When, fresh from his November election victory, President Donald Trump began musing about buying Greenland, repossessing the Panama Canal, and annexing Canada, many people dismissed his visions of territorial acquisition as a Trumpian pipe dream, full of hubris, bluster, and wishful thinking.
The cheeky New York Post dubbed his fevered imaginings the “Donroe Doctrine,” calling it a throwback to the “Monroe Doctrine” declared by America’s fifth president James Monroe 200 years ago.
The tabloid’s front page story featured a whimsical illustration of Trump pointing to a map of North America with Greenland labeled “Our Land,” Canada a “51st State,” the Gulf of Mexico “Gulf of America,” and Panama “Pana-MAGA.”
But since taking office, Trump has made clear he is manifestly determined to make America greater in size and, by extension, even more dominant in the Western Hemisphere.
“We may be a very substantially enlarged country pretty soon,” Trump told a rally in Las Vegas. “Isn’t it nice to see? You know, for years, for decades, we’re the same size to the square foot — probably got smaller actually, but we might be in an enlarged country pretty soon.”
Land acquisition and hardball tactics play to Trump’s strengths as a former developer of high-end real estate, so when he sees a prime property like Greenland — strategically located in the contested Arctic Ocean, rich in minerals and rare earth elements, and with a population of only 57,000 — he believes he can get it.
That, even though Denmark, which owns Greenland, insists it’s not for sale and 85% of Greenlanders oppose joining the United States, according to a recent newspaper poll, which, when the results are displayed in a bar graph, looks uncannily like a huge middle finger to the U.S.
“I think Greenland we’ll get because it has to do with freedom of the world,” Trump confidently told reporters on Air Force One the same day as the Vegas rally. “I don’t really know what claim Denmark has to it, but it would be a very unfriendly act if they didn’t allow that to happen because it’s for the protection of the free world.”
The Danes, according to a report in the Financial Times, are “utterly freaked out” after Trump harangued Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen in a phone call, in which Trump was described as rebuffing offers of closer cooperation with the U.S. while threatening targeted tariffs, which could cripple the economy of a NATO ally.
“The intent was very clear. They want it,” one official briefed on the call was quoted as saying. “The Danes are now in crisis mode.”
The pursuit of Greenland, along with Trump’s demand that the Panama Canal “be returned to the United States of America, in full, quickly and without question,” both fly in the face of something known as the “rules-based international order,” a series of laws, agreements, principles, and institutions adopted after World War II designed to elevate international law over raw power in resolving disputes among nations.
“Central to the rules-based international order … is that countries must respect each other’s sovereignty,” writes historian Heather Cox Richardson. “Between 1942 and 1945, forty-seven nations signed the Declaration by United Nations,” pledging to “create a world based on the 1941 Atlantic Charter, which called for the territorial integrity of nations and the restoration of self-government to countries where it had been lost.”
It’s the principle then-President Joe Biden invoked in a 2022 opinion essay in the New York Times, in which he argued that failing to stop Russia from gobbling up Ukraine “could mark the end of the rules-based international order” and “put the survival of other peaceful democracies at risk.”
At his Senate confirmation hearing, Secretary of State Marco Rubio articulated a vision of the emerging Trump Doctrine, arguing that what he called the “post-Cold War global order” was an archaic framework that other nations have “manipulated to serve their interests at the expense of ours.”
“The post-war global order is not just obsolete, it is now a weapon being used against us,” he testified, “We welcomed the Chinese Communist Party into the global order, and they took advantage of all of its benefits and ignored all of its obligations and responsibilities.”
“Eight decades later, we are once again called to create a free world out of the chaos. This will not be easy, and it will be impossible without a strong and confident America that engages in the world, putting our core national interests once again, above all else.”
The 1823 Monroe Doctrine “proclaimed the U.S. protector of the Western Hemisphere,” the Encyclopedia Britannica tells us, and along with the 1904 Roosevelt Corollary “laid the groundwork for U.S. expansionist and interventionist practices in the decades to come.”
Trump, though, seems to be channeling a different president, William McKinley, elected in 1896, the last president of the Gilded Age.
Like Trump, McKinley was a self-described “tariff man” who embraced the super-rich of his time (John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and J.P. Morgan) while aggressively pursuing expansionism, seizing Puerto Rico in the Spanish-American War, and annexing the Republic of Hawaii.
“We’re going to rename Mount McKinley [Denali in Alaska] into Mount McKinley because he was a great president,” Trump told Fox News Host Sean Hannity. “He was a very successful businessman who believed strongly in tariffs, [and] because [of] tariffs, we were our wealthiest in the 1890s.”
Like the Monroe Doctrine, the Trump Doctrine would establish the Western Hemisphere as a U.S. sphere of influence, sending a strong message to Russia and China (which operates ports on both ends of the Panama Canal) to keep out of America’s backyard.
At the same time, Trump argues the U.S. should stay out of Russia’s sphere of influence and leave the defense of Ukraine and NATO nations primary to Europe.
“Europe is much more affected than the United States,” Trump argues. “We have an ocean in between, right? Little thing called an ocean.”
That kind of talk is music to the ears of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping. After all, if the U.S. can use coercion and the threat of military force to acquire Greenland, a self-governing island, citing “national security purposes,” why can’t Russia and China say the same about Ukraine and Taiwan?
“I could easily imagine Xi Jinping, saying, ‘Look, I perfectly well understand Greenland’s close to the United States. Taiwan is close to us. Trump won’t rule out the use of force on Greenland. Exactly our position. We won’t rule it out on Taiwan,’” Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton said on CNN. “Or Vladimir Putin could say, ‘Look, Ukraine is critical to our national security. We are using force. And frankly, if the United States invaded Greenland — which, by the way, has U.S. troops stationed there today — I, Vladimir Putin wouldn’t oppose that.’”
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Trump insists he can stop China from taking over Taiwan with his superpower — you guessed it — tariffs!
“I can do that because we have something that they want,” Trump said in his Fox News interview. “We have one very big power over China and that’s tariffs. And they don’t want them, and I’d rather not have to use it, but it’s a tremendous power over China.”