In Donald Trump’s America, foreign diplomats must be able to distinguish between a joke and an attempt to annex a fellow Nato member’s territory – an unenviable job. When Trump first said he wanted to acquire Greenland in 2019, it was treated as cross-continental trolling. (He had posted a meme of a glitzy Trump Tower superimposed onto Greenland’s landscape.) The Wall Street Journal headline “President Trump eyes a new real-estate purchase: Greenland” was typical of the view that this was about Trump’s personal vanity, and not a serious plan to protect American national security.
No longer. When he raised Greenland again in December 2024, the response was different. Trump’s political resurrection has altered the way Washington, and foreign capitals, view what was once seen as pantomime. He is in a stronger position to enact his desires than he was eight years ago. The Democrats are, for now, bemused about why they lost and unable to muster an alternative to Trump’s political hegemony. At the same time, there has been no attempt to delegitimise his win as there was with Russiagate in 2016. As for his own party, Trump commands loyalty from erstwhile opponents. Figures such as the former secretary of state Rex Tillerson and the former national security advisers John Bolton and HR McMaster, who once restrained Trump’s impulses, have been replaced by a cadre of loyalists nominated for key roles. Or, as Bolton, who is a critic of Trump, told me, “The theme that runs through the nominees that he has announced so far is not a theme of loyalty – it’s fealty”.
If Trump’s first term was isolationist, in attacking multilateralism and trying to end the conflicts and liberal nation building that sprung out of the war on terror, then his second term might be defined by hemispheric expansionism, a desire for America to control territories in its own backyard. Since the election, Trump has said he wants to annex Greenland, force Canada to join the US through economic coercion, potentially use the military to take control of the Panama Canal and rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America”.
In other words, Trump wants to expand America’s territory and influence in its regional sphere. Bolton warned against inferring too much from Trump’s remarks, however. “He doesn’t do grand strategy,” he told me. “He doesn’t do policy, as we normally understand that term. It’s all ad hoc, anecdotal, transactional.” But that does not mean that Trump won’t act on these statements either. So is this mere rhetoric and an attempt to distract from the president-elect’s domestic woes, such as his recent sentencing for falsifying business records? Or is it a substantive shift from isolationism towards an aggressive expansionism? If so, how will Europe respond?
Accusing Trump of being “a fascist” was a tactical error from Kamala Harris’s team during the 2024 campaign. The decision to spend its final fortnight trying to scare people into voting against Trump didn’t account for the fact that the overuse of such words has stripped them of meaning to voters. Yet while calling Trump a fascist might be a foolish electoral strategy, it has no bearing on whether it is an accurate description. One of the most common arguments against the fascist thesis was that Trump was an isolationist who wanted to end wars, not launch military ventures to conquer territory. His newfound expansionism draws that into question.
Expansionism, however, is as much an American trait as it is a fascistic one. Thomas Jefferson wanted to build an “empire of liberty”, which, as he wrote in an 1809 letter to James Madison, required the conquest of Canada. Secretary of State James Byrnes told the Danes during negotiations in 1946 over the US military presence on Greenland that purchasing the island “would be the most clean-cut and satisfactory” solution for America. The Monroe Doctrine, first outlined in 1823, was initially a warning against European colonialism and interference in the Western hemisphere but became a justification for adventurism in the Americas. Ronald Reagan, for instance, cited the “integrity of our hemisphere” to defend sending military aid to El Salvador in 1981. Five years before that, Reagan’s 1976 primary campaign was saved by his attack on President Gerald Ford’s plans to return the canal to Panama. His rallying cry was, “We built it, we bought it and we’re going to keep it!” Trump’s bombast, then, does not mean the content of what he says is without precedent.
But such continuity can be overstated. The author Chris Cutrone argues that Trump’s rhetoric does indicate a shift to expansionism, but one which should be seen as part of the American tradition of overcoming counter-revolutionary forces. “America is revolutionary or it is nothing. The United States of America liberated the world twice – three times with the Cold War. Its mission continues.” This is a Trotskyite recasting of the present in which the only way the American revolution is safe is through permanent revolution abroad. Even if that were true, Canada and Greenland are strange places to locate the greatest threats to the American revolution. Canada was once a British colony, sure. But that doesn’t mean the Canadian head of state still poses a threat to the American way of life.
Ego, more than revolutionary ideals, motivates Trump. Amending names, adding territories, conquering new lands would mean he has changed the map – this is the stuff of forging a legacy. He wants to look at a chart of the sea beneath Louisiana and see “Gulf of America”. It would give him a new golden plaque to be remembered by, a permanent legacy similar to President Eisenhower giving Alaska statehood.
Beneath that egotism is his core belief that all relationships are transactional. Trump has few consistent policies, but he does have several stable principles. One is that the US should not help another country – whoever they are – without getting something in return. He treats friend and foe the same. “Canada is subsidised to the tune of about $200bn a year plus,” Trump said on 7 January, apparently mistaking America’s trade deficit with its neighbour for a subsidy. “They have a very small military – they rely on our military,” he continued. “It’s all fine, but they’ve got to pay for that!”
You can see the same disregard for allies in his designs on Greenland. The 1951 treaty between Denmark and the US, which gave America free rein to use Greenland for military purposes, was couched as a Nato pact, and gives every other Nato member the right to use Greenland when necessary. The only strategic motivation for Trump wanting Greenland would be if he didn’t trust the durability of the Nato alliance. Trump’s disdain for the 1951 agreement reflects his disdain for the organisation the treaty was designed to protect. (Bolton, who attempted to secure Greenland for Trump in 2019 told me he was worried, among other things, that China could use the pretence of mineral mining to build infrastructure on the island which could conceal espionage.)
Britain’s Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, has swatted away Trump’s remarks as rhetoric. The Europeans are not so blasé. France’s foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, has said, “If you’re asking me whether I think the United States will invade Greenland, my answer is no. But have we entered into a period of time when it is survival of the fittest? Then my answer is yes… We must wake up.” Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has said the “principle of the inviolability of borders applies to every country… no matter whether it’s a very small one or a very powerful one,” adding, in a pointed comparison of America with Russia, “no matter whether that’s in the east or the west”. The Danish king has deployed a heraldic defence: he has enlarged the polar bear which represents Greenland on his coat of arms.
The problem for the foreign diplomats in Washington is that Trump’s bullying and his official foreign policy often end up one in the same. His jibes are a weapon of negotiation. He conjures up realities through threats and images that scare other leaders into accepting his will. So Prime Minister Justin Trudeau flies south to the winter White House on 29 November to assuage Trump over his plans to tariff Canada, only to be humiliated as the “Governor” of the “Great State of Canada” by Trump in a social media post a week later. (Trudeau, after months of political turmoil at home, resigned less than a month later.)
Trump does not respect what he has called the “artificially drawn” borders between America and Canada. The nationalist poster boy who built a career on attacking liberals’ failure to enforce borders is now claiming they don’t exist. Whatever happened to JD Vance’s belief that what made America a nation was its “shared history and… common future”? It seems nationalism is for America and no one else.
Trump’s bet is that America has the power to act as he sees fit, regardless of the sovereignty of its allies. America has long claimed a right to a sphere of influence, as Russia and China do today, and Trump is burnishing this tradition in bullish and brash tones. His comments will only inflame European anti-Americanism, which has already grown at the threat of impending tariffs. The ideas that were once dismissed as the product of Trump’s unserious character now seem like the serious intentions of a more aggressive, more expansionist, incoming administration.
[See also: The year ahead: Will the Musk-Trump bromance endure?]
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