Donald Trump team says Canada, Greenland, Panama comments part of a broader plan

US President-elect Donald Trump has threatened trade wars and mused about taking over Greenland and the Panama Canal. Photo / Getty

In the past several weeks – and before he has been sworn in for his second term – US President-elect Donald Trump has threatened trade wars with both of the United States’ closest neighbours, mused about taking over Greenland, blustered about bringing the Panama Canal back under American control and suggested making Canada the 51st state.

Less than a month before his inauguration, Trump – who vowed to end foreign wars and made “peace through strength” a rallying cry of his 2024 presidential campaign – is crafting an “America first” foreign policy defined by antagonism toward US allies and adversaries alike, centred around dreams of territorial expansionism, and channelled through the president-elect’s braggadocio.

Trump’s pre-presidency tactics regarding Greenland, the Panama Canal and the United States’ closest neighbours aren’t likely to result in massive change. Canadians and their political leaders are unlikely to prove receptive to dissolving their country, and US lawmakers have not broadly expressed willingness to absorb Canada as a new state. Greenland’s prime minister has said the island is not for sale, and Panamanian President Jose Raul Mulino has said “every square metre of the Panama Canal and its adjacent zone belongs to Panama and will remain so”.

For any other modern president – especially one who campaigned on ending wars, not starting them – threatening to encroach on allies’ sovereignty would be extremely unusual. But US foreign policy during Trump’s first term was marked by near-constant departures from diplomatic conventions and prior international commitments and defined by unpredictable and at times hostile political and economic brinkmanship with traditional partners and enemies across the globe. For Trump, training his imperial instincts on some of the United States’ closest partners advances a version of that same scattershot foreign policy he pursued during his first term, when he sought to forcefully promote American interests on the global stage with little regard for borders or delicate international relationships.

‘America will be respected again’

Trump’s team insists his recent comments are part of a broader strategy.

“World leaders are flocking to the table because president Trump is already delivering on his promise to ‘Make America Strong Again’,” Trump transition spokeswoman Anna Kelly said in a statement. “When he officially takes office, foreign nations will think twice before ripping off our country, America will be respected again, and the whole world will be safer.”

An overarching mission of countering Russia and China is the common thread tying together Trump’s comments about Canada, Mexico, Greenland and Panama, a Trump transition official argued. Trump himself has not explicitly made that argument.

“This isn’t just slapdash, there’s a coherent connective tissue to all of this,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to discuss the matter publicly. “Trump knows what levers to pull and what guardrails there are and he’s in a position of power to utilise those levers.”

Earlier this month, Canadian officials announced a plan to increase spending on border security and use canine teams and artificial intelligence to intercept illegal drugs. The transition team has pointed to that announcement as an early indication of the success of Trump’s strategy.

Not everyone is convinced. Former representative Carlos Curbelo (R-Florida) told MSNBC this week Trump’s messages could “deteriorate” relationships between the United States and other countries, which could make it more difficult to build international alliances in the future. “These kinds of insults could provoke them into a confrontation with the United States,” Curbelo said, noting it’s unlikely that it would be a military conflict. “There is a risk here, even if it is a negotiating tactic.”

Ownership of Greenland

Trump’s focus on the Western Hemisphere, as opposed to Russia and China directly, indicates he is “less convinced we can determine national security outcomes in other theatres of the world” where the US has less influence, according to Ryan Berg, the director of the Americas Program and head of the Future of Venezuela Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a non-partisan Washington-based non-profit group that specialises in national security issues.

On Sunday, while announcing Ken Howery, a co-founder of PayPal and former US ambassador to Sweden, as his pick for ambassador to Denmark, Trump emphasised his desire to take ownership of Greenland, the semi-autonomous Danish territory where the United States maintains its northernmost airbase.

“For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity [sic],” Trump wrote on his social media network, Truth Social.

Trump has actively pursued the idea of buying Greenland since at least 2019, when the then-president pushed his top aides to look into the process of acquiring the world’s largest island, whether buying it would be legal and where money to purchase the vast, icy landmass might come from. The idea came from an old friend of Trump, Ronald Lauder, an heir to the Estee Lauder cosmetics fortune, who pitched him on the plan at the outset of his first term.

Although it sounds “a bit hilarious”, the island’s strategic importance has been a long-standing issue in US foreign policy, and Trump’s announcement was “not unexpected” based on his past positions, said a former Danish diplomat who dealt with the issue during the first Trump administration, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive international issue. Mike Pompeo, Trump’s second secretary of state, visited the region in June 2020 shortly after the US reopened its first consulate in Nuuk, Greenland for the first time since 1953. Pompeo highlighted America’s presence in the Arctic, and took aim at Chinese and Russian efforts to gain a foothold in the resource-rich island.

“Something is probably going to happen with Greenland over the next 10 to 15 years,” the former diplomat added. “They might go independent, which is why the US is hedging for all futures. They are moving in the direction that the US sees as a part of its zone of influence.”

Retake control of Panama Canal

In a separate series of social media posts last weekend, Trump escalated his threats to retake control of the Panama Canal, accusing Panama of “ripping off” the United States with high shipping rates and allowing Chinese soldiers to operate the waterway – claims that Mulino denied.

“There are no Chinese soldiers in the canal, for the love of God,” Mulino said during a briefing last week, addressing Trump’s post directly. “It’s nonsense. There is not a single Chinese soldier in the canal.”

