Why Greenland?

And Canada, Mexico, Panama...

In one way, Trump is utterly predictable. He wants to die in bed rather than in prison, and he wants that bed to be in the White House. That's what they all want, all of these supposedly strong men with their ostensibly national feeling: the eternal clean sheets.

But precisely because the authoritarians are predictable in this way, they are unpredictable in another. Because they are entirely fixated on themselves, and skillful at separating themselves from normal political checks, observers cannot evaluate their behavior in the familiar and comforting terms of national interest.

"America First" has nothing to do with the interests of Americans facing a challenging world, and no one has even pretended very hard that it does. What "America First" means, in the 2020s as in the 1940s, is that America should be the first democracy to imitate leading foreign dictators. Trump has admired dictators and will admire dictators. This might be in his interest: again, in the basic sense that he needs to learn how to stay in power and die in bed. But it has nothing to do with the interests of Americans.

The more power is concentrated in the hands of one person, the harder it is to say what is actually going on. People fantasize that strong-man rule will be simple and stable, but for everyone except the strong man it is exhausting and destructive.

Sure, we might want Trump to be concerned about the national interest; we might wish that he considered the world beyond the United States in light of what might benefit its citizens. It will be comforting for the many in the media to imagine that somehow Trump considers the world and his fellow citizens, and we hear a lot of hopeful nonsense along those lines.

But there is, frankly, zero evidence that any of his cogitation takes that form. Anyone imagining that Trump speaks of Greenland or Panama or Canada or Mexico because he cares about America would need to cite some pattern of behavior that demonstrates that Trump has ever done so.

Checks from elections, from the law, and from other government bodies force an executive to think before speaking. The interests and utterances of voters or other politicians can help us see what might happen. Insofar as they have a voice, we know that the executive is at least hearing that voice. Insofar as they have an ability to check, we know that the executive faces limits. Trump is now largely free of all that; and so we are forced, sadly, to try to figure out what is in his mind.

So why is Trump (or people in his circle) talking about building an American empire that includes (depending on the day) Greenland, Canada, Panama, Mexico? The statements are of course different in each case, ranging from threats of invasion to control internal politics (Mexico and Panama), economic pressure or possible invasion to annex territory (Denmark over Greenland), and economic pressure to achieve political control (Canada, although with lots of side commentary from allies about absorbing the whole country).

Even if we cannot be certain about what Trump has in mind, we have to be serious about the consequences of his statements. I would caution strongly against treating Trump's outlandish imperialism as a joke; whatever Trump's motives, the things he has said are dangerous in the extreme, making ongoing wars less likely to end, making new wars more likely, and promising a future of senseless resource war. Here are five Trumpian logics explanations, all of which can function together, and probably do.

1. Putin and Xi. Trump is assisting Putin and Xi, making present Russian wars easier and future Chinese wars more likely. The international legal order is based upon the notion that states are sovereign and borders are inviolable. To be sure, these principles have been ignored in the past. But hypocrisy is a very different thing than nihilism. By advocating a violent American empire, Trump is saying that there is no international legal order. Worse still: he and the people around him are repeating arguments that Putin has made for more than a decade: borders are not real; people on the other side of borders want to be ruled by us; the law does not apply to big powers. It is objectively the case that this makes Russian and Chinese imperialism easier. Trump is removing the arguments, supported by most of the world, against a Russian invasion of Ukraine or a future Chinese invasion of Taiwan. The reactions of Moscow and Beijing make it very clear that Russian and Chinese leaders understand the work that Trump is doing for them. The only question here is whether Trump is knowingly or unknowingly doing comms work for Putin and Xi. In my view, he knows exactly what he is doing. He is enacting a policy of fighting with friends and enabling enemies.

