Provocations so outrageous as to be untethered to reality are integral to U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s “Uncertainty Doctrine.” So the primary challenge in reacting to those provocations is determining what to take seriously, what to take literally and whether or not to respond at all. The view of some observers is that, because Trump makes so many provocative threats, there is a danger in giving too much credence to those that are unrealistic, since it distracts from other issues that are more urgent and more likely to actually happen.
It’s understandable to apply that logic to Trump’s recent expansionist threats toward Greenland, Panama and Canada. But there are important reasons to take these threats seriously, even if it is unlikely that the U.S. actually moves to expand territorially during Trump’s second term.
For one, Trump is always both the cause and symptom of the developments that have fueled his political rise and return to the White House. In other words, he both shapes the popular discourse, as well as the stances of his followers, and channels underlying political shifts that may not be visible to most observers yet. The fact that he himself is not an intellectual firepower doesn’t change this—in fact, in many ways it makes him more of a frictionless communicator of veiled political grievances.
In this case, Trump’s expansionist threats reflect his fascination with the U.S. in the late 1800s and his attempts to mirror former U.S. President William McKinley, who oversaw the start of a new era of U.S. imperialism at the turn of the century.
At the same time, Trump’s threats toward Greenland, Panama and Canada should also be seen as the international flip side of the domestic backlash to the Diversity, Equality and Inclusivity agenda that has become a bugbear of the MAGA movement. Trump and his followers have increasingly demonized diversity efforts and other calls to remedy past social injustices in the United States, especially in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests that swept across much of the U.S.—and, indeed, the world—in 2020.
Those protests fueled calls to “decolonize” everything from newsrooms and boardrooms to global governance institutions and international affairs scholarship. So it is no coincidence that Trump’s rhetoric, always antagonistic to such efforts toward restitution, now also includes a call for what amounts to re-colonization. As it stands, this neo-imperialist platform might only be in its emergent phase, and it could very well flame out. But it may also represent a coalescing agenda that, similar to the trade protectionism that Trump ushered in, could form into a coherent political platform in the near future.
Ultimately, too, defending territorial sovereignty is every state’s topline responsibility, among the core preoccupations of all international relations. As a result, while observers in the U.S. may be able to debate whether or not Trump’s threats are worth discussing, the states that are being threatened—and others watching nervously from the sidelines—don’t have that luxury.
