• Trump’s Territorial Ambitions: On A Fool’s Errand
  • German Foreign Policy: Crisis Mode Will Continue

By Shashi P.B.B. Malla

Trump Claims Panama, Greenland & Canada (and Threatens Mexico)

President-elect Donald Trump is up to his old antics again. It is difficult to ascertain whether he is making American politics serious or ludicrous.

In all seriousness, Trump appears to be entertaining an American territorial expansion that would rival the Lousiana Purchase or the deal that bought Alaska from Russia.

He has taunted Canadian officials regarding their domestic politics and suggested that the United States could absorb its northern neighbour and make it the 51st state of the union.

He has actually threatened to take over the Panama Canal, the US-made waterway connecting the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, controlled now for over a quarter century by the Central American state Panama.

And on last Sunday, he repeated his first-term demand to absorb Greenland, the Danish territory he has long had an eye for.

Perhaps these provocations are the opening salvos in his attempt at deal-making (CNN/Steve Contorno, Dec. 23).

Indeed, when Trump vocalized his threat to take back the Panama Canal last weekend, he did so with a path out for the country to avoid his wrath: lower ‘exorbitant’ fees on American ships that utilize the water passageway to travel between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.

“So to the officials of Panama, please be guided accordingly, he warned last Sunday during remarks to Republican activists in Arizona (CNN).

Still Trump’s outlandish demands are strikingly similar in their focus on expanding the United States footprint abroad.

This is, after all, coming from someone who argued during the presidential campaign that the US should pull back from foreign intervention, his new demands echo the 19th century doctrine of Manifest Destiny – the belief in the United States’ divine right to expand across the North American continent.

Trump even called ownership of Greenland an “absolute necessity” for purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World.”

His pitch to seize the Panama Canal – which he described as a “vital national asset” though it’s been decades since America controlled it – reflected a similarly nationalist agenda that Trump often describes as “America First”.

Speaking in Arizona, Trump also reiterated his plans to designate drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, a designation that could preface the use of military force on Mexican soil.

Trump has also threatened to drop bombs on fentanyl labs and send special forces to take out cartel leaders, an incursion that would definitely violate Mexico’s sovereignty and disrupt relations Jose Raul with the United States largest trading partner.

Trump’s transition team declined to clarify whether these latest statements reflect genuine ambitions or other motivations to CNN.

Panama’s Response

Panama President Jose Raul Mulino posted a lengthy statement on social media declaring ownership of the canal “not negotiable.”

Built at the turn of the 20th century, the canal was operated by the US until 1999, when it was fully turned over to panama under a treaty signed by President Jimmy Carter two decades prior that guaranteed American use of the canal in perpetuity.

“I want to express precisely that every square meter of the Panama Canal and its adjacent area belong to Panama, and will continue to,” Mulino wrote (CNN).

Reaction From Greenland/Denmark

Trump’s pitch to purchase Greenland from Denmark, which he first made in his first term, was similarly rebuffed.

The prime minister of the autonomous Danish territory, Mute Egede, said in a Facebook post, “Greenland is ours” and “we are not for sale and will never be for sale.”

The office of Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen – who called Trump’s first-term suggestion that Greenland could be purchased “absurd” – echoed Egede.

The US & Canada

Trump’s proposal to annex Canada appears far less serious and more so a public provocation of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau after the two dined recently at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago. The president-elect has, however, continued to explore the idea on social media.

“I think it’s a great idea,” he wrote in a recent post (CNN).

 This taunting stems from another Trump provocation, this one to implement 25 % percent tariffs on goods originating from Canada and Mexico, that is illustrative of his approach to negotiating with foreign leaders.

In many ways, the gambit delivered the intended result: leaders from both countries immediately sought an audience with Trump to reaffirm their commitment to assist the US on border issues.

And it provided an early avenue for Trump to claim victory over a foreign target.

“President Trump is Securing The Border,” his transition team wrote in a recent release,” “And He Hasn’t Even Taken Office Yet” (CNN).

German Foreign Policy Faces Challenges

Germany will hold new federal elections on February 23, 2025. But regardless of who leads the next government, foreign policy is expected to remain challenging (DW/Deutsche Welle/ Christoph Hasselbach, Dec. 25).

Experts expect that Germany’s biggest foreign policy challenge in 2025 will stem from the next US President, Donald Trump.

He is expected to oppose much of what was prioritized by current Chancellor Olaf Scholz and his recently ruptured coalition government of his Social Democrats with the Greens and the Free Democrats.

“It is now clear that the old formula – that we can rely on the US to safeguard our security – no longer applies,” Thorsten Benner, director of the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPI) in Berlin, told DW.

“Trump is the new rule – and four years under Biden were the last twitches of the old trans-atlanticism.”

As a consequence, Germany must prepare for a world “in which we have to pay much more for our own security in Europe, and to do that while there is a war on the European continent,” Brenner added.

