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President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday openly mused about using U.S. military might to retake the Panama Canal and to claim Greenland, while threatening to use economic pressure to force 40 million Canadians into seeing their country demoted to an American state. He also called for changing the name of The Gulf of Mexico to The Gulf of America, and, just for good measure, casually suggested NATO member states set aside 5% of their economies for defense spending, a sharp jump from the current 2% non-binding guideline.
Only on the globe of Trump’s imagination does this Godzilla-esque trampling of sovereignty make any rational sense. It’s like the incoming Leader of the Free World is treating the map like a real-life Monopoly board to be dominated. Trump’s boasts may be as reliable as play money, but that does not mean the world beyond his gilded …