The Gulf of America. The gulf between what we profess we stand for and the unvarnished truth. The rest of the world is measuring the divide. President-elect Donald Trump is quite a-boy. The Gulf of Mexico was named four centuries ago. Four centuries with the same name; then along comes the big man on campus. Even if Trump is trolling the world about Canada, Mexico, Greenland and Panama, his imperial bluster screams that big powers can slap around the little guy when it serves their interests: a page from Russia and China’s play-book. A page from the world’s imperial past. As a much esteemed international relations professor once told me, “There is a reason why the sun never set on the British Empire… it’s because God doesn’t trust an Englishman after dark [substitute American].”
On the face of it, Trump is trying to position the United States to reclaim the Panama Canal, and he is publicly threatening Denmark, a NATO ally, with confiscating Greenland. At best, his policy is forcing that small European nation to part with Greenland in a fire sale. MAGA, wake-up. It’s your children who will die for this would-be emperor; not one of the twelve children of the billionaire oligarch, Elon Musk, will die in combat achieving greatness for his excellency, Donald Trump.
And then there are the apologists, like Pennsylvania’s senior US Senator John Fetterman (D). While Senator Fetterman’s moxie is to be admired, oh how he drives the lefties crazy, his absurd comparison between Trump’s proposals and the Louisiana Purchase and the acquisition of Alaska, is beyond the pale. President Thomas Jefferson never threatened to take the old West by force. It was Napoleon who needed cold hard cash, the Do-Re-MI, to fund his profligate imperial conquests. In fact, he had every intention of snatching it back after his finances got settled. President Andrew Johnson never threatened the Russian empire over possessing Alaska. It was Czar Alexander II that sold Alaska to the United States for, you guessed it, hard cold cash to recover from getting smacked around by the British in the Crimean war. Senator, your foot is in your mouth. Save us from the eternal shame that will surely accompany our strong-arm tactics.
We had it wrong. Donald Trump doesn’t want to be a dictator in America, he wants to be an imperial dictator, a creator of empire. He wants to hobble Canada, and he hopes American troops will declare him Imperator in the field while he gobbles up Greenland and goes back on making right our theft of that narrow stretch called Panama. Shame on us for widening the gulf between our ideals and our extreme and arbitrary behavior. Oh, it’s going to be a long four years.
