Scenes from a land grab dystopia

It is clear that no financial meltdown globally, or even in the US itself, will deter President Donald Trump from pursuing his Make America Great Again (MAGA) agenda that prioritises reciprocal tariffs and resultant trade wars, followed by the takeover of select countries and territories.

But maybe it’s not about MAGA. It just may be about a megalomaniacal world leader’s innate desire to go down in history as the most epochal president. Trump distinctly appears to be playing to this objective. He jetted off to Florida for a weekend golf tournament and attended a lavish $1 million-a-plate dinner while the US economy was under siege due to his sweeping tariffs that sent global financial markets into free fall. He insisted his policies were the path to prosperity.

"This is a great time to get rich," he wrote on Truth Social last week. "My policies will never change." Later, he wrote, "Only the weak will fail," even as he witnessed the bloodbath within the usually robust US stock markets.

There were widespread protests particularly within the US against the President and his apparent indifference to the economic anarchy he had unleashed. "What a disgrace," said Republicans Against Trump in a post on X, noting his weekend retreat came amid "a crashing market, looming recession, and rising global isolation".

All these will undoubtedly lead to the global isolation of the ‘Land of Dreams’ as the ‘American Dream’ evaporates. If President Trump’s neo-colonial paradigm leads to an actual takeover by the US of Greenland or Canada, or the Gaza Strip or Panama Canal for that matter, it will unleash brute hegemonism across the world by leading regional powers to exercise their own territorial claims over other sovereign states. Emboldened will be China. As also Russia and Israel who are already receiving favourable backing from Trump.

Expansionist ambitions of dominant powers have been largely checked by the United States’ unquestionable status as the ‘global policeman’, derived from its overarching economic, military and diplomatic supremacy. However, any adventurism by Trump will undermine the US’s authority and moral high ground to enforce a rule-based order across the world, with aggressor states calling out any intervention by Washington in their territorial designs.

The US’s global stature is already showing signs of weakening as Trump’s sweeping tariffs, announced on 3 April, recoil on the US and its economy. While Trump believes his trade barriers will fuel manufacturing at home, countries and consumers across the world are already striking back with widespread boycott of American brands and products. The Elon-Musk-helmed Department of Government Efficiency’s mass retrenchments from government departments are moreover eviscerating administration and raising unemployment.

In such a scenario, China may look to any territorial excesses by the US to give shape to President Xi Jinping’s threat of “no one can stop the reunification” of Taiwan with China, which he made in his address to the nation last New Year’s eve.

China has for long considered Taiwan a breakaway province to be brought under its control by force if necessary. Though Washington has a ‘One China Policy’ aligned with the UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 of 1971 that recognises the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as the only legitimate government of China, its Taiwan Relations Act mandates it "to make available requisite defence articles and services to enable Taiwan to maintain a sufficient self-defence capability and the capacity to resist any form of force or coercion that would jeopardise the security, or the social or economic system, of the people on Taiwan".

On the other hand, the 2022 US National Security Strategy cites PRC as the “only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to do it”.

Trump’s overtly partisan approach in his negotiations with Vladimir Putin on peace with Ukraine has emboldened the Russian President to stand his ground. He has ruled out withdrawal from the Ukrainian land his forces occupy, even while seeking withdrawal by Ukrainian troops from Russian territories it has annexed, as claimed by Moscow. Russian revanchism is evident in Putin’s conviction that Ukraine occupies historically Russian lands.

Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire and briefly gained independence after World War I, following which it became a republic of the USSR in 1922. It declared independence in 1991 with the Soviet Union’s dissolution.

Trump’s similar backing of Israel in its war against Gaza and other Palestinian outposts — going to the extent of seeking the ouster of two million Gazans from their home and transforming the strip into a ‘riviera’ of the Middle East — will likely stiffen Jerusalem’s resolve for Greater Israel.

In 2023, Prime Minister Netanyahu held up a map at the UN General Assembly plenum that showed Gaza and the West Bank as parts of sovereign Israel. On 2 April, Israeli defence minister Israel Katz announced a major expansion of the military’s operation in Gaza involving the seizure of large areas of land that would be “incorporated into Israel’s security zones”. Israeli human rights group Gisha was quoted as saying that Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have seized buffer zones around Gaza totalling 62 sq km, or 17 per cent of the strip, since the war began in October 2023.

Trump is now setting his sights on Canada as America’s 51st state with his fantastical claim that the US subsidises Canada by $200 billion a year. The actual trade deficit was $63.3 billion, with US exports to Canada worth $349.4 billion and imports at $412.7 billion. Trump also falsely claims that the Canadian public favours Canada’s accession to the US.

The President’s coveting of Greenland is also not new. He had, during his first term in 2019, contemplated the purchase of this autonomous Danish territory located in the Arctic, maintaining that US control of Greenland was an “absolute necessity” for American and wider international security.

Within a week of securing his second term in office, on 20 January, the President told reporters on Air Force One, “I think we’re going to have it [Greenland].” He again wrongly claimed that Greenland’s 57,000 residents “want to be with us”.

Ironically, though Trump is a known climate change denier, he is enthused by the fact that its warming effects on the 80 per cent snow-bound Greenland will facilitate access to the vast deposits of oil and rare and strategic minerals the frigid territory sits on. This will open up the Northern Sea route, the shipping route along the northern coast of Russia that connects the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans through the North Arctic, as a reliable partly ice-free waterway.

If the US, which spans 9.53 million sq. km, were to annex the 9.98 million sq. km Canada and 2.17 million sq. km Greenland, it will have the largest landmass, of 21.68 million sq. km, in the world, far overshadowing Russia’s 17.1 million sq. km. But will Washington be left with the economic and diplomatic heft to administer these territories?

Sarosh Bana is executive editor of Business India and regional editor, India/ Asia-Pacific, of Germany’s Naval Forces publication. More of his writings for NH are available here