Trump Is Opening Pandora’s Box

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Analysis Trump Is Opening Pandora’s Box The president-elect’s expansionist statements about Greenland and Canada may be a passing whimsy, but they will exact a cost. Howard French Howard W. French By Howard W. French , a columnist at Foreign Policy . Trump is shown from the side as he speaks into a microphone. The background is almost entirely dark. U.S. President-elect Donald Trump speaks during Turning Point’s AmericaFest in Phoenix on Dec. 22, 2024. Rebecca Noble/Getty Images My FP: Follow topics and authors to get straight to what you like. Exclusively for FP subscribers. Subscribe Now | Log In United States North America Howard W. French January 14, 2025, 2:31 PM Comment icon View Comments ( 7 ) In the recent frenzy of commentary seeking to interpret U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s increasingly adamant comments about territorial expansion to Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal, too much of the discussion has focused on matters of secondary importance. These range from assessing whether Trump is merely engaging in a game of showmanship or distraction, to deciphering how those regions’ inhabitants feel about ceding territorial control to the United States, to determining how much it would cost to purchase their acquiescence. In the recent frenzy of commentary seeking to interpret U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s increasingly adamant comments about territorial expansion to Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal, too much of the discussion has focused on matters of secondary importance. These range from assessing whether Trump is merely engaging in a game of showmanship or distraction, to deciphering how those regions’ inhabitants feel about ceding territorial control to the United States, to determining how much it would cost to purchase their acquiescence. Trending Articles Thousands Return to Northern Gaza After Last-Minute Hostage Dispute But a White House proposal to “clear out” the war-ravaged territory could shake the region’s fragile peace. Powered By Advertisement Thousands Return to Northern Gaza After Last-Minute Hostage Dispute X From a policy perspective, though, more fundamental matters have gone surprisingly unaddressed, beginning with the question of whether any of these moves would even be good for the United States. Since Trump’s first term, I have been struck by the degree to which his ideas seem stuck in the past. This is best exemplified by his obsession with trade balances and tariffs. The first of these is redolent of the Reagan era, while the second harks back to the U.S. protectionism of the early 20th century under leaders such as Herbert Hoover, who signed the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act into law, which sharply raised import duties to protect U.S. farmers and industry. Old-fashioned national aggrandizement reached a peak even earlier, during Washington’s victory in the 1898 Spanish-American War. This led the United States to acquire Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, which few Americans today know was once a U.S. colony. The same year, moves were afoot in Congress to formalize control over Hawaii. Washington’s transition to a global power, as opposed to one primarily concerned with extending control by descendants of Europe over the contiguous United States, was well underway. After World War II, beginning with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Washington helped lead the way in making direct rule over peoples in far-flung territories outmoded and began to nudge European countries to relinquish their control over most of the world. The Cold War accelerated this process, as Washington and Moscow sought to project themselves as the true friend of the world’s subjugated peoples. As the United States gradually established its superiority in the competition with the Soviets, it led the way in the creation of a new era-defining model of international power based on finance, the spread of mighty multinational companies (think Coca-Cola, Citibank, IBM, and Boeing), and the dominance of the Bretton Woods institutions. Those institutions include the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, which helped govern the global economy on terms that favored the West in general and Washington in particular. Washington might never have admitted to itself that it, like the European nations it freed itself from, had become an imperialist nation. But by the final decades of the 20th century, this was indisputable. Since the early 1990s, the world has been transitioning away from this era of U.S. global hegemony. This shift has been driven by the spectacular rise of China. As I watched the world change while living in China during the first decade of this century, the West seemed unprepared to accept that its domination—sometimes imagined to be rooted in the glories of ancient Greece and Rome, but in fact only recent—could ever be seriously challenged. China, which possessed the world’s largest economy throughout most of history, had other ideas. As recently as the late 1970s, China accounted for only roughly 1 percent of the world’s manufacturing. By 2023, it alone produced around 34 percent of the world’s manufactured goods. Trump seems to believe that the United States can somehow turn back the Chinese challenge by imposing itself on the world’s largest island (Greenland), the world’s second-largest country by area (Canada), and one of the world’s oldest transoceanic canals (in Panama). But this is a grand delusion that misunderstands the direction and flow of historical change. For all its successes, China has many serious structural challenges, including a sharp demographic decline , which are aggravated by grave policy mistakes and hubris. Yet the country has taken the lead in investing in industrial processes and technologies that are likely to play a decisive role in the future: robots and automation, artificial