by Geoff Vasil
United States president Donald Trump announced across-the-board tariffs against Mexico, China and Canada over the weekend, exempting oil and natural gas imports from Mexico and Canada, in what the Wall Street Journal trumpeted with the headline “The Dumbest Trade War Ever.”
Initially citing illegal migration and fentanyl smuggling, Trump allegedly told Alberta premier Danielle Smith at his winter White House Mar-a-Lago it was really about percentages of national GDP devoted to NATO defense spending.
The announcement of sweeping tariffs follows a whirlwind two weeks of executive order, presidential decrees and social media statements by Trump completely overturning president Biden’s policies and seemingly an American return to the letter of the law in president Monroe’s doctrine.
President Hames Monroe claimed the US right to defend the entire American hemisphere, North and South America, against European colonization. The doctrine echoes down the corridors of history to the spheres of influence of the period between the two world wars and the standoff between NATO and the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War.
Trump has claimed the right to take back the Panama Canal Zone, to annex Greenland from the Kingdom of Denmark, and to challenge the British Crown’s ownership of the Dominion of Canada.
Trump Sunday told the media he was considering tariffs against the UK but not as much as he was determined to levy tariffs on the EU, which media commentators ascribed to US trade deficits with those entities.
In point of fact Canada has little illegal immigration or fentanyl exports to the USA compared with Mexico, orders of magnitude less, and the US-UK balance of trade is almost equal, depending on interpretations of commercial data.
Trump’s statements on Greenland and his son’s visit to the capital Nuuk have actually sparked renewed debate in Greenland over independence from Denmark, with polls showing perhaps 10 to 20% of the population of around 56,000 in favor of going American, with higher numbers among young people.
A research study several years ago caused controversy in Denmark and Greenland, a constituent territory of the Kingdom of Denmark outside the EU, which claimed the US already has de facto sovereignty over Greenland via the Thule Air Base found under project Blue Bird by president Eisenhower in the 1950s. The study claimed Denmark at most has suzerainty over the far northern territory. Denmark’s claim dates back to the 1700s when Hans Egede went searching under royal edict for the lost Norse colonies there, meaning Norwegian colonies, although the first settlers were from Iceland, which technically was part of the Kingdom of Norway for many centuries.
The first European settlements in Greenland predate Inuit claims. Ethnographers say the first Eskimo people in Greenland were the so-called Thule culture which entered likely at or north of Disko Island and Disko Bay, and who were almost certainly Inuit rather than Dorset culture. Archaeological discoveries in recent years have uncovered an earlier settlement around 4,000 years ago which died out and was genetically related to the Nenets of northeaster Siberia. The best archaeology shows a rapid decline in the Norse population sometime between AD 1400 and 1500, but also a trend towards assimilation with the Inuit groups in Greenland and Arctic Canada. There is also good evidence of ethnically mixed trading posts in northern Quebec predating Spanish, French and English colonization of North America. Canada’s conservative PM Stephen Harper’s Government attempted to suppress that archaeology, leading to some speculation Norwegian claims to the region might hold precedence over the British Crown’s.
The Panama situation is also complicated. Panama was basically carved out of Columbia by the US government when the initiative went forward to dig the Panama Canal, which was almost completely a US initiative. When president Carter’s promise to cede the Canal to Panama. enshrined in a treaty in 1977. came to term ca. 1990, US president George H. W. Bush waged a war to depose Panamanian leader Manuel Noreiga. Carter’s cession was in line with Thatcher’s return of Hong Kong to China and her support for a black-majority run Rhodesia/Zimbabwe and was part of the West’s decolonization agenda which led to the independence of numerous countries in the Caribbean, Africa and Austronesia. Bush’s war in the winter of ’89 and ’90 was overshadowed by rumors he had colluded with Noriega in cocaine smuggling and financing the Contras against Nicraragua’s Communist government the Sandinistas. As Trump claims correctly, the handover treaty included provisions for the zone’s return to the United States under certain circumstances which broadly reflect the tenets of the Monroe Doctrine, that powers outside the Western Hemisphere not be allowed to control territories in North and South America.
The border zone between Columbia and its lost province of Panama is a swamp-filled area without roads called the Darien Gap. It is the major land-transit for illegal immigrants seeking entry to the US from South America.
Trump”s state-sponsored tariffism and geopolitical ambitions to enlarge American territory (and his inaugural statement on this point towards Mars and space rather than Greenland and Panama) amount to what might be called his calling in of markers, a margin call, threatening the bluff of foreign powers rather than a real threat to wage war against the rest of the world. His last-minute statements on tariffs with Canada revealed he wasn’t exactly engaged in setting up a bargaining position for future negotiations, because the other party, Canada, had no idea what he was really driving at, and had dismissed fentanyl and immigration, but not NATO contributions, as the real motive involved. Trump is reasserting America is the boss, the police man of the world or at least the West, and can work out the exact details of that fealty later.
In terms of the Five Eyes/Five I’s intelligence-sharing countries–New Zealand, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom the United States–tariffs and sanctions are probably off the table for NZ and AU, although Australia has some problems with Trump’s Israel policy. The UK under Keir Stahmer will likely continue to enjoy the so-called special relationship with the USA, while Canada faces increasing tariffs until the election sometime between April and June. Trump has also targeted South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphose for recent legislation allowing the seizure of farm lands without compensation intended to disenfranchise South Africa’s few reaming white farmers, a move reminiscent of Zimbabwe’s violent attacks on white farmers which led to economic decline in the country in the foregoing decades.
Australia’s strategy so far to avoid Trump tariffs is to maintain a low profile. The US-Australians balance of trade is not egregious in any direction and involves investments rather than the shipping of products. The election predicted for sometime between March and May will likely see the ascent of a pro-Trump Government under opposition Liberal/.Nationals leader Peter Dutton and the continuation of the Quadrilateral Agreement with Japan, India, the US and Australia, and the continuation of the nuclear submarines agreement under the AUKUS (US, UK, AU) agreement, despite the Labor Party’s opposition to nuclear energy in general and objections voiced by Red Chine over the nuclearification of defense strategies in the South Pacific. In the event of a minority government with Albanese’s Labor Party in the position of power. the Trump administration might lobby for a return to bipartisan support for the state of Israel in Australia, which could face opposition among Labor and possible American retaliation via trade and military sanction.
In terms of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, Trump will likely try to project a Reaganesque peace-through-strength position initially, but the leaders of the Russian Federation will stick to their initial position from 2021: no NATO membership, an end to the US-backed Kiev regime, official neutrality vis-a-vis Russia. Russian leaders probably will sweeten the deal for recognition of Russian territorial gains on the battlefield with some sort of economic or technological concession, perhaps a bilateral treaty on space flight or the old Carter-era standby of grain export guarantees. Given the focus on energy by Trump and Putin, this might be an oil production treaty akin to OPEC, although it’s too early to speculate much on that. Russia has demanded the lifting of Western sanctions against the country while Trump has vowed to increase them. Given the scope of current sanctions, there isn’t much room for expansion, only space flight and an end to existing military cooperation in Africa, the Middle East, Europe and Asia.
Trump’s strict interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine in North America sends a signal to the Russian Federation and Communist China that he believes in spheres of influence and will likely acquiesce to Russian claims to the Ukraine and perhaps also Chinese Communist claims to Taiwan.
The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do no reflect necessarily those of the Lithuanian Jewish Community or any other organization.