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Since winning a second presidential term, Donald Trump has made a curious pivot toward a kind of performative imperialism. Immediately after the November elections, he began to think about acquiring Greenland from Denmark, which has no interest in parting with it. His threatening gestures began to intensify. Trump began taunting Canada by calling its prime minister a “governor” and vaguely threatening annexation. He began demanding the return of the Panama Canal, ceded by the United States more than forty years ago.
Today, during a press conference, Trump announced that he would rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. When asked by a reporter whether he would forgo military and economic coercion in his efforts to seize Greenland or the Panama Canal, he refused to rule either out. “No, I can’t guarantee either,” he mused. “I’m not going to commit to that. We may need to do something.
When an authoritarian-minded leader willing to control the most powerful military in the world begins openly swinging sabers against his neighbors, the most obvious and important question to ask is whether he has the I intend to go all the way. Unfortunately, it is difficult to answer this question. On the one hand, Trump almost certainly has no plan, or even any idea of a plan, to launch a hemispheric war. Seizing the uncontrolled borders of the North American continent makes sense in the board game Risk, but it has very little logic in a real-world scenario.
On the other hand, Trump constantly generated crazy ideas during his first term, only for mainstream Republicans in his orbit to hijack or outmaneuver him, with the result that the world never discovered just how much he took them seriously. This time around, one of his biggest priorities has been ensuring that his new administration is free of officials whose professionalism or loyalty to the Constitution would put them at risk of violating their loyalty to Trump. We can’t just assume that Trump’s most outlandish plans will fail.
An easier question to answer is Why Trump keeps making these threats. One reason is that he seems to sincerely believe that strong countries have the right to bully weaker ones. Trump has long insisted that the United States should seize the natural resources of small countries and that American allies should pay us money for our protection, as if they were traders and America was a mafia boss.
A second reason is that Trump uses his international intimidation as fan service for his base. The real, concrete policy agenda of Trump’s presidency consists largely of boring regulatory and tax favors to wealthy donors and business interests — priorities that most of his voters don’t care about. Trump seems to understand the need for public drama to entertain the MAGA base.
Shows of dominance play an important role in Trump’s political style. “Build the wall” is the classic example: Trump never built his “big, beautiful wall” along the southern border, and yet his fans don’t blame him, because the physical manifestation of a barrier on the southern border the border was irrelevant. Rather, they were enthusiastic about the idea of a wall as an expression of strength and defiance. When Trump responded to criticism by saying, “The wall just went up 10 feet higher,” he was showing dominance. The real wall is the threats he made along the way.
The revelation occurred when, during Trump’s first term, congressional Democrats offered to fund the wall in exchange for minor concessions on immigration policy, so much so that Trump appeared to lose interest in the project. The fact that Democrats would cooperate emptied the trope of its transgressive appeal.
Trump’s most recent gestures also reveal his symbolic intent. Certainly, you can build a coherent policy reasoning for some kind of international agreement involving Greenland. But there is little evidence that Trump is interested in any practical deal. He wants to threaten his allies. You don’t do it shipping Donald Trump Jr., whose professional expertise, to the extent that he possesses it, monetizes the Trump brand, to advance a real diplomatic or military strategy. You send Don Jr. to entertain the base. Meanwhile, renaming the Gulf of Mexico doesn’t even have a plausible connection to any economic or territorial goal. This is pure symbolic boasting.
Trump could very well move from performative imperialism to a live-fire war. (When I was a child, my teachers banned play fighting at recess because it often led to real fights). More likely, he will antagonize his allies and cause voters in those countries to nominate their own nationalist leaders who will stand up to the United States rather than cooperate with it.
This would represent a long-term cost to American foreign policy, purchased for ephemeral political gain: mortgaging the country’s interests to extract immediate value for Donald Trump. This form of arbitration is precisely the kind of agreement that Trump turned into an art form long ago.