Trump The Conqueror?

Alexander McKay, Marx Engels Lenin Institute, January 8, 2025 —

Is Trump The Man Who Will Conquer The Sullen Canucks?

I like thinking big. I always have. To me it’s very simple: if you’re going to be thinking anyway, you might as well think big. Most people think small, because most people are afraid of success, afraid of making decisions, afraid of winning. And that gives people like me a great advantage. 

Donald Trump – The Art Of The Deal

In the weeks since the election of Donald Trump to his second term as President of the USA he has continued in his usual style of seeking to dominate the headlines. In this he has certainly succeeded by reeling off a series of threats to Panama, Denmark and now Canada. The bombastic pronouncements about taking over Greenland, seizing control over the Panama Canal and making Canada into the 51st state have been greeted with equal parts amusement and hysteria across the west. As always though we should look beyond Trumps bombast to look at what might actually be behind his words.

What Trump is actually doing is expressing a point of view that has long been established policy in Washington D.C. among the political servants of US imperialism going back to the original formulation of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 where the US signaled clearly that it considered the entirety of the Americas to be theirs to control and have acted that way ever since. As US imperialism has faced pressures on its global presence though it is clear leading some inside the policy making sphere in the US to see the need to reassert control over “their” particular hemisphere. When you examine the strategic failures of the US in Ukraine and the likelihood that the Russians will not only win but do so on their own terms. The rise of BRICS (now with Indonesia on board) and the dethroning of the US as the leading trade partner of most countries by China all count as severe setbacks for the US ruling class. In this context then it makes sense that they would seek to at least secure their hemisphere and try to stop the Chinese and Russians gaining more allies there.

In terms of what this means for Greenland and Canada it is much less about the US taking these places over and more about Trump “going big” in his demands in order to get something else. What could that be? We can get an indication by looking at the squeaking coming out of the mouth of Pierre Polievre, the Conservative leader in Canada, who is likely to be the next Prime Minister. He replied to Trump in the following manner:

In this tweet we see what Trump is really looking for and it isn’t taking over the governance of Canada and trying to incorporate it into the USA. That would be a huge undertaking, politically risky and very costly. Why would the US ruling class do that when they can get everything they want out of the cravenly servile Canadian bourgeois leaders? As Pollievre makes clear in his sustained act of online groveling part of his is about shutting out the Russians and Chinese from arctic trade routes that go through Canadian waters. That is the biggest concern of the US imperialists, that they control the key trade routes in the Americas and shut out other nations or try to use control over them to extract concessions from the Chinese and Russians. The prostrate Poilievre also makes clear that he will be carrying out an increase in military spending (also a key demand of the US) and approving more mineral extraction projects, which will doubtless be beneficial to the US. The same game will be played with regard to Greenland, the US ruling class are looking to exercise control of its sea lanes (more than they do already) and get access to the rare earth metals located under its soil. With regard to the Panama Canal the threats of direct US control over it should be taken more seriously but it is likely that Trump is playing the same game and his target is really the Chinese. The demand will be to restrict Chinese access to the canal in order to disrupt their ability to move goods that way.

The conclusion that we can draw here is that Trump is expressing the demands of the US ruling class in a more crude manner than the likes of Biden would but the demands are the same. The US imperialists wish to disrupt Chinese and Russian trade, isolate Socialist countries like Cuba and those going through a revolutionary process such as Venezuela and Nicaragua whilst gaining more control over critical resources such as oil and rare earth metals. The US can gain this via intimidation and that is certainly much more cost effective than trying to incorporate vast new territories into the US polity.