Trump’s territorial ambitions rattle a weary world

When Donald J. Trump won a return to the White House, many countries thought they knew what to expect and how to prepare for what was to come.

Diplomats in world capitals said they would judge what his administration does, rather than what Mr. Trump says. Major nations developed plans to mitigate or counter his threat of punitive tariffs. Smaller countries hoped they could simply hide from another four years of storming America First.

But it’s getting harder for the world to keep calm and carry on.

At Tuesday’s press conference in Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump to rule out the use of force in a potential land acquisition for Greenland and the Panama Canal. He promised to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America”. He also said he could use “economic force” to make Canada the 51st state as a matter of US national security.

To those eager to parse substance from bluster, it looked like another performance of scattershot bravado: Trump II, the sequel, more unrestrained. Even before he took office, Mr. Trump with his surprising wish list stirred up “Here we go again” comments from around the globe.

Beyond the talk, however, there are serious stakes. As the world prepares for Trump’s return, the parallels between his concerns and the distant age of American imperialism in the late 19th century become more relevant.

Mr. Trump has already championed the era of his protectionism, claiming that in the 1890s the US was “probably the richest it’s ever been because it was a tariff system.” Now he seems to be adding 19th and early 20th century focus on territorial control.

What both eras share is the fear of shaky geopolitics and the threat of being locked out of territory of great economic and military importance. As Daniel Immerwahr, an American historian at Northwestern University, put it: “We are seeing a return to a more unstable world.”

For Mr. Trump threatens China – in his opinion ready to take territory far from its own borders. He has falsely accused Beijing of controlling the US-built Panama Canal. There is also the specter, more grounded in reality, of China and its ally Russia moving to secure control of Arctic sea lanes and precious minerals.

At the same time, competition is increasing all around as some nations (India, Saudi Arabia) rise and others (Venezuela, Syria) spiral and struggle, creating openings for outside influence.

The 1880s and 90s also saw a race for control and no single dominant nation. As countries became more powerful, they were expected to grow physically, and rivalries resurfaced, causing conflicts from Asia to the Caribbean.

The United States mirrored Europe’s colonial design when it annexed Guam and Puerto Rico in 1898. But in larger countries, such as the Philippines, the United States eventually opted for indirect control by negotiating agreements to promote preferential treatment for American companies and its military interests.

Some believe that Mr. Trump’s fixation on Greenland, the Panama Canal and even Canada is a one-man revival of the debate about expansionism.

“This is part of a pattern of the United States exercising control, or attempting to, over areas of the globe perceived as American interests without having to utter the dreaded words ’empire’, ‘colonies’ or ‘imperialism,’ while they still reap material benefits,” said Ian Tyrrell, a historian of the American empire at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

Mr. Trump’s threats of territorial takeover may simply be a transactional starting point or a form of personal desire. The US already has an agreement with Denmark that allows for base operations in Greenland.

His proposals for Americanization there and elsewhere amount to what many foreign diplomats and scholars see as an escalation more than a break with the past. For years, the United States has tried to limit Chinese ambitions with a well-known playbook.

The Philippines is again a focus, with new deals for bases that the US military can use in any potential war with Beijing. So are the sea routes that are most important for trade both in Asia and around the Arctic, as climate change melts the ice and makes navigation easier.

“What the US has always wanted was access to markets, lines of communication and the capacity for forward projections of material power,” Professor Tyrrell said.

But especially for some regions, the past as prologue arouses fear.

Panama and its neighbors tend to see Mr. Trump’s comments as a mix of both the 1890s and the 1980s, when the Cold War saw Washington meddling in many Latin American countries under the guise of fighting communism. The Monroe Doctrine, another 19th-century creature that saw the US treat the Western Hemisphere as its exclusive sphere of influence, has re-emerged to relevance alongside tariffs and territorial agreements.

Carlos Puig, a popular columnist in Mexico City, said Latin America was more concerned about Mr. Trump’s return than any other part of the world.

“This is Trump, with a majority in both houses, after four years of complaints, a guy who only cares about himself and wins at any cost,” Mr. Puig. “Not easy for a guy like that not to show that he’s trying to fulfill his promises, no matter how crazy they are. I’m not so sure that everything is just bullying and almost comical provocations.”

But how much can Mr. Trump actually achieve or harm?

His news conference in Florida mixed vague threats (“You might have to do something”) with messianic promises (“I’m talking about protecting the free world”).

It was more than enough to arouse other nations and arouse rapturous attention and opposition even before he took office.

The French foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, warned on Wednesday against threatening the “sovereign borders” The European Union — with reference to Denmark’s Greenland area. He added that “we have entered an era where the law of the fittest is returning.”

What may be harder to see from Mar-a-Lago, but much discussed in foreign capitals: Many countries are simply fed up with the America Mr. Trump wants to make it big again.

While the United States remains a dominant power, it has less influence than in the 1980s or 1890s, not only because of China’s rise, but because of what many nations see as America’s own drift into dysfunction and debt, combined with the increase in development in other countries.

The international system the United States helped create after World War II prioritized trade in hopes of deterring conquest—and it worked well enough to build pathways to prosperity that made American unilateralism less potent.

As Sarang Shidore, the director of the Global South Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft in Washington, explained, many developing countries are “smarter, more confident and capable, even as the United States has become less predictable and stable.”

In other words, today the world is unsettled. The post-war equilibrium is shaken by wars in Europe and the Middle East; of the autocratic partnership between China, Russia and North Korea; of a weakened Iran seeking nuclear weapons; and of climate change and artificial intelligence.

The end of the 19th century was also turbulent. That mistake, Mr. What Trump may be committing now, according to historians, is to believe that the world can be pacified and simplified with additional American real estate.

The protectionist, imperialist age that Mr. Trump’s apparent romanticism exploded as Germany and Italy sought a larger share of the world. The result was two world wars.

“We saw how it went with 20th century weapons,” said Mr. Immerwahr, the author of “How to Hide an Empire: A Short History of the Greater United States.” “It’s potentially far more dangerous in the 21st.”