There’s Real Logic Behind Trump’s Global Ambitions

Our inbound president Donald Trump generates torrents of diplomatic angst with statements about Canada being America’s “51st state,” the national security logic of buying Greenland from allied Denmark, and snatching back the Panama Canal to counter China’s growing economic footprint throughout our hemisphere. Where is all this expansionist energy coming from? How did Trump’s America First isolationism suddenly morph into an Americas First mergers and acquisition (M&A) strategy?

Let’s be clear on who Trump is: The man does not come with a vision of his own making but with a stunningly effective capacity to sense fear within the ranks and weaponize it for political mobilization.

Americans are scared and angry right now, feeling deeply uncertain about the nation’s trajectory and globalization’s increasingly fierce competitive landscape. We want someone strong and confident to tell us how we can be great again without assuming undue global responsibilities and a return to Boomer-esque Cold War-standoffs with both China and Russia.

A tough needle to thread alright, but Trump’s instincts are correct, and he’s uniquely suited for the task.

There is an only-Nixon-can-go-to-China opportunity here. Nixon shocked the world in 1972 by formally recognizing China’s communist regime. Americans trusted him on that bold, history-bending move because he was the quintessential anti-communist. If Trump, the quintessential isolationist and climate change-denier, negotiates US expansionism across North America (Canada, Greenland), then Americans may well trust his national security logic that we’re in a “Race for the Arctic” with both China and Russia amid rising climate change.

Three key trends animate the globe right now: (a) an East-West decoupling dynamic, (b) a re-regionalization imperative along North-South lines that brings “near-shoring” production close to home markets, and (c) a growing superpower clash animating all these “races” — namely, adapting to climate change, winning the energy transition, achieving AI supremacy, etc.

Trump, love him or loath him, sees just enough of this world and the fear it generates to know the right plan of attack.

Trump’s approach to international affairs reflects Americans’ judgment that we are done building a world order — which we’ve overseen from 1954 to 2008 —and now must vigorously embrace an aggressively competitive approach to this multipolar world; in other words, be less the generous market-maker and more the selfish market-player.

The world’s superpowers (U.S., Europe, Russia, India, China) fear one another more and more. We sense an imperative in this re-regionalization/decoupling era — one that screams get yours now before somebody else does!

Russia evinces that ambition in the nastiest ways (see Georgia, Ukraine). China, presently globalization’s premier integrating power, does so systematically with its Belt and Road Initiative, securing long and critical supply chains across the world through that multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure building scheme. India is just beginning to think and act along such lines, for now instinctively pushing back against China’s efforts to integrate South Asia into its global value chains — in effect, boxing in New Delhi’s ongoing “rise.”

Europe and the U.S., with Trump’s return, seem destined to complete their conscious uncoupling like two self-absorbed celebrities whose career needs no longer jibe. And just as Russia has sought to put the pieces back together of its empire, we now spot the same acquisitive rumblings within Western ranks.

Trump has long argued that Europe and Canada both “owe” America vast sums of money for defending them for decades against the Soviet/Russian threat. He now implies that America deserves Greenland as compensation for that strategic debt, arguing that we’ll do a better job of developing and defending Greenland than tiny Denmark has ever managed.

In seeming reply, the august British newspaper, The Economist, calls for the EU, having just cut a landmark trade deal with South America’s Mercosur bloc, to now vigorously invite Canada into its economic union. If that deal makes sense for the European Union, why doesn’t it make similar sense for America when it comes to Canada and Greenland?

Together with Alaska (which we bought from Imperial Russia in 1867), Greenland and Canada comprise North America’s “crown jewels” when it comes to an Arctic revealed by climate change. The warming Arctic possesses almost one-third of the world’s remaining hydrocarbon (oil, natural gas) reserves, along with prodigious amounts of minerals (nickel, zinc, rare earths) critical to both national security and the energy transition.

Does anybody think Canada and Greenland won’t need serious help in standing up to Russia and China’s aggressive ambitions across that vast and strategically crucial landscape?

Or how about China’s recent emergence as primary trade partner and source of investment throughout South America? The Chinese will be more than happy to beggar our neighbors of energy, minerals, and food while climate change devastates these vulnerable economies in the years ahead, knowing full well that the vast numbers of climate migrants escaping that desperate situation will head to North America — not China.

Humanity now enters a decades-long Zone of Turbulence that I describe in my 2023 book America’s New Map: Restoring Our Global Leadership in an Era of Climate Change and Demographic Collapse. Our world system and its major players are being compelled to evolve at what feels like warp speed.