2. Musk. It is important for Trump's supporters to believe that Trump is the one actually in charge. One way to accomplish this is for Trump to seem more outlandish than Elon Musk. In recent weeks, Musk has expressed the view that Germany can only be saved by its far right, called for Britain's government to be dissolved, and even expressed preferences about who should lead the radical parties in these countries. Now, Musk's actions are broadly consistent with Trump's: he supports people in Europe who can be counted on to oppose alliances with the United States, to break the European Union, and to make life much easier for Beijing and Moscow. But, as even Trump's ideologues have to admit, Musk's money means that he might even be able to achieve these goals. What Musk has been doing has been outrageous, by any standard. If we regard Musk as an individual, he is claiming that he has a special power to make and break governments around the world ("we can coup whoever we want.") If we regard Musk as an American co-president, he is interfering in the domestic politics of other countries in a way that is openly imperial. Like Trump, Musk has never provided any evidence that he has a view of the American national interest, or cares in any way how changes in the world affect the lives of Americans. He uses the power that he has for his own purposes, and does not really seek to hide that. In this situation, where Trump may have less real power than Musk, he can compete at the level of spectacle. Musk's designs on Europe and the world may be more sinister, in the long run, than Trump's on Greenland etc. But today at least they are less spectacular and receive less media attention. So Trump's rhetorical imperialism might be there to distract from Musk's real imperialism. And, of course, Musk might very well be behind Trump's rhetoric anyway. Who do we think told Trump that Greenland and Canada had valuable mineral resources? Is this something that Trump read about on his own? Musk's own rhetoric on Canada, though it has received less attention, has been even sharper than Trump's.

3. Nominees. Trump is good at directing media attention this way and that. And he needs to do so, given that many of his nominees for high office, especially those with responsibility for national security, are incompetent and much worse. As I have written elsewhere, it is ludicrous to imagine that Tulsi Gabbard is a reasonable choice to direct American intelligence agencies, that Pete Hegseth should run the defense department, or that Kash Patel should direct our national police force (the FBI). These people are entirely bereft of qualifications for these positions. And that should be more than enough to disqualify them. What stands out about them is something that transcends even their total incompetence: their notorious positions in favor of destroying international and domestic legal order. Gabbard is known for nothing around the world beyond her defense of Assad and Putin. Hegseth believes that America should be fighting a "Holy War" against itself. Patel has argued for arresting Americans for their political views. As we approach their nomination hearings, we should be thinking about what kind of America, and world, will be created if such people are allowed the run some of the most powerful institutions of violence in the history of the world. All the talk of Greenland and the rest has been shielding them. It distracts the media. And it makes chaos seem normal. It should be pointed out, in fairness, that these people will not help to actually fight wars abroad. If Trump's nominees are confirmed, what we can actually expect is conflict within the United States. Trump is opening the world for Russian and Chinese expansion in this way as well. If we follow the logic of this hypothesis, we would circle back to the first logic: that Trump's fake American imperialism is just there to enable real Russian and Chinese imperialism.

4. Enemies. By essentially announcing that he wants to destroy world order and make life easy for Putin and Xi, Trump is creating a loyalty test. Anyone who wants to work for him or to be regarded as loyal has to support his wild and destructive ideas, or at the very least keep quiet about them. Regardless of whether or not Trump takes aggressive action against Canada, Greenland, Panama, or Mexico, those who point out the nihilism and self-destructiveness of it all can be presented as enemies. Trump's politics works on a notion of friends and enemies, not on a notion of the interests of people or the rights of citizens. So imperialist fantasies can be useful in domestic politics as a way of drawing lines and generating domestic conflict.

5. Minerals. People seeking some kind of American interest in the control of Greenland or Canada point to the mineral assets of these countries. This hardly means that invading them is a good idea. It would make much more sense to preserve our present alliances with Canada and with Europe, and to trade on a fair basis with our friends. Invasions and threats thereof will not actually get Americans access to valuable goods. They will undo the world order and leave everyone, including Americans, far worse off. Insofar as they make it easier for anyone to control the Arctic, Trump's threats favor Russia. Squabbling among Western allies and flouting of international law makes things easier for Putin everywhere, including the Arctic. And the hard truth about the real world is this: it makes no sense to dream of conquering northern lands for gas and oil. Even were it possible, it would be the worst of all possible policies. Given the state of the global climate, the resources currently under the ice have to stay in the ground if we want to have any chance of maintaining ourselves as a functional civilization. Even if Greenland and Canada were controlled by America, in some dark imperial world, the resources American imperialists want are only becoming accessible because global warming is melting ice. The people who want to profit from them are imagining themselves getting very wealthy in a world in which America is flooded on the coasts and on fire everywhere else, in which a very large portion of the American population is living through Asheville or Los Angeles every day. The aspiration to control these assets amounts to a politics of catastrophe, a plan to burn the world for the profits of the few. And this is the logic in which we take Trump at his word.