Trump’s
Wish to Control Greenland and Panama Canal: Not a Joke This Time
In recent
days the president-elect has called for asserting U.S. control over the Panama
Canal and Greenland, showing that his “America First” philosophy has an
expansionist dimension.
President-elect
Donald J. Trump has accused Panama of price-gouging American ships traversing
the Panama Canal, and suggested that unless that changed, he would abandon the
decades-old treaty that returned all control of the canal zone to Panama.
David E.
SangerLisa Friedman
By David E.
Sanger and Lisa Friedman
David E.
Sanger has covered five American presidents and writes often on the revival of
superpower conflict. Lisa Friedman covers a range of environmental and climate
change challenges.
Dec. 23,
2024
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/23/us/politics/trump-greenland-panama-canal.html
Over the
past two days, President-elect Donald J. Trump has made clear that he has
designs for American territorial expansion, declaring that the United States
has both security concerns and commercial interests that can best be addressed
by bringing the Panama Canal and Greenland under American control or outright
ownership.
Mr. Trump’s
tone has had none of the trolling jocularity that surrounded his repeated
suggestions in recent weeks that Canada should become America’s “51st state,”
including his social media references to the country’s beleaguered prime
minister as “Governor Justin Trudeau.”
Instead,
while naming a new ambassador to Denmark — which controls Greenland’s foreign
and defense affairs — Mr. Trump made clear on Sunday that his first-term offer
to buy the landmass could, in the coming term, become a deal the Danes cannot
refuse.
He appears
to covet Greenland both for its strategic location at a time when the melting
of Arctic ice is opening new commercial and naval competition and for its
reserves of rare earth minerals needed for advanced technology.
“For
purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World,” Mr. Trump
wrote on social media, “the United States of America feels that the ownership
and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.”
On Saturday
evening, he had accused Panama of price-gouging American ships traversing the
canal, and suggested that unless that changed, he would abandon the Jimmy
Carter-era treaty that returned all control of the canal zone to Panama.
“The fees
being charged by Panama are ridiculous,” he wrote, just ahead of an increase in
the charges scheduled for Jan. 1. “This complete ‘rip-off’ of our country will
immediately stop.”
He went on
to express worry that the canal could fall into the “wrong hands,” an apparent
reference to China, the second-largest user of the canal. A Hong Kong-based
firm controls two ports near the canal, but China has no control over the canal
itself.
Not
surprisingly, the government of Greenland immediately rejected Mr. Trump’s
demands, as it did in 2019, when he first floated the idea. “Greenland is
ours,” Prime Minister Mute B. Egede said in a statement. “We are not for sale
and will never be for sale. We must not lose our long struggle for freedom.”
The Danish
prime minister’s office was more circumspect, writing in a statement that the
government was “looking forward to working with the new administration” and
offering no further comment on Mr. Trump’s remarks.
After Mr.
Trump brought up the Panama Canal again in a speech on Sunday, Panama’s
president, José Raúl Mulino, said in a video that “every square meter of the
Panama Canal and its adjacent zones is part of Panama, and it will continue to
be.” He added: “Our country’s sovereignty and independence are not negotiable.”
But the
president-elect’s statements — and the not-so-subtle threats behind them — were
another reminder that his version of “America First” is not an isolationist
creed.
His
aggressive interpretation of the phrase evokes the expansionism, or
colonialism, of President Theodore Roosevelt, who cemented control of the
Philippines after the Spanish-American War. And it reflects the instincts of a
real estate developer who suddenly has the power of the world’s largest
military to back up his negotiating strategy.
Mr. Trump
has often suggested that he does not always see the sovereignty of other
nations’ borders as sacrosanct. When Russia invaded Ukraine, his first response
was not a condemnation of the blatant land grab, but rather the observation
that President Vladimir V. Putin’s move was an act of “genius.”
Even now, as
Mr. Trump seeks a deal to end the war in Ukraine, he has never said that the
country’s borders must be restored, a key demand of the United States and NATO
— he has only promised a “deal” to end the fighting.
In the cases
of Greenland and Panama, both commercial and national security interests are at
play.
