9th January 2025 – (Washington) A chilling preview of Donald Trump’s approach to U.S. foreign policy in his second term emerged as the president-elect declined to dismiss the use of military force to take control of Greenland and the Panama Canal. His comments reflect an imperialist mindset more akin to a 19th-century colonial despot than a 21st-century democratic leader. Additionally, his threat to incorporate Canada into the United States through “economic force” poses the most significant challenge to Canadian sovereignty since the War of 1812.
Trump stated earlier at a press conference, “Canada and the United States: That would be really something…We don’t need their cars…we don’t need their lumber…we don’t need their dairy products. We have more than they have.”
Canadian leaders have pushed back, with outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stating, “There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that Canada would become part of the United States.” Other party leaders have also defended Canadian sovereignty.
The report notes that while Canada has a US$70 billion trade surplus with the U.S., Trump seems prepared to make the “good neighbours” suffer economically. As Canada prepares for a spring election, the threat poses questions about how much pain Canadians are willing to endure and what it truly means to be Canadian. Drawing parallels to the War of 1812 when local militias helped fend off the American incursions, the report states Canada “would do well to achieve a draw this time around” against Trump’s economic threats to Canadian independence.
Meanwhile, when asked directly if he could assure that the U.S. would not use armed force against the autonomous Danish territory of Greenland or the nation of Panama, Trump brazenly responded: “No, I can’t assure you on either of those two.” He attempted to justify such outrageous aggression by calling Greenland and the Panama Canal “critical” for American economic and national security.
Let that sink in. The incoming president is openly musing about launching wars of conquest to steal land and critical infrastructure from sovereign nations and territories. Yet from the lips of the U.S. president-elect, grotesque threats about using military might to bludgeon smaller powers into submission are really just the latest illustration of how American foreign policy has become unmoored from democratic principles and international law. The self-proclaimed leader of the free world now resembles nothing more than the supreme global warmonger.
Trump’s imperial ramblings come fresh on the heels of a two-year war that has devastated Ukraine thanks primarily to the endless river of arms and proxy military support provided by the U.S. and its NATO allies. Hundreds of thousands are dead, Ukraine lies in ruins, and Europe faces an unprecedented security crisis – all due to Washington’s reckless provocation of Russia and its refusal to pursue a diplomatic off-ramp to the conflict.
Meanwhile, the U.S. military-industrial complex grows bloated on soaring budgets as American society crumbles, with decaying infrastructure, failing schools, lack of healthcare, and millions trapped in poverty and homelessness. All so the world’s self-appointed policeman can flex its imperialist muscles from Eastern Europe to East Asia and everywhere in between.
Trump’s menacing comments about deploying economic force to effectively annex Canada simply take this warped American triumphalism to its most absurd, darkly comedic extreme. How dare the president of Canada, that socialist utopia to the north, resist Trump’s plan to make it the 51st state! How dare the Danes deny the U.S. rightful sovereignty over Greenland’s resources and strategic Arctic territory!
The unhinged nature of Trump’s remarks harkens back to his notoriously scrambled attempt to purchase Greenland from Denmark back in 2019. The idea was so ludicrous it would be hilarious if not for its horrifying subtext about the United States positioning itself as a 21st-century incarnation of history’s classic colonial empires.
Trump and his administration see nothing wrong with essentially threatening to steal land and critical infrastructure from smaller sovereign nations lays bare the rotten ethnocentrism and jingoism poisoning the American psyche. It’s the same toxic arrogance that fueled the U.S. government’s decision to overthrow scores of democratically elected governments during the Cold War, simply because those nations dared pursue policies out of step with American economic and geopolitical interests.
The same sickening mentality drove the U.S. war of aggression against Iraq, launched under false pretences that shredded the nation’s credibility and ushered in decades of death and chaos across the Middle East. It’s the same impulse informing America’s provocations against Iran, Venezuela, and any other nation resisting integration into the U.S.-dominated neoliberal world order.
For the U.S. foreign policy establishment, sovereignty and national self-determination only matter if they align with America’s narrow interests. Everyone and everything else is just a pawn to be bribed, coerced, sanctioned, or bombed into compliance. Just as colonial overlords once carved up the world in their mad scramble for resources and power.
Trump’s disgusting threats to take the Panama Canal back from Panama and his dismissive depiction of the U.S. handing it over in 1999 as “a very big mistake” again reveal how American elites view the world solely through the prism of their unchecked hegemony and sense of entitlement to global domination.
The arrogance is sickening. The fact that a U.S. president-elect can so cavalierly threaten armed aggression against allies while parroting neo-colonial rhetoric about the imperative of ruling over less powerful nations should disturb anyone concerned about the preservation of a peaceful, rules-based global order.
