Greg Ip

I guess you could have a debate about that.

But the point was that for Trump, this kind of like financial accounting of international transactions was core to his approach.

A, they're in the Western Hemisphere, and B, they all represent potentially very significant economic assets.

The Panama Canal, for example, Trump has said over and over again he thought it was a mistake to give the canal back to Panama, and so he has said he wants it back.

With respect to Greenland, it's in the Western Hemisphere and it has a lot of resources.

And Trump also has a fixation with adding to the territorial area of the United States, as President James Polk did, for example, back in the 1840s.

And so Greenland is one of the few opportunities to do so.

It's in some sense not surprising that Trump wouldn't logically say, why shouldn't, you know, he covet Canada?

And whether he actually follows through with that, who knows?

But in some sense, it fits the broader template that he's already demonstrated to us.

Trump has made it clear we are going back to the great power system of before World War II, where we have spheres of influence.

And for the U.S., the Western Hemisphere is its sphere of influence.

And it is the prerogative of the United States to essentially establish its influence through military or economic means to ensure that its own security and economic needs are taken care of.

Sure.

President James Monroe, in his address to Congress in 1823, he said that the Western Hemisphere would no longer be a place for colonization by the European powers.

And that was interpreted to mean that the Americas were to be an exclusive sphere of American influence.

Now, as it happened, at the time, the United States was a pretty weak country.

We barely had a navy.

And so it's not like this gave us license to go around intervening in other countries.

And for most of the 1800s, the United States preoccupied itself with expanding its own footprint within the territory of North America.