Recently, NASA satellite imagery discovered the ruins of an old US nuclear weapons base, Camp Century, under the permafrost in Greenland, an abandoned relic of the Cold War. Its resurfacing is an apt metaphor for Donald Trump’s proposal to expand US territory into the circumpolar North, which seems to have come out of nowhere, but in fact draws upon a long history.
When Nazi Germany conquered Denmark in 1940, Britain and later the United States invaded and occupied Iceland. Four years later, Iceland ended its union with Denmark and became an independent republic. Greenland could certainly have followed. Both islands remain of strategic importance for NATO, which makes Trump’s proposal to acquire Greenland for military reasons seem redundant: Doesn’t Greenland already occupy a forward position regarding the Arctic and Russian threats? But perhaps Trump aims to abolish NATO—as he has threatened and his critics have accused him of planning to do—after all. Maybe it is not merely a ruse or negotiating position, but a real prospect. Greenland seems to be part of the calculation.
Trump’s suggestion has prompted the indigenous people of Greenland to demand their independence. Meanwhile, the King of Denmark has added Greenland and the Faroe Islands to his Royal Coat of Arms, but Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has sent out mixed signals. Don Jr. is visiting Greenland as I write this.
“The US-Canada border is the frontier of the American Revolution.”
Trump’s calling Canada the “51st State” caused the downfall of its “governor,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The president-elect has since declared the benefits of a union with Canada that would erase the “artificial border.” But political frontiers represent history and its after-effects. The early Scandinavian—Viking—contact with the New World informs the Danish claim to Greenland. (The Inuit who make up most of the population now actually arrived later.)
The US-Canada border is the frontier of the American Revolution. Benjamin Franklin demanded Canada from the British in the treaty settling the American War of Independence. After the Civil War, the victorious Union offered to take Canada as the compensation the British owed for their support of the Confederacy. Secretary of State William H. Seward had to settle for purchasing Alaska. Canada, then, remains the frontier of the counterrevolution after both American revolutionary wars. It remains the most European part of the Western Hemisphere. This has not been a good thing.
Trump’s promise to Make America Great Again begins with making America America again. Making Greenland and Canada American is part of this initiative. Trump declared the Gulf of Mexico to be the Gulf of America. Perhaps saying so blatantly what is nonetheless a fact is in bad taste. Whether literally or figuratively, the gesture is unmistakable. This is not imperialism, but a reminder of the Empire of Liberty that Thomas Jefferson declared the mission of the new United States. It is an evergreen promise. 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.
“America is revolutionary or it is nothing.”
Ever since the Civil War, the United States has demanded unconditional surrender from its enemies. It has treated all its opponents as it did the Confederacy—as echoes of the counterrevolution, the threat of undoing the revolution. The Confederates regarded the values of the revolution—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as the inalienable rights of all equally—as mistaken. So have all of America’s opponents. They have been and remain slave states.
But the revolution cannot be undone. The question is how Greenland or Canada or Panama or Mexico or the rest of the Americas—the rest of America—might still follow and not oppose it.
The real question, though, is how America still follows the revolution. Trump seems to accept its call. The United States does not desire to rule but only to free people and places. How it does so has come now to be in doubt. But there will be no retreat to Little America. The sheer scope of American power won’t allow it. Can America find itself again—re-found itself—on these frontiers?
The alliance between Washington and Beijing forged by Nixon and Kissinger ended with the defeat of the Soviet Union. It was supposed to shape the next century, and it has done so. Unfortunately, the original intention of the pact for the two countries—both victors of World War II, but one more damaged by it—to keep each other honest, has failed, as did that of the original Allies, the United States and the Soviet Union.
Vladimir Putin, in interviews he conducted with Oliver Stone before Trump’s first term and after the Russian seizure of Crimea, stated that while he accepts American predominance, Washington cannot possibly govern the world. Recalling that throughout US history, Russia has been its ally in all wars except one (namely, the War of 1812—the Napoleonic Wars), he advised that regional powers such as Russia and China be allowed their own domains. The problem is that their neighbors won’t consent, hoping instead for American protection.
Trump is decried by his political opponents in both the Democratic and Republican Parties as an “isolationist”—the old pejorative from the pre-World War II era. But ever since Woodrow Wilson’s War to End All Wars, which was forced on America by Europe (that is, by the counterrevolution), American involvement in global affairs has been a given. Theodore Roosevelt had already negotiated the end of the 1905 Russo-Japanese War, and had warned against America coming into conflict with either Japan or Germany, which he saw menacing on the horizon.
Trump has promised to end the current wars in Ukraine and Gaza; to launch no new wars; and invited Chinese President Xi Jinping to his Inauguration, extending the hand of friendship to the only potential rival of American power. Xi politely demurred, not needing the reminder of the vitality of American democracy.
Trump has not ruled out a military solution to either the Greenland or Panama Canal issues that he has identified. He did, however, rule it out for Canada—ironically enough, considering its origins as the redoubt of America’s foes in the Revolutionary War. Is Trump’s audacious overture to his second term a prelude to a new geopolitical competition—a new Cold War or even World War III? Or is it rather a preview of a restored American world leadership, as Trump apparently intends?
The key to hard bargaining is willingness to walk away from a deal rather than accept bad terms. Trump is wagering that his negotiating partners are at least as in need of peace as America, and that in the wake of both the Great Recession and the Covid crisis, the world depends on American recovery.
The danger is that the United States might overplay its hand. It might not be a time for brinksmanship or confrontation. It might not be a matter of tests of strength. But it might require a match of wills.
Washington has been bogged down by policy impasses and decided lack of vision in the new millennium. Former Rep. Joe Walsh, who briefly opposed Trump for the GOP presidential nomination in 2020, speculated at the 2024 never-Trump Republican counter-convention in Milwaukee that winning the Cold War had doomed America. He might have meant that China was the ultimate beneficiary of the fall of the Soviet Union. But such pessimism is unrealistic. The post-Cold War crisis is indeed being met—however undesirably to Walsh and the GOP old guard—by Trump. Unlike China or Russia, America has greater resources for political change in direction and leadership. There is a refusal to see the obvious regarding Trump: that he represents the “hope and change” that was merely a marketing slogan for Obama before him.
The gravitational attraction of the United States is in its social and not merely its economic power. This extends to its political capacities. There are many sources of power, not just one, and this creates a much more resilient polity than one finds in America’s would-be enemies.
Over the course of American history, every 40 or 50 years has seen a crisis that called for national renewal. Jefferson’s Revolution of 1800, Jackson’s 1828 election, the Civil War, the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Reagan Revolution all changed the political parties and the nature of their competition, fulfilling Jefferson’s estimation that a revolution would be needed every generation or so. We are living through such a shift now.
“Trump sees the need for a broader American future.”
While there might not exactly be a plan, there is a vision. Trump setting his sights on Greenland might seem to prove his critics right about the danger of his folly. It symbolizes the apparent absurdity of the moment. But it would be wrong to fall back on the lack of imagination that has afflicted US politics for far too long.
The neglected and forgotten Danish colony in the Western hemisphere captures something of the nature of Trump’s character, which is bombastic but not empty. Where others have been complacent to let spaces lie unutilized, he has set to building. Could this be done on the mostly vacant territory of the world’s largest island? Where others now see a barren wasteland, Trump finds not only possibilities but necessities—the necessity for American growth and change.
In this and other fields, Trump sees the need for a broader American future. Approaching the quarter-millennium of the American Revolution, perhaps the borders of the Empire of Liberty are set to be revised again.