Opinion | For Trump, the World Is for the Taking

The way Donald Trump talks about —— “Strong borders.” “Borders.” “Borders.” “Border.” gets a lot fuzzier when he talks about other places. “I’m committed to buying and owning Gaza.” “Taking Cuba.” “The Panama Canal.” “A place called Greenland.” When we play with these borders and the definitions of these borders, we are playing with fire. You see, lines on a map are actually really important. They’re an agreement about exactly where a country starts and where it ends. A few strokes can cause generations of conflict. And so can fuzzy borders. “What I’d like to see? Canada become our 51st state.” And that has worried political scientists like Stephen Hanson and Jeffrey Kopstein. Is the United States looking at the rest of the world as territory to be taken, exploited, to become part of the Trump family business? “Venezuela. we’re going to run it, essentially.” We’re in an era where a number of powerful leaders are questioning the hard-fought legal definitions of borders that we have inherited after World War II. That is to say, a whole wave of mostly narcissistic, male, autocratically minded leaders, “Yes, we are now in 60 percent of the territory in the Gaza Strip. We were at 50 percent. We moved to 60 percent. My directive is to move to 100 percent.” We can, and might, return to a world of bloodshed and constant upheaval over political borders between states if we don’t return to the principle of legal borders instead of fuzzy ones. For example, Vladimir Putin —— “The borders of Russia do not end.” moved Russian troops into Ukraine, claiming their land was theirs after all. Putin’s decision that this border was fuzzy has led to roughly 1.8 million combined Russian and Ukrainian casualties. Most of the world’s great powers are tempted by fuzzy borders. All of them at the same time. Russia, clearly with its neo-imperial foreign policy, We have Chinese claims on Taiwan, but also on the South China Sea. “The reunification of the motherland is a historical inevitability.” So the way I like to think of it is from “The Godfather.” “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.” Trump would like if the big heavyweights in the world would be like the head of the five families sitting around the table. Trump would be the Don Corleone. The idea here is that you would use those meetings to divvy up the world, and all of the small countries like Denmark and Canada, right, they would be left at the side. They take the orders from the big boys. In other words, a world ruled by imperialist powers. “The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation, one that increases our wealth, expands our territory.” The idea that we might have the right to go use force within a territory outside of our borders —— “Trump Gaza, number one” and call it our own, that is something which is pretty new. “Think of it as a big real estate site.” The world of legal borders that we built after World War II is one that’s being brought into question now, and we’ll regret that.