Mr. Trump’s
desire for Greenland was made explicit in the first term, when a wealthy New
York friend of his, Ronald S. Lauder, the New York cosmetics heir, put the idea
in his head.
In the Trump
White House in 2019, the National Security Council was suddenly delving into
the details of how the United States would pull off a land acquisition of that
size. Mr. Trump kept pressing the point with Denmark, which consistently
rebuffed him.
Mr. Trump
was not the first president to make the case: Harry S. Truman wanted to buy
Greenland after World War II, as part of a Cold War strategy for boxing out
Soviet forces. Mr. Trump can make a parallel argument, especially as Russia,
China and the United States jockey for control of Arctic routes for commercial
shipping and naval assets.
Arctic
experts did not dismiss Mr. Trump’s Greenland bid as a joke.
“Not that
many people are laughing about it now,” said Marc Jacobsen, an associate
professor at the Royal Danish Defense College in Denmark who focuses on Arctic
security.
Mr. Jacobsen
noted that the reaction in Denmark to Mr. Trump’s latest bid had been one of
fury (one Danish politician called it “an unusually strange way to be an
ally”). But, he said, Greenlanders — who have long sought independence — may
seek to use Mr. Trump’s interest as an opportunity to further strengthen
economic ties with the United States.
Since 2009,
Greenland has had the right to declare its independence, but the vast territory
of about 56,000 people is still heavily dependent on Denmark and has never
chosen to pursue that path. Mr. Trump’s interest could give Greenland an
opening for more U.S. investments, including in tourism or rare earth mining,
he said.
“Was it
crazy when the U.S. acquired Alaska? Was it crazy when the U.S. built the
Panama Canal?” asked Sherri Goodman, a former Pentagon official and a senior
fellow with the Wilson Center Polar Institute, a Washington-based think tank.
Ms. Goodman,
whose book “Threat Multiplier: Climate, Military Leadership, and the Fight for
Global Security” centers in part on the Arctic, said the United States did have
a strong interest in ensuring that China in particular does not develop a
strong presence in Greenland.
Beijing’s
ambitions in the Arctic have grown, and in 2018 it laid out plans to build
infrastructure and develop shipping lanes opened by climate change. Ms. Goodman
said the United States should continue to prevent China from gaining a foothold
in the doorstep to North America, but said Greenlanders must decide their own
fate.
“We want to
have all those territories proximate to our own mainland territory to protect
us and also to prevent an adversary from using it to our strategic
disadvantage,” Ms. Goodman said. “On the other hand, there is international law
and international order and sovereignty, and Greenland is still a part of
Denmark.”
When it
comes to Panama, Mr. Trump may also hold a distant personal grudge.
In 2018,
Panamanian police officers ousted the Trump Organization from the Trump
International Hotel in Panama City after a protracted legal battle between the
president-elect’s family and the majority owner of the property. The Trump name
subsequently came down. The company had held a contract to manage the property.
David L.
Goldwyn, who served at the State Department under Presidents Bill Clinton and
Barack Obama, noted that Greenland has tremendous undeveloped natural
resources, including more than 43 of the 50 so-called critical rare earth
elements used to make electric vehicles, wind turbines and other clean
technology.
“Certainly
if Greenland chose to develop these resources, it would provide a significant
alternative to China, although it is China’s capacity to process those minerals
which gives it its current advantage,” he said.
But Mr.
Goldwyn said that in addition to Denmark’s sovereignty, Mr. Trump might find
that Greenland’s Indigenous communities do not want mining and resource
extraction as much as he does.
“It is
highly unlikely resource extraction could be forced on an unwilling
population,” he said. “A more fruitful path might be to collaborate with the
Danish government and Greenland’s population on ways to safely and sustainably
develop those resources.”
David E.
Sanger covers the Biden administration and national security. He has been a
Times journalist for more than four decades and has written several books on
challenges to American national security. More about David E. Sanger
Lisa
Friedman is a Times reporter who writes about how governments are addressing
climate change and the effects of those policies on communities. More about
Lisa Friedman
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