One Option: Europe Pays, US Supplies Ukraine With Weapons

Next year’s foreign policy shifts may well be most obvious in the way they affect the war in Ukraine.

Trump recently reiterated that he would “certainly” cut support to Ukraine – and called for an “immediate ceasefire”.

He has also hinted that he would end the war in Ukraine through direct talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

To avoid that scenario, Benner believes Germany should “approach the Trump administration with an offer.”

The possibility might be: “We will pay you to continue to supply military goods to Ukraine.”

Currently, Europe simply does not have the manufacturing capacity to supply the same level of military aid to Ukraine that the US has – but it could finance it.

This is a simple, novel and brilliant proposal.

Benner is convinced that Germany must increase its spending on Ukraine as well as on general security.

However, given Germany’s tight budget, it could only do so by taking on new debt.

Germans Don’t Want a “Leading Role”

Opinion polls suggest that the next German government will most probably be led by the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU) under a Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

However, given Germany’s current political climate and in order to have the necessary majority in the Bundestag [lower house of parliament] the CDU/CSU may have to join together with the Social Democrats (SPD) in a grand coalition.

And in any case, a Merz-led foreign policy won’t actually be that different from Germany’s present one, according to Henning Hoff of the German Council on Foreign Relations.

“There’s an [elite] consensus on foreign policy that we have in Germany. This is a stabilizing factor during this time of crisis,” Hoff told DW. That consensus hold that the country must become more active in foreign and security policy.

However, the German population is not fully on board with this.

In a survey commissioned by the Koerber Foundation right after the US election – and shortly after Scholz’s coalition collapsed – 73 % percent of respondents said Germany should invest more in European security.

However, 58 % percent were against Germany taking on a leading role in the West, should the US withdraw from the international stage.

In this context, in the election campaign the Social Democrats could point to the grave threat from Russia and tangentially from Germany’s extreme right detractors.

Elon Musk’s Unprecedented Interference

In the meantime, after Tesla CEO Elon Musk praised the extreme right Alternative fuer Deutschland (AfD) in an article published by the leading Sunday newspaper Welt am Sonntag (WamS), the leading candidate for chancellor Friedrich Merz, hit back, decrying Musk’s interference as “intrusive and pretentious” (DW/Dec. 30).

Merz, the centre-right CDU-candidate for chancellor in Germany’s February 23 parliamentary election, lashed out at the Tesla CEO on Sunday, a day after Musk used an op-ed to describe the populist, right-wing party as the “last spark of hope for this country.”   

In the article published in German, Musk also praised the AfD’s approach to regulation, taxes and market deregulation.

The remarks have been generally fiercely criticized and a senior editor at WamS, the newspaper that published Musk’s commentary, resigned in protest.

The AfD is currently polling second behind Merz’s conservative CDU/CSU alliance – the same group that Angela Merkel led until 2021.

Merz’s Strong Words

“I cannot recall, in the history of Western democracies, that there has been a comparable- case of interference in the electoral campaign of a friendly country,” Merz, the head of the centre-right CDU party said.

Furthermore, Merz said: “Imagine for a brief moment, the – justified – reaction of Americans to a comparable article by a prominent German businessman in The New York Times backing an outsider in the US presidential election campaign.”

He added that Tesla’s first giga-factory in Europe – built east of Berlin – would not have been approved if the far-right party was in power, because it was the AfD that put up the most fierce resistance to this plant” (DW).

Merz also pointed out that the AfD’s policies would bring the German economy to its knees. It has advocated that Germany exit the European Union (EU) – which would ruin the economy and result in a massive loss of jobs.

Musk has insisted that he has a legitimate interest in German politics because of the investments the electric carmaker Tesla has made, but such a massive public interference in the body politic cannot be excused or tolerated, in spite of his economic investment.

German Democracy ‘Cannot be Bought’

Saskia Esken, co-leader of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD), also called out the interference in the German election by the world’s richest man.

“In Elon Musk’s world, democracy and workers’ rights are obstacles to more profit,” Esken told the Reuters news agency. “We say quite clearly: Our democracy is defensible and it cannot be bought.”

Another SPD lawmaker, Matthias Miersch, told the Handelsblatt business daily that it was “shameful and dangerous” that the Springer publishing house – which owns Welt am Sonntag – gave Musk “an official platform to promote the AfD.”

German Health Minister Karl Lauterbach on Saturday wrote on X: “The fact that political power is now increasingly easy to buy will cause great damage to democracy. If newspapers join in, they are digging their own graves” (DW).

The AfD and other right-wing groups have become a grave danger to German democracy itself. Scholz must take a leading role not only in defending it but also attacking these extremist groups relentlessly. He must also point out the security challenges posed by Russia. The German electorate must be clear about the domestic and external challenges brought forth by the extremist groups and their collusion with Russia.

The writer can be reached at: [email protected]