Geography’s Revenge

Over the last few weeks, Trump has raised a lot of eyebrows by suggesting that our country should annex Greenland, invite Canada to join as the 51^st state, and seek the return of the Panama Canal. Together, these remarks signal a break from prevailing norms and a plan to consolidate America’s dominant position in the Western Hemisphere.

Like much of what Trump does, it all seems cheeky, but only at first glance. Even if these maximalist positions do not prevail, they form an anchor for negotiations. Trump is actively seeking to expand U.S. influence over strategically significant regions within our immediate vicinity.

A new order is emerging where regions and their shifting balances of power are the dominant force in the world, rather than conflicts between mere nation-states. Among these competing regions, Europe, under the institutions of the EU, is becoming an economic and political force in its own right, often sidelining the U.S. Unlike NATO, we are not a member of the EU, and it provides space for Europe to assert its own collective interests as distinct from our own.

The BRICS consortium is also gaining power and becoming a viable node of international power, while China is making inroads to consolidate its own influence over Eurasia through its “Belt and Road Initiative.” China also maintains robust commercial ties with Africa and Latin America. Russia, of course, has been asserting its own sovereignty over the former Soviet Union in Georgia, Ukraine, and among the various Stans.

The U.S. is no longer as powerful as it once was in relative terms. We have done a lot on autopilot in recent years, continuing to assert our prerogatives as if the rest of the world has not taken notice of the humiliations in Afghanistan, Niger, and the Red Sea. Our adversaries and competitors are reevaluating things from a realist perspective, and we should as well, abandoning outmoded ideas about friends, enemies, and our own capabilities.

After the Cold War, for a time, we were the most powerful, but this led to a failure to set any priorities. National security strategy documents consisted of meaningless word salad without any intelligent effort to rank threats or connect one activity with another.

From the end of the Cold War to the present, seemingly archaic concerns for resources, strategic geography, and the enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine were dismissed as artifacts of a “revisionist” 19th-century mindset. As in much else, it turns out that our Founders were wise beyond measure. One of our enduring security advantages is separation from the rest of the world and protection by two huge oceans. Even in the nuclear era, the Atlantic and the Pacific protect our country from any conventional attack.

As President Monroe rightly perceived, these advantages would come to naught if Europe or other foreign adversaries could creep up to our doorstep by meddling with our neighbors, developing and expanding military bases through colonization, or otherwise hurting our good and dominant relations over the Western Hemisphere.

While not formally developing colonies, recent developments mimic their strategic impact. China has increased its infrastructure investments in Latin America, and Chinese companies now control the Panama Canal, one of the most strategically important locations on earth. The risk presented by a rising China, which was ignored during the Bush and Obama presidencies, is now taken for granted as an obvious geopolitical reality after Trump changed American policy.

This is an example of one of his great strengths: despite his alleged simplicity, he often perceives big truths that are lost on the experts. The big truth embedded in his recent remarks is that we live in a dangerous world with finite resources and must conduct ourselves accordingly. Thus, he sees that our friendships with EU and NATO countries are overrated and likely to be undone as the zero-sum game of securing supplies of natural resources and access to strategic geography gains momentum.

Talk of taking Greenland and Canada may alienate Denmark and the EU, but this is an unavoidable cost of renegotiating our relationships with these places in order to maintain military and commercial dominance over the Western Hemisphere. Greenland permits control of the North Atlantic. Canada has endless supplies of fossil fuels, to which the EU is seeking to gain preferred access. Trump is willing to strong-arm Europe on these issues because he knows that our interests are diverging.

Trump’s endorsement of a muscular foreign policy focusing on the Western Hemisphere may seem at odds with his broader America First position. But the reality is quite the opposite. America First foreign policy is not isolationist; rather, it sets priorities based on the big truths about the nature of the world as described above.

America First seeks to secure tangible goods that benefit actual Americans, such as safety, prosperity, access to resources and markets, and protection from foreign attack. This contrasts with abstract and utopian goals like “protecting democracy” or the reflexive continuation of yesteryear’s commitments, such as with NATO.

Our ancestors first conquered a land empire in furtherance of our national interest and at the exact moment that the frontier was conquered, they flexed their muscles against Spanish power in the Western Hemisphere. This was the first step to a truly global maritime empire. In recent times, the overseas maritime empire has predominated, while the heartland, our borders, and local issues that directly impact us, such as violence from Mexico’s drug cartels, have been completely neglected. Our legacy policy is not merely idealism but a suicidal anti-idealism, an America Last foreign policy.

The overseas empire is a plaything of the ruling class and the permanent bureaucracy. In addition to fulfilling their quest for meaning and significance, it redirects substantial national wealth to officials, along with the military-industrial complex, and innumerable lobbyists. It is not so clear that this activity does anything to benefit ordinary Americans.

What happens in our own backyard is more important than what happens in Eastern Europe, the South China Sea, and parts in between. Resources and their scarcity have always been important, and they will be more so in the future. We cannot do all the things all the time. Trump’s bid to shore up our naturally dominant position in the Western Hemisphere is a smart play.

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Christopher Roach is an adjunct fellow of the Center for American Greatness and an attorney in private practice based in Florida. He is a double graduate of the University of Chicago and has previously been published by The Federalist, Takimag, Chronicles, the Washington Legal Foundation, the Marine Corps Gazette, and the Orlando Sentinel. The views presented are solely his own.