Abhijit Bhattacharyya | Trump takes a MAGA leap to expand America’s geography

Update: 2025-01-21 18:40 GMT

The new President of the United States, Donald Trump, appears to have borrowed heavily from the words of fifth century BC Athenian general and historian Thucydides: “Large nations do what they wish, while small nations accept what they must”.

What Mr Trump, the 47th POTUS, appears to be doing today with bombastic rhetoric and an incessant volley of verbal salvos makes Thucydides’ words sound immortal and eternal, to the discomfiture and distress of a violence-riddled world. Not too long ago, Mr Trump was promising the American electorate that he would end the Russia-Ukraine conflict within 24 hours of entering the White House, and sermonising Kyiv’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy about the need for an immediate ceasefire. Days before his inauguration, however, still under the watch of President Joe Biden, Israel and Hamas agreed on a temporary ceasefire in Gaza, possibly ending the 15-month Middle East war. Did Donald Trump’s “ultimatum” to Hamas to release all the hostages before January 20 actually work? Still, it was a bit of a break for Mr Trump, as he warned friends and foes alike about imposing tariffs to “Make America Great Again”. He invited China’s supremo Xi Jinping to his inaugural and assured locals he will bring back the industrial glory of Ohio and Pennsylvania, stop illegal migrants crossing over to the US through Mexico and act against all immigrants, aspiring or arrived.

After the November victory and weeks before the takeover, Mr Trump went even more ballistic and implacably bellicose towards all. He is now swerving and veering away from some of his pre-election promises by clarion calls to conquer, occupy, purchase or acquire new lands from friendly nations of the West for Mission “MAGA”. Unsurprisingly, Mr Trump follows a set-piece formula of thousands of years of world history, where the dream list of great powers’ strongman rulers invariably has territorial acquisitions on top of their agenda.

To understand what Mr Trump is dreaming of, just look back nine decades, to the Europe of the 1930s. All decorum and civility got dumped as Germany’s Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, shook the entire West to its core and set fire to the world. What Hitler did to Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1930s’ Europe, Mr Trump is hell bent on doing as he talks of re-taking the Panama Canal from Panama, gobbling up Denmark’s Greenland and America’s northern neighbour Canada.

That’s not all. He has put Iran on notice. The Trump team, led by maverick billionaire Elon Musk has threatened to destabilise the democratically-elected British government of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer. Germany too is under Mr Musk’s radar, being unabashedly warned that Berlin should be ready to witness a repeat and re-creation of extreme Hitler-like fascists in the 2020s.

Whether you like it or not, and even before taking over, Mr Trump has eclipsed almost all others on the global stage. But one never knows what he will do or say next, much as Hitler used to keep everyone guessing on what his next move would be on the European chessboard. For Mr Trump, the entire world is his playing field.

It would be an understatement to say that Donald Trump, on the eve of his White House return, has created chaos of unparallel dimensions across continents. One should not forget that he is not a politician of the usual kind, or one with the usual career trajectory. He has never fought an election for the US Senate or House of Representatives, nor has he been a governor or held any kind of state office. He is a high-end American real estate developer, enamoured of billionaires and adores rulers who possess huge swathes of land with a propensity to acquire more land. Hence, his billionaires’ coterie issue diktats to “test the waters” with their early warnings. Mr Trump himself called on Britain earlier in January to dismantle North Sea wind turbines because US oil company Apache left due to London’s windfall tax on oil operations.

With the burning desire to take his MAGA movement to new heights, Mr Trump switched strategy from isolation to neo-imperialistic territorial expansion, much like Britain from the 18th to 20th centuries and the brute trampling of Central Europe by Nazi Germany, which triggered the Second World War.

Mr Trump, whether in jest or otherwise, has said he wants Canada to be America’s fifty-first state. If indeed that happens, then the 9,985,670 sq km second biggest independent Canada alone would be bigger than all 50 American states combined, of 9,832,468 sq km, the second largest country of the world. And this act by the US would be the single biggest land acquisition by any power in world history. With total of 19,818,138 sq km, the United States would become the largest country in size (overtaking Russia’s 17,098,200 sq km), and further purchase of Greenland (2,166,000 sq km) will swell America into a behemoth of 21,984,138 sq km.

And if that’s not good enough a MAGA movement, Mr Trump wants to rename the Gulf of Mexico as Gulf of America. The name of America must be embossed on every possible area surrounding the US, including the vast sheet of water bodies around Florida’s Mar-a-Lago.

There are a lot of critical challenges demanding Mr Trump’s attention at the Oval Office: race, religion, colour, ethnicity, migration, visa, hi-tech industry and trade deficit issues, not to mention various global and regional wars. Some issues get distracted due to his alleged “revenge” agenda. The mercurial Mr Trump, however, knows well that things are more complicated and complex than what he claimed at election times of having solutions for each crisis. This is one reason why his priorities have changed from internal economics to external geographical expansion under the guise of national security. This is what really lies behind his claims to Canada, Greenland and control of the Panama Canal back in American hands.

In the process, is the US hastening all-round global hostility or acting as the harbinger of peace, prosperity and development? You need to peruse historical atlases of the last 500 years to appreciate the reality. Human nature is always crazy for land as it spells money. It keeps appreciating all the time unless disrupted by war or nature’s fury. Uber capitalism’s multi-billionaires in skyscrapers of giddy heights will seldom realise the outlook of Frantz Fanon’s “wretched of the earth” as things always look rosy and beautiful from up there till shot down to Mother Earth like the recent inferno in Los Angeles.


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