Why Trump turned to manifest destiny

President-elect Donald Trump is still a week away from taking office, but his thoughts on forcing Canada to join the United States while acquiring Greenland and the Panama Canal – at one point refusing to ruling out the use of military force in these two particular cases – made a surreal prologue to his second administration. It’s an obsession that has angered world leaders and forced congressional Republicans into the odd position of insisting that the new president has no plans to storm the Arctic .

“The United States is not going to invade another country,” Senator James Lankford, Republican of Oklahoma, said yesterday on “Meet the Press.”.” Trump, Lankford insisted, was simply making “bold” statements intended to bring “everyone to the table.”

Whether those words are a negotiating tactic or something more, the president-elect’s expressed desire to expand the nation’s footprint reflects an urge that has animated much of his career in the public eye: to ensure let everything he controls be as great as possible.

In this sense, Trump’s remarks about taking control of Greenland and seizing Canada through “economic force” can be considered less as the expression of a foreign policy objective than as the extension of a philosophy which dates back to his determined efforts to expand his power. companies through a series of acquisitions in the 1980s.

In tonight’s newsletter, we’ll tell you why.

Painting other people’s houses

Greenland’s prime minister has said his territory wants to work more closely with the United States on certain issues, but the Greenlanders, like the Panamanians, have expressed little interest in ceding their territory to the Americans.

As a businessman, however, Trump often paid little attention to people who opposed his desired expansions, even if they sometimes found ways to stop him.