Adventures in Panama, Canada, Greenland, funded by an energy boom—the president-elect’s zest is infectious, if not without risks.
On the eve of former President Jimmy Carter’s state funeral, President-elect Donald Trump is reviving the debate over the United States ceding control of the Panama Canal. It is an issue that once divided even conservatives, or at least elite ones. (The grassroots were pretty solidly against the Panama Canal treaty at the time).
There was the classic Firing Line episode pitting William F. Buckley Jr., who was pro-ratification, against Ronald Reagan, who was against it. Buckley’s team included George Will and James Burnham, with Admiral Elmo Zumwalt as a military adviser. Reagan’s crew boasted Pat Buchanan and Roger Fontaine, with Admiral John McCain (the father, not the senator and presidential candidate son, who was born in the Canal Zone). Once when Buckley went to visit Reagan, he was greeted by signs in the future president’s driveway: “We Built It … We Paid For It … It’s Ours!”
Now that Trump is getting ready to accomplish a feat previously achieved only by Grover Cleveland, he appears more set on emulating William McKinley. Thus all the talk of buying Greenland, reacquiring the Panama Canal, and renaming the Gulf of Mexico. No wonder Carter held on past his 100th birthday to vote for Kamala Harris.
Trump’s new focus is the latest bit to have the Beltway up in arms. “Trump trades isolationism for expansionism possibly with military force,” reads a headline in POLITICO after the president-elect’s “extraordinary”—their words—press conference. (Of course, after nearly four years of Joe Biden, lengthy presidential press conferences are quite literally extraordinary.)
What Trump is doing is renewing the Monroe Doctrine for the 21st century and reorienting the focus of our foreign policy, with the significant exception of competition with China, a bit closer to home. If the word “isolationist” means anything, and it usually doesn’t, it refers to the belief that the U.S. has no vital interests outside the Western hemisphere.
Trump plainly does not qualify as an isolationist even under this more rigorous definition. (In Beltway lingo, the term typically means someone who only wants to fight five wars while the Blob would prefer your children and a reserve army of illegal immigrants to fight six). But a big, beautiful Gulf of America is less ambitious and more realistic than benevolent global hegemony.
The talk of military conquest for Greenland or wherever sounds more like the usual Trump tic where the media ask him to rule something out and he refuses to do so, or ask him if he is considering something and he replies he is already considering it “very strongly.” Perhaps after nearly a decade of Trump dominating national politics, reporters would learn about this tendency. But just as governments engage in endless wars and Red Lobster bets its future on endless shrimp, reporters are fond of endless headlines.
I would not be so foolish as to guarantee this won’t end badly. This fixation on Canada, Greenland, the canal could at a minimum distract Trump from the agenda that got him elected, which is alleviating inflation and securing the border without plunging the country into new no-win wars. Trump would tell you he is focused on a big energy boom that will help deliver most of the above.
Trump was more sensible on Iraq than the median Republican elected official until shockingly recently. But he still mused about how we should have taken the Iraqi oil, so you can’t rule out this taking a dark turn. The same could be said for Trump’s plans for the Mexican drug cartels, which are both more closely tied to vital American interests than a lot of things we have fought wars for in the past 20 years and not without serious risk.
For my cryptocurrency, Trump’s first term was superior to what we would have experienced under the leadership of Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush, especially if you avoided doom-scrolling on social media. And yet it was January 6 just this week, reminding us that the Trump experiment is never without risks.
The second term will be no different, though this transition has been rapid and disciplined by Trumpian standards. Trump himself has generally been speaking at a lower volume, though with energy and purpose. It will be a second term like no other in recent history, because much of Trump’s team now has White House experience but are rejuvenated by four years off, unlike the typical tired second-term team.
Trump 2.0 is upon us.
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