
Any commitment the United States may have had to a rules-based international order has been sabotaged by President Trump. As far as he is concerned, it’s back to “might is right.” He wants Greenland and the Panama canal and he doesn’t rule out taking them by force. He wants Canada, too, but, in the short run at least, will rely on economic muscle to coerce us into statehood.
Like many perhaps naive observers, I had assumed that after WWII Western nations had abandoned expropriating territory by force. The time had come to dismantle empires not expand them. With the creation of the United Nations and its charter in 1945, countries resolved to base international interactions on a system of laws, rules, and norms.
The leading Western nation has apparently abandoned that ideal and possibly blown up NATO in the process. Any claim to the moral high ground relative to the imperial ambitions of others, say China or Russia, is now hollow.
Trump is of course following an old American tradition. The American Revolution was motivated partly by land hunger. The great hero of the revolution and first president, George Washington, had fought on the frontier and recognized the value of the rich lands in the Ohio River valley, then in Indian territory. He planned on capitalizing on his knowledge by gaining legal title to thousands of acres which he could then sell for handsome profits. But King George III issued the Royal Proclamation of 1763 that reserved the west to the Indigenous people, closing it off to further settlement, leaving Washington and other land speculators in a revolutionary mood.
The American revolutionaries attempted to persuade Canadians to reject British administration and support annexation of Canada to the united colonies—without success. We have been rejecting their advances from the very beginning.
They didn’t get Canada, but they got Ohio and just kept going, from the Louisiana Purchase, the best land deal in history, to expropriating territory from First Nations, Mexico and others, using force if necessary, and eventually even crossing oceans, to ultimately create the United States of today.
Thomas Jefferson once predicted, “it is impossible not to look forward to distant times when our rapid multiplication will expand itself beyond those limits, and cover the whole northern, if not the southern continent.” He wasn’t so far wrong.
Americans long-standing greed for more land has now been revived by a president who compliments manifest destiny with a claim to divine right.
His claims will not be lost on other powers. After all, China has a better claim on Taiwan than the U.S. has on Greenland and Russian a better claim on Ukraine. Trump’s claims will serve as a useful precedent for them.
Indeed, Russians have been quick to use this as a justification for their own country’s claims in the Arctic and elsewhere. Former Russian military official Andrey Gurulyov claims there’s now an opportunity for Russia to take Greenland itself or “make a deal with Trump and split Greenland in two parts.” One Russian parliamentarian even suggested, one hopes tongue-in-cheek, that “We are inevitably facing an issue of returning Alaska to Russia. There are many reasons to recognize the deal of 1867 as unlawful.” Russian humour?
We must think long and hard about how Canadian foreign policy will fit into all this. Might is right is not a healthy policy for a small nation, particularly when the great power adopting it is next door and its president makes threats against you on his first day in office.
And what does this mean in regard to our contribution to Ukraine? And what about NATO? Trump has violated the Treaty just by not ruling out force to take territory from a NATO ally. Lots of questions. Lots of worries. And we’re only getting started.