intelligence, efficient transportation, space, and, perhaps most important of all, green energy. The diversion of U.S. attention to territorial pursuits will not help it compete in these crucial areas. What is worse is that by alienating its friends and neighbors, the United States is weakening one of its greatest sources of international prestige and power: its role as an underwriter of global order. Even if Trump’s comments about Canada, Greenland, and Panama are passing whimsies, they will exact a cost. They help legitimize Russia’s ongoing aggression against Ukraine, which even Moscow is careful enough to deny is expansionist, as well as China’s claims over Taiwan, which Beijing threatens to use force to annex. One day, they could even encourage Beijing’s revanchism in the parts of Russia’s far east that were once under China’s control. Others, with territorial claims of their own, will follow. In other words, we are all witnessing the opening of Pandora’s box. Read More A photo collage shows Donald Trump squinting and smiling slightly as he looks to the right. Paper tears at the corner reveal an image of devastation in Gaza and a person walking through a dry landscape. A cool-to-warm gradient color effect is over the image. The Top Global Dangers for a Burn-It-Down Era A rogue America is among the biggest threats of 2025. Analysis | Robert A. Manning , Mathew Burrows A black and white political cartoon shows an extra tall and lanky Uncle Sam with one foot in Alaska and one in South America as he straddles the Americas and holds a big “Monroe Doctrine” stick. Trump Will End U.S. Passivity in the Western Hemisphere Prioritizing the Americas after decades of neglect marks a return to traditional U.S. strategy. Shadow Government | Alexander B. Gray Trump’s remarks about Canada, and much of the domestic conversation that has ensued, also reveal U.S. misconceptions about Canada’s history and place in the world. Commentators belatedly acknowledged that the very foundation of Canadian identity rests in being non-American , but few seem to have asked themselves why this important. Instead, many Americans seem to think that U.S. and Canadian identity are closely intertwined. Both countries’ histories are fundamentally bound up in settler colonialism . This term has been attacked of late by the self-styled anti-woke, but the facts speak so eloquently about how the two countries were populated by Europeans that this doesn’t bear stressing. There is one major difference between the pair, though. As I wrote in my book, Born in Blackness , the foundational feature of the United States that is lacking from Canadian history is plantation slavery. This means that Canadian notions of self involve much more than a narcissism of small differences. Yes, Canada had enslaved Africans, but always in far fewer numbers than the United States, and they did not play a vital role in Canada’s economic development. In fact, as too few Americans know, for Black people under enslavement in the United States, Nova Scotia and other parts of Canada were promised lands of freedom and terminus points of the Underground Railroad. Sign up for Editors’ Picks A curated selection of FP’s must-read stories. Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use and to receive email correspondence from us. You may opt out at any time. Enter your email Sign Up ✓ Signed Up You’re on the list! More ways to stay updated on global news: FP Live Enter your email Sign Up ✓ Signed Up World Brief Enter your email Sign Up ✓ Signed Up China Brief Enter your email Sign Up ✓ Signed Up South Asia Brief Enter your email Sign Up ✓ Signed Up Situation Report Enter your email Sign Up ✓ Signed Up View All Newsletters One of the most interesting commentaries about the future of Canada, before the hoopla over Trump’s series of provocations reached a crescendo, came from an Economist editorial suggesting that Canada should join the flagging European Union instead of the United States. This would give Europeans a future-oriented land to emigrate to and provide Canada with new economic and security relationships that would reduce its reliance on an unpredictable United States. What this out-of-the-box idea missed, though, is the striking fact that it is not the rich and privileged of the world who lack new migratory or economic options. Rather, it is the large population of people from low-income nations that are driving intercontinental migration—and with the worsening climate crisis and Africa’s rapid demographic growth , this will likely accelerate. Europe is working desperately to limit the arrival of people from poorer parts of the world, but its efforts seem doomed to fail in the medium- to long-term. That’s not just because of Europe’s ineffective border policing efforts, but because aging and population decline will eventually become so severe that Europeans will be forced to accept radically larger numbers of arrivals. In fact, for all of the backlash against immigration driving the recent successes of conservative parties in the West, this trend has already begun . Until recently , Canada had been one of the Western countries most hospitable to immigration from the global south. The solution to its future challenges won’t come from merging with the United States or even Europe. That will only arrive once the current mood of nativism and thinly concealed racism crests in the West, and Canada opens its vast and sparsely populated territory widely once again. This post is part of FP’s ongoing coverage of the Trump transition . Follow along here . Howard W. French is a columnist at Foreign Policy, a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and a longtime foreign correspondent. His latest book is Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War. X: @hofrench Read More On Canada | Donald Trump | Greenland | North America | Panama | United States Join the Conversation Commenting on this and other recent articles is just one benefit of a Foreign Policy subscription. 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