Donald Trump wants to take possession of Greenland, annex the Panama Canal, rename the Gulf of Mexico as “the Gulf of America” and has referred to the US-Canadian border as “an artificially drawn line”. On the subject of Canada, he told reporters, “they should be a state”.
This appetite for stealing large parts of foreign countries is an impulse that Trump shares with other authoritarian rulers, most recently Vladimir Putin. During his near 25-year rule, Putin has invaded and taken significant parts of Georgia, Moldova and is currently attempting to do the same in Ukraine.
When asked to justify his invasion of Ukraine, Putin comes out with a confused array of explanations, ranging from historically illiterate arguments about the origins of the Russian people, to a desire to rid Ukraine of what he calls “Nazis”.
Trump’s justifications for taking other people’s land are much less diffuse and more direct. He wants Greenland and the Panama canal because, as he told journalists at Mar-a-Lago, “we need them for economic security”.
The idea that other nations might object to having their territory stolen doesn’t feature anywhere in Trump or Putin’s reasoning, and if it is there at all, it’s outweighed by the authoritarian conviction that might is always right, so what does it matter what they think anyway?
All that counts is the big country and its interests. Other nations may also have interests, but they do not really count. Yes, Greenland is currently recognised as part of the Kingdom of Denmark, but as Trump put it: “People really don’t even know if Denmark has any legal right to it, but if they do they should give it up because we need it for national security.” In other words, you may think you have interests, but they are irrelevant. Only my interests count, which means that your interests have now vanished.
In the Tumputin worldview, Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova, Canada, Greenland, Panama and Denmark are nations which have interests that do not matter. And they don’t matter because, for Trump, Putin and the other authoritarians who see the world solely in terms of might, there is a sense in which these countries do not really exist anyway.
That’s how Canada becomes, in Trump’s mind, the product of “an artificially drawn line”. That is how, for Putin, Ukraine is little more than an aberration in the Russian heartland that needs to be cut out.
The logic of dismissing other nations, of seeing them as nothing other than temporary impediments to the interests of greater, more powerful states, inevitably ends in occupation and war. Putin’s period of rule has made this clear. The 20th century also contains examples.
Nobody could have predicted that Trump would return to the White House with the intention of confiscating a globally significant national waterway, or an entire country, simply because he felt like it. That’s an all-new degree of authoritarianism that he didn’t display last time round. But what we did learn last time round was to listen closely to what he actually says – because he means it.
Trump’s second term was always going to be a rough ride. It might just be rougher than any of us dared imagine.
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