Trump Wants To Bring Back the American Imperium
Something about the holiday season seems to inspire nostalgia for the American imperium—that epoch from 1898 through the first decade or so of the 20th century when the United States sought unapologetically to become an imperial power. Two decades ago, then-Vice President Dick Cheney caught hell for sending out a Christmas card that said, “And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without attracting His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?” Now Donald Trump is celebrating Christmas with threats to reclaim the Panama Canal, control of which Congress turned over to Panama in 1978, and to open an entirely new theater of conquest by seizing Greenland from Denmark.
Cheney’s words were borrowed from Benjamin Franklin, who, as Franklin biographers Edmund S. Morgan and Walter Isaacson explained to me at the time, did not have in mind the conquest of foreign lands. (“Empire” did not, the late Morgan told me, “carry the kind of freight it carries today.”) But that didn’t get Cheney off the hook. By December 2003, United States troops had deposed Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Combat operations wouldn’t end until December 2011 (and even today about 2,500 troops remain). One year earlier, President George W. Bush had adopted a military doctrine of ”pre-emption” that permitted “anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack.” Under those circumstances, nobody felt like cutting Cheney any slack.
Trump’s Panama Canal comments appeared Saturday on Truth Social and were repeated at a rally Trump held later the following day in Arizona. The two-part Truth Social post was unusually long for Trump. “The Panama Canal is considered a VITAL National Asset for the United States,” it began. It was “was built at HUGE cost to the United States in lives and treasure—38,000 American men died from infected mosquitos in the jungles during construction.” Carter, Trump wrote, “foolishly gave it away,” and now “the fees being charged by Panama are ridiculous.” If “the principles, both moral and legal, of this magnanimous gesture of giving are not followed then we will demand that the Panama Canal be returned to us, in full, and without question.”
The GOP cult of William McKinley is on the march. We already knew Trump admired this much-derided president for his tariffs. Now it appears he’s also taken a fancy to McKinley’s “Remember-the-Maine” conquest of Cuba and the Philippines.
There’s a dash of the Gipper as well. Trump’s rhetoric echoes Ronald Reagan’s belligerent mantra about the Canal when Reagan ran unsuccessfully for president in 1976. “We bought it, we paid for it, it’s ours,” Reagan said at the time, “and we should tell [Panama leader Omar] Torrijos it’s going to remain ours.” Even Reagan halted this saber-rattling after the treaty was ratified; by the time Reagan met Trujillo’s successor for the first time in October 1982 his previous opposition went unmentioned. Instead, Reagan said he was “looking forward to a warm working relationship.”
It may not surprise you that Trump mangled his facts about Panama, overstating by more than 600 percent the number of Americans who died building the Canal (only some of them from malaria). Indeed, if we based sovereignty on the sacrifice in lives building the Panama Canal, then the waterway would rightfully belong to France, which began construction in 1881 and abandoned the project to the United States seven years later after losing about 20,000 workers. Nous l’avons acheté, nous l’avons payé, c’est à nous !
Moreover, Carter never “gave away” the Canal because the Canal never belonged to the United States, a point Carter explained in a February 1978 address to the nation. “We have never had sovereignty over it,” Carter said. The United States never “bought” the Canal, but rather rented it and the surrounding Canal Zone from Panama, paying annually for the privilege. All the 1978 treaty did was cancel the lease while granting the United States the right to intervene militarily should any nation threaten the Canal’s neutrality—a neutrality under threat, the BBC’s Mark Wendling and Jake Horton pointed out this week, only from the United States itself. After Panama’s president, José Raúl Mulino, replied to Trump that “Every square meter of the Panama Canal … belongs to Panama and will continue to belong to Panama,” Trump reposted it with the comment, “We’ll see about that!”
Panama charges ships $400,000 to traverse the canal. That’s hardly ruinous for the multibillion-dollar shippers and suppliers that use it. Transit slowed in recent years because drought lowered water levels in the Canal, in turn reducing the number of ships that could pass through. That in turn led to supply-chain-disrupting traffic jams; in August 2023 the number of vessels waiting to pass through reached 160, delaying passage by as much as 21 days. Panama started auctioning off rights to jump the queue, which doubled the cost of transit for shippers that availed themselves of this short cut. It wouldn’t astonish me to learn that the Central American nation has taken economic advantage of the situation, but Trump’s complaint is a bit rich coming from the guy who sells $60 “God Bless the USA” Bibles. (The “Inaugural Edition” will set you back $70.) In any event, Trump is bluffing. We aren’t going to invade.
Buying Greenland from the Kingdom of Denmark is a project Trump suggested during his first term, calling it “a large real estate deal.” The Danish prime minister said back then that Greenland wasn’t for sale (prompting Trump to cancel a visit to Denmark in a huff). Indeed, it isn’t clear Denmark could sell Greenland if it wanted to, given a power-sharing agreement under which the world’s largest island mostly governs itself. Greenland was a Danish colony from the 18th century until 1953, at which time it became a Danish district with two representatives in parliament; in 1979 Greenland became almost entirely self-governing. (The intricacies of the arrangement may be somewhat familiar if you watched the fourth season of Borgen.)
Even so, Trump posted Sunday (while announcing on Truth Social that Ken Howery was his choice for ambassador to Denmark) that “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.” This time the offer was rebuffed by Greenland’s own prime minister.
Why would Trump even want Greenland? Our military already has a base there, so it can’t be for national defense.
The island is rich in natural resources, including a few rare-earth minerals of commercial importance and of course oil (though the United States has plenty of the latter already). The presence of these natural resources would put the price at $1.7 trillion, The Washington Post’s Christopher Ingraham estimated in 2019, which means buying Greenland would probably cost more than $2 trillion today. (That’s assuming Denmark were willing to sell, which, again, it is not.) No way would Congress appropriate $2 trillion to buy Greenland. Instead, we’d have to invade. That would mean waging war against NATO, since Denmark and Greenland are both member nations. China and Russia, I figure, would take NATO’s side. In the unlikely event that human life survived this conflict, the United States would inherit not only Greenland’s natural resources but also Greenland’s 57,000 inhabitants, most of them Inuit fishermen—a population sufficiently impoverished that Denmark must subsidize the country to the tune of more than $500 million annually.
These flirtations with neoimperialism are of course nonsense. Trump’s not going to take back the Panama Canal or seize Greenland any more than he got Mexico to pay for his idiotic border wall. The Panamanians, the Danish, and the Greenlanders don’t take these threats seriously, and neither should you. It’s just our senile president-elect spouting off again.
Timothy Noah is a New Republic staff writer and author of The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It.