Just like species are compelled by climate change to evolve at thousands of times normal speed, globalization and its pillars are being similarly stressed by a collision of history-twisting transformations ranging from a birth dearth and rapid aging across the Global North to the drought-driven strangulation of agriculture across the Global South to AI’s profound destruction of job markets just as that Global South seeks to cash-in its demographic dividend and achieve deep integration in global value chains.

Up until now, globalization’s integrating forces have unfolded largely along East-West lines. Now, thanks to climate change, our planet’s lower latitudes (closer to the equator) will suffer extreme environmental devastation and thus economic tumult.

The North can build all the walls it wants, but the logic of North-to-South political integration will prevail, echoing the European Union’s logic in integration of former socialist states following the Cold War — namely, it’s better to pre-emptively integrate than suffer long-term disintegrating dynamics.

And here’s the national security kicker: all that North-to-South integration is really an economic and technological race among the North’s superpowers (U.S., EU, India, Russia, China) to capture the long-term brand loyalty of that emergent global majority middle class concentrated across those very same lower latitudes increasingly tormented by climate change.

That evolution of our world system thus requires a very strong empire-building phase. The Tech Bros recognize it for what it is, as does the Kremlin and the Chinese Communist Party. Now Trump seems increasingly locked onto it as the means to establish his legacy: the real-estate magnate who not only bettered America but biggered it.

This is why we must take all this diplomatic jousting seriously: It’s not just Trump, and it’s not just climate change, and it’s not just the “Race for the Arctic,” and it’s not just North-South demographic disparities, and it’s not just the AI sprint or superpowers competing to lock-in strategic resources.

It’s everything everywhere all at once.

Successful grand strategy is all about flowing with history’s tides instead of swimming against them. That’s how you expand your ranks (more people, more territory, more member-states) while denying such growth to your rivals.

In crass realist terms, this is the world we live in right now — a super-competitive moment. By mid-century, we will all be living in somebody’s slice of our multipolar world.

Washington needs to fully commit to making that future world — or however much of it we can effectively integrate — American in its ethos and rules versus anything else. America remains the kernel code of today’s globalization: our internal rule set of free trade, democratic rule and collective security projected across the world these past eight decades but now encountering firm authoritarian pushback from the likes of China and Russia.

The best way to ensure that future is to re-open these United States to new member-states — the ultimate Trump card in a superpower brand war.

Such ambition and responsibility will define our patriotism this century: We get better by getting bigger, just as we have throughout the vast majority of our history.

However bombastically, Trump points us in the right direction. Ask yourself: Do you want a future in which Canada defects to the EU, Russia rules the Arctic and China runs Latin America? Because that will be the default outcome of our non-action.

This is where Trump’s seemingly absurd ambition punches through our current strategic fog: embracing today’s inconceivable to prevent tomorrow’s inevitable.

That is genuine grand strategy.

But let’s also get more real in our thinking and the terms we offer. Justin Trudeau is right when he says Canada will never become America’s 51st state, but what if it became America’s 51st-through-59th-states? Would that be enough political power and standing for Canadians to choose over admission into the EU? Say, 18 Senate seats and more congressional districts than California’s 52 seats?

That’s a respectful offer.

Greenland holds two seats in Denmark’s 179-member parliament. Does that strike you as more empowering than two seats in the U.S. Senate? How about a $57 billion buy-out package that makes every Greenlander an instant millionaire?

Does Trump have your undivided attention now?

We live in volatile and uncertain times. But it still holds that the best way to predict the future is to create it yourself versus letting others take the lead.

Trump is all about taking the lead in such deal-making. And Trump, perhaps more than any other U.S. political leader out there, recognizes that America’s strategic future will be marked by North-South or hemispheric integration. Trump may discount the ultimate cause of that shift — namely, climate change’s devastation of our planet’s lower latitudes, but he’s already zeroed in on its most disruptive outcome: mass migration from the Global South to the Global North.

America — and Canada, for that matter — can pretend that we can wall ourselves off from that turbulent future, but that is a cruel fantasy. Better to move America’s borders further north and south than to suffer that inescapable pathway — again, the inconceivable pre-empting the inevitable.

Donald Trump may seem as unlikely a messenger from this future as Nixon was during the height of the Cold War (A future global economy dominated by China and America? Are you insane?), but the logic will only grow more formidable over the years.