But Berg said there is some validity to the idea China’s global-port influence – including on both sides of the Panama Canal – is expanding.

“There is worry about Chinese influence of the canal and the reliability of US operations,” Berg said. “It could be one of the main routes to deploy US naval vessels from the Atlantic to the Pacific in a contingency situation where we have national security interests – such as Taiwan.”

Trump’s obsession with the Panama Canal is long-standing, according to John Feeley, who served as Trump’s ambassador to Panama. Trump felt former US President Jimmy Carter made a “historic mistake” by signing two treaties that relinquished American control over the canal, Feeley said – an echo of Ronald Reagan’s position that the US was the “rightful owner” of the canal. When Trump raised the matter during his first meeting with then-president Juan Carlos Varela in 2017, Varela responded with a non sequitur about Syria, managing to avoid an escalation of the topic, according to Feeley.

“The tiger doesn’t change its stripes. He’s got history with these ideas – these are not coming out of nowhere,” Feeley said. “And Donald Trump thrives on chaos. He loves to be the agent of chaos. He feels that this kind of disruptive approach to international affairs makes him and the United States strong.”

“It’s very much the Richard M. Nixon ‘uncontrollable madman’ theory,” Feeley continued, referring to the Nixon administration’s strategy of cultivating an image of a volatile and unpredictable president to intimidate and destabilise adversaries.

Trump’s expansionist rhetoric harks back to a time when a state’s power was defined by the land it controlled, rather than the more diffuse forms of influence – military, economic, cultural and diplomatic – US presidents have pursued since the conclusion of World War II, said Daniel Immerwahr, a Northwestern University history professor and author of How to Hide an Empire, a history of American imperialism.

“None of this would have sounded weird in the 19th century,” Immerwahr said, adding that Trump has embraced a more forceful approach to US diplomacy, appearing to lack the patience for the “sinuous blend of co-operation and consent” that has defined US diplomacy for much of the last century.

Trump’s focus on the Panama Canal is ironic because the passageway historically was the focal point of a shift in US policy away from territorial expansionism toward a more “informal empire”, said Jonathan Katz, a foreign correspondent and author of Gangsters of Capitalism, a biography of Smedley Butler, a decorated Marine and veteran of America’s foreign wars in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

“It’s really in Panama where America makes this turn to: ‘We’re not going to formally colonise this place, but we’re going to create a de-facto colony and control the strip in the middle,’” Katz said.

Stay out of Europe, annex everywhere else

Trump’s expansionist visions may appear to contradict the anti-interventionist promises he made on the campaign trail, as he argued the United States should limit spending to defend Ukraine and bashed the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. But his positions echo the early foreign policy of Woodrow Wilson, one of the first politicians to run on the catchphrase “America first”.

Wilson is largely now remembered for his efforts to advance international order through the creation of the League of Nations. But he ran for office on the slogan, “He kept us out of war”, as he vowed to keep the United States out of World War I. Katz noted the people of Haiti, the Dominican Republican and Mexico would have disagreed with that motto, given US intervention in those countries during Wilson’s first term.

“When we’re talking about what is retrospectively looked at as isolationism, we’re really talking about staying out of European wars while then doing war and effectively annexation everywhere else,” Katz said. “In a lot of ways, it’s not that different.”

Although many of Trump’s allies brush off Trump’s threats as part of his normal negotiating playbook, some in his orbit have real concerns about whether he will cross the line from harsh rhetoric and economic warfare to military intervention. Trump has threatened a 25% tariff on Mexican imports to stop the flow of illegal drugs, and privately discussed the idea of firing missiles into Mexico to try to take out cartels. Instead of ruling out the idea, which Mexican officials have warned would destroy all security co-operation between the two countries, several Republican presidential candidates during the 2024 GOP primary indicated support for using military force to stop fentanyl trafficking.

A conservative foreign policy adviser with insight into the president-elect’s transition process said while he believed Trump’s position was “mostly posturing”, the unanimous agreement during the Republican primary to make war on the cartels was troubling and a “hazardous approach”.

“Given the fact that this has already been through the ideas machine and spit out the other end, articulated by everybody from [Vivek] Ramaswamy and [Ron] DeSantis, as something they are all willing to do [on] day one, it makes me a little more concerned,” said the foreign policy adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be more candid.

Trump’s early appointments of Latin American experts to high-ranking positions could signal his intent to focus on the Western Hemisphere. Trump tapped Senator Marco Rubio (R-Florida), a foreign policy hawk, for secretary of state; Christopher Landau, his first-term ambassador to Mexico, for deputy secretary of state; and Mauricio Claver-Carone, who served as deputy assistant to the president and senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs at the National Security Council under Trump and is known for his hardline policy preferences, as special envoy to Latin America.

Some of Trump’s picks, such as Rubio and representative Michael Waltz (R-Florida), who has been tapped to serve as Trump’s national security adviser, would not be out of place in any Republican presidential administration. But other Trump choices, such as Claver-Carone and Richard Grenell, whom Trump named as presidential envoy for special missions, are more controversial figures, even within conservative circles, the conservative foreign policy adviser said.

“You have a cast of characters that runs the gamut on what sort of advice they’ll be proffering,” the conservative foreign policy adviser added. “Trump goes beyond ‘team of rivals’ to welcoming the thunderdome in some ways … A lot of this seems paradoxical by design.”