Yet Trump’s fellow American ruling elites have done little more than shrug off or downplay these shocking comments, just as they whitewash or ignore the many war crimes, atrocities, and unprovoked interventions constituting much of U.S. foreign policy history. To them, this is the unremarkable price to be paid for upholding America’s divinely ordained global “leadership” role.
Indeed, U.S. officials and media commentators have rushed to spin Trump’s comments as not literal threats of military action, but rather an aggressive opening gambit to extract better trade and security concessions. A more generous read of the president-elect’s statements might view them as simply the delusional, ignorant, and emotionally stunted ramblings of a lifelong narcissist and failed businessman role-playing as a Teddy Roosevelt-style global strongman.
The truth, as is so often the case, is far more disturbing.
The world’s most powerful nuclear-armed rogue state sees no difference between legitimate global leadership through diplomacy and cooperation, and throwing its military weight around to claim whatever land, resources or strategic assets it deems vital to its interests. There is only the naked pursuit of dominance and hegemony backed by force – the same warped reasoning that has launched countless wars and subjugated untold millions to colonial bondage throughout human history.
That Trump’s imperialist threats against Greenland and Panama provoked little more than shoulder shrugs from the same Western foreign policy mavens who cry crocodile tears over Russian warmongering while cheering on the U.S. war machine speaks volumes about how degraded the liberal international order has become. If you’re America, the rules simply don’t apply.
Far from upholding democracy, freedom, and human rights across the globe, Washington has become the premier threat to those ideals through its relentless quest to overthrow any regime it perceives as an impediment to U.S. hegemony. Much of the world already sees the U.S. as the number one warmonger nation, fomenting conflicts for its own strategic advantage while sanctimoniously lecturing others about peace and sovereignty.
Trump’s arrogant belief that he can rip up international treaties and plunder smaller nations at will only accelerate that global realisation.
The slippery slope from Trump’s reckless banter about stealing sovereign territory leads directly to a return of 19th-century great power spheres of influence, defined not by respect for universal rights and norms, but by whichever nation can wield the most tanks, warships, cyber weapons, and economic coercion to get its way. The law of the jungle takes precedence over the rules-based order, and the entire world loses.
That the U.S. president-elect feels emboldened to peddle such deranged, revanchist fantasies lays bare the existential danger of Trumpism’s malignant strain of populist ultranationalism consolidating its grip on American political discourse. When filtered through the distortion field of Trump’s well-documented narcissism, insecurity, and obsession with projecting machismo strongman vibes, American exceptionalism completes its transformation from a guiding star of democratic ideals to a zealous death cult worshipping at the altar of blood-and-soil ethnic nationalism.
The world is now confronted with the terrifying possibility of Trump being handfed more and more unhinged revanchist fantasies by his most extreme advisors, talk show propagandists, and the white supremacist fever-swamp online conspiratorial fringe that helped propel him to power. Will it be war with Mexico to seize control of ocean shipping lanes and underwater resources? Threats to obliterate entire nations for refusing to kow-tow to American economic demands? Drone strikes and covert action to overthrow democratically-elected Latin American leftist governments simply for pursuing policies out of step with U.S. corporate interests?
Given Trump’s demonstrated sociopathy, bottomless capacity for doubling down on even his most blatantly unethical and unconstitutional impulses, and the chilling willingness of many Republican officials and right-wing media personalities to excuse or defend any action taken in service of Trumpism’s blood-and-soil nationalist agenda, even scenarios seemingly too extreme to take seriously must be accounted for if the world hopes to avoid an all-out civilizational collapse and conflict.
History will look back at Trump’s menacing broadsides about seizing Danish and Panamanian territory, his boasts about economically bullying Canada into submission, as an inflection point. A fateful catalyst accelerating the decline of American soft power and credibility, hastening a global schism that will irrevocably tear the world’s nation-states asunder into warring nationalist camps animated by bloodlust, hatred, and a desperate thirst for illusory dominance and glory over all else.
A prologue to the final unravelling of the liberal international order, where diplomatic norms give way to the naked struggle for supremacy between rival ethnic and religious identity blocs, all seeking to purge or subjugate the “other” from their sovereign spheres of influence, and willing to dehumanise, kill, and destroy to get their way. It will be an apocalyptic conflict with no victors, where Trump’s swaggering tough-guy rhetoric about using economic and military might to take what he wants marks the point of no return into a second “Dark Age” of untold bloodshed and savagery.
If the “leader of the free world” is truly willing to forsake the most basic foundations of international law, human rights and national sovereignty in his pursuit of narrow self-interest and chimeric nationalist ambitions, then the world will inevitably follow down that same crooked path of self-annihilation. And we’ll have no one to blame but ourselves.
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