At a rambling press conference yesterday, between promoting projects by his Emirati and Saudi business partners from the Trump Organization and showcasing America’s budding kleptocracy, or pontificating about the evils of leaky faucets, electric heaters, and windmills, Donald Trump did something extraordinary, unleashing a political furor and instigating a major international incident in the process.
In response to a question from New York Times security reporter David Sanger, Trump flatly refused to rule out using “military force and economic coercion” to acquire control of Greenland and the Panama Canal, two sovereign states with territory now coveted by himself: the incoming American president.
In fact, Trump was so eager to give the impression that he was indeed considering using force to redraw international borders to suit his fancy, he literally interrupted Sanger before he could finish his question.
This bears emphasizing: the incoming U.S. president giddily refused to say he would not deploy the world’s most lethal fighting force for the purposes of territorial expansion, and against two different American allies, no less. It was a remarkable moment, as an avaricious President-elect embraces his inner strongman for all the world to see, and begins lashing out at the world beyond U.S. borders a la Putin, Hitler, and Stalin.
Of course, such a move would immediately and irrevocably obliterate the system of global alliances America has so meticulously created, along with what’s left of the ailing postwar global order, the one that says strong countries can’t simply gobble up weaker countries because they feel like it, also constructed by Washington, and for its immense benefit.
It would signify a return to a world devoid of international law, a return to the Hobbesian law of the jungle geopolitical landscape that resulted in two ruinous global conflicts, and at a time when humanity possesses nuclear weapons that could exterminate our species. It’s terrifying to think that Trump will be personally controlling those weapons in less than two weeks, particularly in this acquisitive, warmongering mood he seems to be in.
As it happens, Denmark is a member in good standing of NATO, the alliance created and led by America after World War II to safeguard Western Europe against the threat of Soviet totalitarianism. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has until now been successful at preventing World War Three and a nuclear holocaust, safeguarding Paris, West Berlin, and Vienna from the Soviet behemoth during the Cold War, and it continues to be effective today, preventing Vladimir Putin from attacking Poland and the Baltic States even as he ravages Ukraine.
As the Washington Post dryly noted in an analysis of his comments, based on NATO’s Article 5 commitments, if Trump actually invaded Greenland, NATO would likely find it “at war with itself.” Indeed, NATO was designed to protect the world’s democracies. Instead, the threat now appears to be coming from the capital which still leads those democracies, for now. If nothing else, Vladimir Putin must be chuckling over his champagne in the Kremlin tonight, watching this spectacle, even as the rest of the world cringes.
In the same vein, Trump also discussed strong-arming Canada into being America’s 51st state via economic pressure, and still more bizarrely, renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” This surreal press conference two weeks before Trump’s second term begins seemed to capture something of this perilous new era we’re entering, as an already-unhinged foreign policy ingenue returns to power in a bombastic, reckless, freewheeling mood, this time with far fewer guardrails to contain his rapaciousness, and scant concern about anything but himself and his terrifying theatrics.
Fascism with a capital F
For years, Trump’s brand of muscular ultranationalism was said to be differentiated from classical midcentury European fascism by one main factor: Trump’s supposedly isolationist foreign policy, and his lack of an expansionary imperial vision for America abroad. This single element was thought to be necessary for a political movement like MAGA to meet the dictionary definition of fascism, as such, whatever one might feel in their gut.
Still, this always seemed like sort of a flimsy rationale for saying Trump was not a fascist, though many scholars and academics clung tightly to this, despite the many other indicators, all blinking bright red. It turns out it was always something of a fig leaf, and a meager one at that, given Trump’s tendencies toward aggression, political violence, and authoritarianism.
As former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley said of his former boss, Trump “is fascist to the core,” something John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff agreed with. In other words, this isn’t some kind of leftist fixation, a symptom of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Indeed, America’s preeminent scholar of fascism, Robert Paxton, recently changed his mind about Trump, affirming that yes he is in fact a fascist. A quick glance at Paxton’s definition shows why.
Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion. — Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism
Before now, everything in that definition fit with the exception of the last two words. Now, the entire definition fits like a glove. Whatever Donald Trump and MAGA were during their first iteration, between 2016–2020, his second term is promising to be something else entirely. As it happens, this radicalizing evolution is also a classical element of fascism.
Bluster or bust
At this point, it’s unclear if all this talk of annexing countries is merely empty bluster, a terrifying rhetorical stunt, or something far more ominous. As writer Jonathan Chait noted yesterday, this is perhaps designed to be Trump’s offering of bloody red-meat to his base of voters, men and women who love Trump’s bellicose performing and his economic promises, but who are far less keen on his actual policy agenda, which is mostly about deregulating federal rules on behalf of friendly corporate donors, while lowering taxes for the wealthiest American billionaires who own those companies. It’s hardly the kind of stuff that excites your average MAGA voter. Thus, perhaps these angry outbursts about conquering territory are a cheap substitution.
However, it seems pretty clear to me that Trump is building a national security case to potentially go to war or threaten to go to war in the near future for Greenland and the Panama Canal, a sobering reality, and the sum of all of our fears about Donald Trump. Obviously, it’s impossible to read Trump’s intentions with any degree of accuracy, to the extent he himself even knows his own intentions, or divine whether these threats are just a negotiating tactic, or something more sinister.
Either way, his comments have already caused deep alarm and unease in European and Latin American capitals, provoking angry responses from Danish, Canadian, Mexican, and Panamanian diplomats and officials. It’s the kind of self-defeating chaos that Trump thrives on, and which is celebrated in Beijing and Moscow, even as America’s standing in the Western democratic world crumbles.
What comes next is anyone’s guess, though if you take him at his word, it could be a global nightmare, a cataclysm for humanity. Still, let’s not pretend we didn’t see this coming. We’ve known precisely who and what Trump is for a long time now, whatever the quibbling debates about whether he is or is not the F word (and he most certainly is).
It’s a brave new world Trump’s leading us all into, as a right-wing dictator takes the helm of the world’s leading democracy and nuclear superpower, turning the United States into yet another hungry hyena looking for a quick meal. It feels like we’ve crossed an invisible threshold with this latest provocation, and I fully expect more grim surprises before we’re through.
