Trump revives 19th-century imperialism. Make Russia great again!

 Calling the U.S.-Canada border “artificial” is what Putin says about Russia and Ukraine.

by Fareed Zakaria, Washington Post, Jan. 10, 2025- Having campaigned on a policy of ending wars, making peace, putting America first and disentangling the country from the world, President-elect Donald Trump this week decided to revive 19th-century imperialism. 

In a single news conference, he pondered making Canada a state and acquiring Greenland and the Panama Canal by economic coercion — and declined to rule out using military force in the latter two cases. Republican leaders, whom Trump has only recently trained to denounce their party’s old foreign policy of expansionism and internationalism, quickly pivoted again and adopted the new party line, and are now showering praise on Trump’s grand vision and big thinking. Where will all this go?

Some say we are simply back to the “madman theory” of foreign policy, which posits that it’s good for the president to sometimes appear unpredictable, even irrational, because it throws adversaries off guard. It’s worth recalling that Trump tried this gambit in his first term, most obviously with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. He began by threatening him with nuclear war (“fire and fury … the likes of which this world has never seen before”) and then abruptly switched to romancing him with love letters. None of it worked. North Korea continued to build its nuclear arsenal, conduct missile tests (after a brief pause) and threaten its southern neighbor. ...

America has been so influential around the world because it has been able to persuade others that it seeks to act not just in its narrow self-interest but for broader interests — that it wants peace, stability, rules and norms that help everyone. That’s why it was able to get 87 countries to immediately condemn Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. That is why so many of China’s neighbors have allied themselves with the United States.

In the news conference, Trump proposed getting rid of the “artificially drawn line” between Canada and the United States. Of course, that is precisely what President Vladimir Putin says about the line between Russia and Ukraine. Or President Xi Jinping about the division between China and Taiwan. This is a world that makes Russia and China great again. (Read it All)

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