Which bring us to this month, in which Trump has expressed his desire to take the canal, which the U.S. controlled until 1977, as well as Greenland, a Danish territory that the U.S. has never laid any claim to (though American troops did occupy it for defensive purposes during World War II). In both cases, Trump has refused to rule out deploying the military to get what he wants. That’s not all. Trump also apparently covets Canada, and has pledged to make it America’s fifty-first state, albeit merely through “economic force.” It’s a positively McKinley-esque vision—in its expansionist ambition, anyway, if not its design.
Trump’s powers of media manipulation are often overstated, but—conscious or not—he has always had a knack for conjuring distracting baubles. It’s not clear that he benefits by diverting attention from serious issues (what he will do about China, Ukraine, and the wider Middle East) onto unserious ones like taking Greenland. But he has successfully and effortlessly focused the attention of the media away from those issues while providing red meat to his base, which is suddenly eager to acquire a giant, largely uninhabitable island in the North Atlantic.
As is almost always the case with Trump, though, the cleanest and perhaps most persuasive explanation is the simplest and dumbest: The territory, like Canada, looks really, really big on the commonly used (and widely distorted) Mercator projection. Adding it would be a huge ego boost for a man who, hours after planes hit the Twin Towers, boasted that he now owned the tallest building in New York City. (He didn’t, but that’s beside the point.)
Trump may even be mimicking the autocrats he admires. Over the last several years, as he brooded in quasi-exile at his Mar-a-Lago estate, Trump has watched Russian President Vladimir Putin gobble up territory in Ukraine while China’s Xi Jinping lays the groundwork to take Taiwan. Everywhere you look a large, powerful nation is grabbing territory from its smaller, weaker neighbors. Why should America sit on the sidelines?
This is, ultimately, all that matters to Trump. One could argue that he sees this as an opportunity akin to Ronald Reagan’s invasion of Granada in 1983, which was a P.R. exercise intended to restore a sense of optimism and strength in a nation still traumatized by its defeat in Vietnam. But Trump has never cared about the mood of the nation, only the—all too fleeting—mood of Donald Trump. Acquiring land, whether it be valuable (the Panama Canal) or mostly just very big (Greenland) is exactly the kind of legacy boost our first real estate tycoon president has always lusted after. For Trump, there is no difference between real strength and the appearance of strength, and acquiring land would make him look strong, like that nineteenth-century president whose name was so unfairly stripped from that Alaskan peak.
On the campaign trail, Trump talked a lot about Iran and China and said nothing about Greenland or the Panama Canal. Now that he is president-elect, the situation has reversed. It’s easy to see why. Surveying the current geopolitical climate, he surely sees several perilous conflicts on the brink of erupting into protracted, devastating wars. Trump is profoundly ill suited for the complexity of the geopolitical situation he is inheriting. He disdains all forms of diplomacy except escalation; his only “diplomatic” move is to issue threats of increasing belligerence and derangement. But doing so against leaders like Putin and Xi risks not only inflaming tensions but exposing his own weakness. Were he to spar with one of them like he has been with Denmark or a lame-duck Canada, he may have to back down or even lose. In short, Trump fears such dictators for the same reason that he admires them. They’re the strongmen he has always desperately wanted to be—and would be, in his mind, if only our pesky democracy didn’t limit his full potential.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( What Trump Really Wants From Greenland and Panama )
Also on site :