Trump's revival of American imperialism AP's 'imperialism obsession' NYT's 'territorial war'
AP analyzed the revival of American imperialism under the Trump regime as a 'new imperialism obsession' and NYT analyzed it as a 'territorial war'.
In the first term of the Trump regime, the dual strategy of using 'fire and fury' nuclear war theory as bait to attract attention for 'North Korean nuclear weapons' and actually killing the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Army with a missile was used, but in the second term, foreign media diagnosed that Musk supported the European far right as bait and broke down the border.
In the title <Trump, the 'America First' candidate, has a new obsession with imperialism>, the US Associated Press reported on the 8th that "the president-elect is accepting a new imperialist agenda."
The New York Times reported on the 8th under the headline, “A distant era of global politics when nations fought over territory suddenly seems not so distant,” that “As the world prepares for Trump’s return, the parallels between his obsession and the distant era of late 19th-century American imperialism are becoming increasingly important.”
The NYT said that President Trump had already defended the era of protectionism, claiming that the United States in the 1890s was “probably the wealthiest because it was a tariff system,” and now he seems to be focusing on the territorial control of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The two eras that Trump is trying to restore share a common thread: fear of unstable geopolitics and the threat of being kicked out of territories of great economic and military importance.
“We are seeing a return to a more tumultuous world,” Daniel Imawor, a professor of American history at Northwestern University, told the NYT. At a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago vacation home on the 7th, President-elect Trump did not rule out the possibility of using force to seize potential territories in Greenland and the Panama Canal.
He officially announced on the same day that he would rename the Gulf of Mexico to the "Gulf of America."
He then said that he could use his "economic power" to make Canada the 51st state for the sake of U.S. national security.
His son, Trump Jr., went even further, provoking the world to say, "Here we go again," by presenting a "list of conquests" even before he took office.
Trump said at the press conference that day, "Canada and the United States, it's really going to be something," and "If we remove the artificial line and see what it looks like, it's going to be much better for our national security."
The AP said, “Trump has spoken of the world’s longest border and America’s second-largest trading partner,” and that “the president-elect is embracing a new imperialist agenda, threatening to seize the Panama Canal and Greenland, possibly by military force, and saying he will use economic coercion to pressure Canada into becoming the 51st state.”
“Trump seems bolder and much less disruptive than when he first took office in 2017,” Gerald Butts, a former top adviser to outgoing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, told the AP. “There’s no restraint, and this is Trump at his best. As someone joked, the last time he was most scared of not knowing what he was doing, but this time he knows what he’s doing.”
The Greenland invasion remarks were prompted by a comment on his podcast on Monday by Charlie Kirk, a key Trump ally who visited Greenland this week with Trump’s eldest son Donald Trump Jr., saying, “It’s essential that the United States control Greenland.”
Greenland is a self-governing territory of Denmark, a longtime US ally and founding member of NATO, and is a key base for missile warning and space surveillance, as the Pitufik spaceport, the northernmost space station in the US, is located there.
China and Russia, which are formalizing the development of the Arctic route, are investing in the Arctic at a time when the melting of the perennial ice caps is opening up new potential shipping routes, and Trump's team has pointed to Canada as a conflict zone, pointing out that it spends far less on defense than its southern neighbor.
Kirk has been promoting the "occupation" of Greenland as "America First" in a provocative way, saying that in addition to the US's strategic location in the Arctic and its abundant resources, "there is another element that makes us dream again about America, that we are not just sad, low-testosterone, beta males sitting in chairs and letting the world come over us."
The AP reported that Kirk told the Turning Point group, a campaign group that repeated the rallying cry for Trump’s election to “occupy” Greenland, that “it’s a resurgence of masculine American energy. It’s the return of Manifest Destiny.”
“The talk of undermining sovereign borders and using military force against allies and fellow NATO members represents, to put it mildly, a striking departure from decades-old norms about territorial integrity,” the AP said. “Analysts say that as Russia pushes to invade Ukraine and China threatens Taiwan, which it claims as its own, the United States could embolden its adversaries by suggesting that it is now OK with countries using force to redraw their borders.” “Every decision the President makes is in the best interest of the United States and the American people,” Trump-Vance transition spokeswoman Caroline Leavitt told the AP. “That’s why he brought to our attention the legitimate national security and economic concerns about Canada, Greenland and Panama.”
“The joke is over,” Canadian Finance Minister and U.S.-Canada Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc said on Tuesday. “I think it’s his way of creating confusion, of unsettling people, of creating confusion when he knows it’s never going to happen.”
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum stood in a sarcastic tone in front of an old map on Tuesday, telling reporters that “North America should be renamed America Mexicana, or Mexican America.”
The AP said the joke was because “it was mentioned in the founding document of the country, written in 1814, before the Mexican constitution was adopted.”
Denmark and Panama also objected.
Panama’s Foreign Minister Javier Martinez-Acha said “sovereignty over our canal, which Panama has controlled for more than 25 years, is not negotiable and is part of our history of struggle and irreversible conquest.”
Mike O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the liberal Brookings Institution, said Trump’s recent comments were “surprising” given his “relative indifference” to military use early in his first term. “Trump boasted that he had a ‘nuclear button’ bigger and more powerful than North Korea, and during his first term he launched a missile strike on Iranian General Qassim Soleimani, but during his campaign he presented himself as the president who could prevent World War III without starting a new war. This time around, things are different,” O’Hanlon told the AP.
“NATO members are sworn to defend each other if attacked, so if Trump were to actually take Greenland by force, it would be unprecedented,” O’Hanlon told the AP. “You could make a strong case that the rest of NATO should come to Denmark’s defense. That raises the possibility of direct military force at some level of madness.”
“Elon Musk has been promoting far-right candidates and issues,” Andrew Chadwick, a professor of political communication at Loughborough University, told The Associated Press.
“We’ve seen Musk align himself much more clearly with the international far-right movement, and if you look at the kinds of people he’s pushing on his platform, he’s starting to bring together a wider range of right-wing influencers, many of whom have large followings, and are using their evidence as evidence for his involvement in European politics.”
Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has supported the radical Nazi-leaning far-right Alternative for Germany party, called for the release of jailed British anti-Islam extremist Tommy Robinson and has been outspoken in calling British Prime Minister Keir Starmer an evil tyrant who should be jailed. Musk's social network X feed, which seeks to directly provoke many of Europe's politicians, is filled with abusive language, including calling politicians "idiot believers" and "sniping cowards," and retweets from far-right and anti-immigrant accounts.