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Since winning his second presidential term, Donald Trump has taken a strange turn toward a kind of performative imperialism. Immediately after the November election, he began mulling the idea of acquiring Greenland from Denmark, which had no interest in giving it up. His threatening gestures began to escalate. President Trump began mocking Canada by calling the Canadian prime minister “the governor” and vaguely threatening annexation. He began demanding the return of the Panama Canal, which the United States ceded more than 40 years ago.
Today, President Trump announced at a press conference that the Gulf of Mexico will be renamed the “Gulf of America.” Asked by a reporter whether he would rule out military or economic coercion to seize Greenland or the Panama Canal, he did not rule out either possibility. “No, I can’t guarantee either of those two,” he thought. “I’m not going to commit to that. Maybe we have to do something.”
When an authoritarian-minded leader seeking to control the world’s most powerful military begins to openly draw his sword against his neighbors, the most obvious and important question to ask is whether he intends to follow through. is. Unfortunately, that question is difficult to answer. On the other hand, Trump almost certainly has no plans or even a concept of planning to start a hemispheric war. Seizing the uncontrolled edge of the North American continent makes sense in the board game Risk, but it’s hardly logical in a real-world scenario.
Meanwhile, Trump consistently generated outlandish ideas during his first term, only for traditional Republicans in his orbit to distract or thwart him. The world never knew how seriously he thought about them. One of his top priorities this time around is to ensure that the incoming administration is free of officials whose professionalism and loyalty to the Constitution would be at risk of violating their loyalty to Mr. Trump. We cannot simply assume that Mr. Trump’s dumbest plans will fail.
The easy question to answer is why Trump keeps making these threats. One reason is that he seems to genuinely believe that strong countries have the right to bully weaker countries. President Trump has long argued that the United States should seize the natural resources of small countries and that America’s allies should pay protection money to the United States as if they were store owners and the United States was a mob boss. Ta.
The second reason is that Trump uses international bullying as fan service to his base. President Trump’s actual concrete policy agenda consists largely of boring regulations and tax breaks for wealthy donors and corporate interests that most of his voters don’t care about. Not a priority. President Trump seems to understand the need for public theater to entertain the MAGA crowd.
The show of control plays an important role in Trump’s political style. “Let’s build a wall” is a classic example. Trump never built a “big, beautiful wall” along the southern border, but fans don’t hold that against him. The border was right next to the point. They were instead excited by the idea of a wall as an expression of strength and defiance. When President Trump responded to criticism by saying, “The wall is just 10 feet higher,” he had the upper hand. The real barrier was the threats he made along the way.
The quid pro quo arose during President Trump’s first term, when Congressional Democrats offered to fund a wall in exchange for some concessions on immigration, at which point Trump agreed to support the plan. He seemed to be losing interest. The fact that Democrats cooperate has drained the metaphor of its transgressive appeal.
President Trump’s recent gestures similarly reveal his symbolic intent. Certainly, it is possible to build a coherent policy rationale for certain international agreements involving Greenland. But there is little evidence that President Trump is interested in any substantive deal. He wants to blackmail his allies. There is no need to send Donald Trump Jr. to advance actual diplomatic and military strategy as long as his professional expertise monetizes the Trump brand. You send Don Jr. to entertain the base. On the other hand, the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico has no even plausible connection to economic or territorial objectives. It’s a purely symbolic rant.
President Trump may well blunder from performative imperialism to live-fire war. (When I was a kid, teachers used to ban pretend fighting during recess for the good reason that it often led to the real thing.) Perhaps he will antagonize allies and galvanize voters in those countries to elevate their own nationalist leaders who stand against the United States rather than cooperate with it.
This will be a long-term cost to American foreign policy, bought to mortgage the country’s interests in order to extract temporary political gains, immediate value for Donald Trump. This form of arbitrage is exactly the kind of trading that President Trump long ago turned into an art form.
