Trump Is Treating the Globe Like a Monopoly Board

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President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday openly mused about using U.S. military might to retake the Panama Canal and to claim Greenland, while threatening to use economic pressure to force 40 million Canadians into seeing their country demoted to an American state. He also called for changing the name of The Gulf of Mexico to The Gulf of America, and, just for good measure, casually suggested NATO member states set aside 5% of their economies for defense spending, a sharp jump from the current 2% non-binding guideline.

Only on the globe of Trump’s imagination does this Godzilla-esque trampling of sovereignty make any rational sense. It’s like the incoming Leader of the Free World is treating the map like a real-life Monopoly board to be dominated. Trump’s boasts may be as reliable as play money, but that does not mean the world beyond his gilded Florida club can treat his pronouncements as musings meant to be ignored.

Any of the wide-ranging comments on their own should be enough to give any U.S. ally indigestion, but packaged together as part of a bravado-driven posturing just weeks before he returns to power demands nothing short of a complete rethinking about how to approach the second Trump era. It is obvious that every assumption of global partnerships is now up for review and Trump is finding his own satisfaction in testing the sturdiness of each and every one of them.

Speaking to reporters at his Florida club, Trump seemed ever as certain about his influence. He even took credit for Meta’s announcement hours earlier that the social media giant would stop fact-checking posts, a move he said was “probably” in response to past threats he made against the company and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. 

Or witness Trump’s rant about the Panama Canal, a key shipping lane between the Atlantic and the Pacific that the United States opened in 1914 and transferred fully to a Panamanian transportation authority in 1999. “Jimmy Carter gave it to them for $1 and they were supposed to treat us well. I thought it was a terrible thing to do,” Trump said just hours before the 39th President’s body was due to arrive in Washington ahead of his state funeral on Thursday.

Typically light on details, Trump nevertheless said he wanted to have control over the 51-mile piece of infrastructure in Panama. Asked if he would rule out using the military to accomplish that, he refused. “I’m not going to commit to that,” he said. “It might be that you’ll have to do something. The Panama Canal is vital to our country.” (Of note: Panama does not have a standing army.)

The President-elect sounded similarly expansionist when it came to Greenland, an autonomous part of Denmark that Trump sought to claim during his first term. Trump said Tuesday that he would “tariff Denmark at a very high level” if it does not cede Greenland to the United States. The Arctic island has its own Prime Minister and parliament, but its national security interests are handled by Copenhagen. Greenland is represented in Washington at the Danish Embassy.

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said in an interview Tuesday that the island is still not for sale. His comments came as Donald Trump Jr. and incoming White House personnel chief Sergio Gor arrived in Greenland on Tuesday for what can only be imagined as next-level trolling.

It was roughly the same grace Trump offered Canada, where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced his sudden exit as his party’s leader with his vacating of 24 Sussex to follow. Trump has long needled the progressive darling of Canada and suggests that perhaps residents of the U.S. neighbor to the north would find a home as an annexed 51st state. On Tuesday, Trump even boosted hockey legend Wayne Gretzky to replace Trudeau. In true style, Trump suggested Gretzky would be a great leader of his fellow Canadians as their Governor, not necessarily a P.M. of an independent nation.

This style of throwing around America’s might is expected from the Trump orbit. Heck, apropos of nothing, Trump said he would be changing the name of the body of water bordering Texas to Florida, plus Mexico and Cuba, to The Gulf of America. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, a primo Trump enabler in the House, quickly sent out notice that she was preparing renaming legislation as the President-elect wished.

Finally, Trump sought to double the kitty available to NATO with the pronouncement that each country’s baseline for defense spending should be bumped to 5% of its gross domestic product. Trump has long confused the 2% suggestion as a dues-based system among the 32 member states. No country—including the United States—currently hits spending at 5%; Poland tops the list at 3.9% of GDP on defense spending and the U.S. slice hits roughly 3.5%. Trump’s obsession with perceived free-loading alliance members was a standard riff during his first term and he seems ready to bully nominal allies into spending even more on the joint project designed after World War II to keep Soviet—and now Russian—aggression in check. (Or, if Trump is to be believed, his own country. Greenland falls under Denmark’s NATO membership, which means NATO nations could be obligated to fight one of its charter members if Trump moved ahead with his military spasm.)

Which brings us to this uncomfortable reality: the objects of Trump’s ire are more than the casual U.S. ally. Denmark and the United States have long been reliable partners, with a history of working together in conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Panama is a lynchpin to U.S. trade, with American ships accounting for roughly three-quarters of its canal traffic; about 40% of all U.S. container ships make their way through the channel. Canada and the United States share the longest border between any two countries on the planet, its economies and cultures are deeply enmeshed, and the relationship between Washington and Ottawa is one of the most durable in the hemisphere. Trump largely got his way on NATO spending in his first term, yet is continuing to hector comrades in arms to spend even more on an alliance he isn’t exactly known to champion.

So to see the incoming President pick such self-defeating fights with allies is as confounding as it is numbing. Trump’s apologists say the bluster is just part of the package, and insist he is more substantive when the TV cameras are not present. Still, the signal beaming out of Florida on Tuesday was sprayed globally, and it would be mighty irresponsible for allies sitting in foreign ministries to ignore them. For some, the actions taken by Meta make sense: just give the bully what he wants and hope he moves to harass someone else.

The United States—and, here, Trump is the United States when it comes to foreign dealings—can effectively browbeat most nations to heel. The flex has a long history of accidental shrapnel and long-bruised feelings, but it works at least for a while. It doesn’t help America’s image as a top-down dictator in global matters, but sometimes such niceties prove to be a drag. Among allies, a phone call will usually do, but here Trump wants a public showing of force.

But Trump is not looking to harangue second-tier capitals with third-tier interests. He is going straight at some of the United States’ most reliable and critical friends. Trump may think of Greenland as an under-leveraged piece of real estate with a trove of rare natural resources buried under the melting piles of ice, but the strategic thinkers heading back into the National Security Council see it as a vital defense bulwark. After all, a U.S. base there is its northernmost outpost and uses its position exactly between Moscow and New York as a missile defense monitor. Similarly, Panama and Canada alike are major players in the U.S. trade ecosystem. NATO is one of the reasons Vladimir Putin’s ambitions to restore the Russian Empire have stayed (mostly) in check.

Unlike his first ascent in 2017, Trump now has a pretty fulsome understanding of the real power he has and how to wield it. How he is so far choosing to do so, just shy of two weeks from moving back into the White House, is as telling as it is maddening. With all that is stacked on Trump’s to-do list, picking fights with friends seems like an indulgent distraction that will soon grow tiresome. And in the meantime, he is fraying relationships with allies he hopes will just pull a Meta and bend to his whims.

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