Donald Trump is what anthropologists and scholars of ancient mythologies would call a ‘trickster’, that is, a trickster. Tricksters intimidate and disturb. They have an accurate instinct to detect what irritates their opponents and a special ability to throw them off balance. As a master trickster of global politics, the president-elect plays his cards with gusto. Calling the Canadian Prime Minister “Governor Trudeau,” referring to his country as the 51st state, or suggesting that “pressure” is needed to subdue Canadians on issues of tariffs, trade, and border security have clearly succeeded in irritating Canada.
Keeping calm is not easy this time. Even the most pro-American prime minister in recent history, Stephen Harper, has said that Trump’s comments do not sound like “the words of a friend, a partner and an ally.” Trump is provoking allies everywhere while reaching out to Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un, whom Canadians and Europeans have always considered common adversaries. Canada, like Europe, has made its alliance with the United States the cornerstone not only of its foreign policy, but also of its identity. But when Trump analyzes his alliances he sees an American giant tied up by pygmies. When he assumes the presidency – he believes – the giant will have to stand up and shake off those chains.
The president is demanding that his allies in Europe and North America increase defense spending, not just to 2 percent of GDP, but to 5. That is an unattainable goal for any Canadian government and for most European countries. In addition to readjusting the defense relationship with his partners, Trump wants to use tariffs to further subject the North American economy to US control. Some observers believe that the final destination is complete, borderless continental integration. Canada, whose population is one-tenth that of its neighbor, has limited negotiating room when that neighbor threatens to impose 25 percent tariffs on products such as oil, natural gas, minerals, auto parts and wheat, everything that Canada exports to the United States. Canadians have resorted to some threats of their own, but using the most drastic measures, such as cutting off energy exports – hydroelectric from Quebec or oil from the West – could harm both Canada and the United States, given their dependence on the American energy market.
In 2019, the Canadian government discovered that behind the bluster and trickster show was a compromise-seeking politician and struck a deal that preserved cross-border trade. In 2025, no one can be sure that even a new conservative government, ideologically aligned with Trumpist positions, can achieve the same. A trickster president keeps everyone in suspense, and dealing with a trickster means understanding Shakespeare when he says that there is a method to madness. Could there be a logic, a strategic ambition that connects his provocations to Denmark with his idea of buying Greenland, to Canada for border security and tariffs, to Mexico for immigration and to Panama for the canal?
Trump may not be recycling the Yankee war cries of the 19th century. Perhaps it looks to the future, to a world where the “rules-based international order” no longer has authority and where power over the global economy has been divided into three zones of influence: the Chinese in East Asia, the Russians in Eurasia and the Americans in an exclusive sphere in the Western Hemisphere, stretching from Greenland in the Arctic to Chile at the southern tip of Latin America. “Making America great again,” in this sense, would involve mining strategic minerals in Greenland, fighter jets and surveillance equipment at the old Thule air base; a unified North American economy powered by Canadian oil and gas, uranium and critical minerals; a wall to keep Latin Americans out, while Mexico functions as a cheap labor platform for American manufacturers; privileged access to the Panama Canal, excluding China, and a Trumpist version of the Monroe Doctrine, which defines North and South America as the exclusive zone of power and protection of the United States.
If this is the way to “make America great again”, Trump could seek as a ‘quid pro quo’ to accept the Russian and Chinese spheres of influence, and allow India to oscillate between the two. Accepting these spheres, as long as they recognize his own, would allow him to cut the Gordian knot that has tied the United States’ strategic interests with Europe and Asia. He has never had patience with the Washington elite’s liberal view that the United States should provide global public goods in a “liberal rules-based international order.” If its strategic competitors accept a U.S. sphere of influence in their own hemisphere, what strategic interest would the United States have if China blockaded, invaded, and absorbed Taiwan? Or Russia imposed its control over Ukraine? Or Eastern Europe, and then Western Europe becomes a satellite of the Russian sphere of influence?
No one can say, perhaps not even the president himself, whether this is Trump’s grand plan. But if it turns out to be his overall strategy, he would make America “great again” by reducing its foreign commitments. It revisits old isolationist criticisms that the United States has expanded too much. Reviews key American defense doctrines that commit the nation to two-front wars to defend distant allies. It would allow, at least in theory, substantial cuts to the State and its defense apparatus. It responds to the demand of a disenchanted Republican electorate to focus on domestic affairs and curtail the power of the ‘deep state’ that fueled US imperial expansion after 1945. Focusing US power on its own hemisphere would allow Trump, in other words, to , squaring many circles: “making America great again” by reducing its imperial footprint; reduce the tax burden on the rich by cutting the apparatus that a global empire required.
The mere fact that Greenland does not want to be an American colony, Canada does not want to be absorbed, Panama does not want to return the canal, Mexico wants to preserve its independence, and Latin America considers the Monroe Doctrine synonymous with Yankee imperialism only tells the incoming president that he has before him a battle worth fighting. Great causes always arouse great resistance. That’s what makes them valuable. Resistance may delay the inevitable, even beyond his presidency, but he can get the ball rolling, and once he does, we will know which direction to take for the rest of the century.
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