Donald the Conqueror | The Press

Donald Trump announces his colors: he intends to conduct his country’s international relations as he has conducted his businesses. As a thug.

The repetition of its aggressive designs on Canada, Panama and Greenland should be taken very seriously, no matter how realistic it may be.

Because if once is a joke, twice is a bad joke, and three times is a threat.

And it was a downright threat of invasion that the man who will once again become President of the United States in two weeks made on Tuesday.

At a press conference at Mar-a-Lago, he did not rule out the use of force to seize the Panama Canal, a sovereign state, and Greenland, a Danish territory. As for Canada, it is through economic force that he intends to include it in the United States, he said.

Meanwhile, Donald Jr. went to Greenland for a “private visit.”

All this requires a serious response from Ottawa. We are still facing a president who is publishing new maps of the United States including Canada. It hasn’t been a joke for a long time. The Prime Minister wrote on X that Canada will never become an American state. It’s still shy. You never win with a bully by using appeasement. But Justin Trudeau has never been comfortable with crises and confrontations. And Trump is taking advantage of his unpopularity and his resignation to add to it.

Threatening to use military power to seize territory is itself a violation of international law. The very foundation of the United Nations Charter is respect for the sovereignty of the members. Members, says the Charter, “refrain, in their international relations, from resorting to the threat or use of force, whether against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State.”

Regarding Greenland, the threat is also a violation of the first article of the North Atlantic Treaty, since the United States and Denmark are members of NATO. But the same logic applies to Canada, and it is incredible that the strongest speech comes not from the federal Prime Minister, but from that of Ontario.

Trump obviously doesn’t care, since last summer he said that no one really knows what NATO is…

Does this mean that Marines will take control of Greenland this winter?

This means that the offer to purchase the territory is made under the threat of armed violence, which is obviously a violation of international law.

Above all, this means that the American doctrine of international relations under Trump II will be a complete break with what we have known since the end of the Second World War.

Trump has been described as an isolationist: he wants to withdraw from costly military agreements and no longer be the planet’s policeman. He wants to let Russia do its thing in Ukraine instead of sinking billions into defending Ukrainian sovereignty.

But isolationism may not be the right definition. The concept is based on old categories of American politics. As for the North American space, we are rather facing a future conquering, aggressive, intimidating president. Something that wasn’t really on the radar.

If Vladimir Putin takes back the old Russian imperial possessions, why wouldn’t the United States do the same with the North American continent?

Listen to his speech, it’s the American version of Putin’s speech about Ukraine, minus the patriotic nostalgia:

“If you get rid of this artificially drawn line [la frontière canado-américaine]and you look at what it looks like, it would be much better for security. Basically, we are protecting Canada. »

Trump spoke last month of the “100 billion in subsidies” paid by the United States to Canada, without ever really explaining what he was talking about. Probably from the trade deficit, which is not a subsidy, but a difference between what is sold and bought between states. On Tuesday he spoke of “200 billion”…

It’s nonsense, you’ll tell me. Yes, but he wants to appoint an incompetent alcoholic as Secretary of Defense… and fire the top brass.

American generals, unlike Trump, are highly educated, knowledgeable in law and history, and surely not interested in invading an ally like Denmark. But how will things happen after January 20?

It’s not new that the United States wants to buy Greenland, which is geologically part of North America. Purchase offers have been made before, notably under President Harry Truman in 1946. But no one had publicly threatened to invade if the offer-that-can’t-refuse was refused, as we say in The godfather. Because this is indeed a mafia tactic.

The case of Panama is very different. It was a French company which began the construction of the canal at the end of the 19th century.^e century – the same that built that of Suez. The business proved ruinous and the French company went bankrupt. The Americans regained control under Teddy Roosevelt. This is what led to the independence of what was until then a province of Colombia. The Americans have intervened militarily there several times to protect their interests, as in many other Latin American states.

Ironically, it was the president whose funeral took place on Tuesday who signed the treaty in 1977 ceding the canal to Panama from 1999. Jimmy Carter thus put an end to major unrest in the country.

That did not prevent the Americans from sending 9,000 soldiers in 1989. An intervention decried as a violation of international law… We could therefore claim that Trump’s rhetoric is only the more brutal verbalization of the American policy of interference .

It’s much more than that. Relations between the United States and Panama, which has long been a corrupt military dictatorship, cannot be compared with those of Canada or Denmark.

The Americans, at the end of the Second World War, posed themselves as guardians of the idea of ​​an international state of law. It never really existed, and as late as 2003, the United States invaded Iraq under false motives. But at least pretexts and guiding principles were needed. Those that did not have one were, for the Americans, “rogue states”: subsidizers of terrorism, invaders of neighboring states.

What Trump professes in his speeches is the end of this very idea of ​​legality in the world order. It is in fact a new world disorder, where we no longer really know who is an ally, who is an adversary, who is an enemy, and where everything can change the next day.