Cheney’s words were borrowed from Benjamin Franklin, who, as Franklin biographers Edmund S. Morgan and Walter Isaacson explained to me at the time, did not have in mind the conquest of foreign lands. (“Empire” did not, the late Morgan told me, “carry the kind of freight it carries today.”) But that didn’t get Cheney off the hook. By December 2003, United States troops had deposed Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Combat operations wouldn’t end until December 2011 (and even today about 2,500 troops remain). One year earlier, President George W. Bush had adopted a military doctrine of ”pre-emption” that permitted “anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack.” Under those circumstances, nobody felt like cutting Cheney any slack.
The GOP cult of William McKinley is on the march. We already knew Trump admired this much-derided president for his tariffs. Now it appears he’s also taken a fancy to McKinley’s “Remember-the-Maine” conquest of Cuba and the Philippines.
It may not surprise you that Trump mangled his facts about Panama, overstating by more than 600 percent the number of Americans who died building the Canal (only some of them from malaria). Indeed, if we based sovereignty on the sacrifice in lives building the Panama Canal, then the waterway would rightfully belong to France, which began construction in 1881 and abandoned the project to the United States seven years later after losing about 20,000 workers. Nous l’avons acheté, nous l’avons payé, c’est à nous !
Panama charges ships $400,000 to traverse the canal. That’s hardly ruinous for the multibillion-dollar shippers and suppliers that use it. Transit slowed in recent years because drought lowered water levels in the Canal, in turn reducing the number of ships that could pass through. That in turn led to supply-chain-disrupting traffic jams; in August 2023 the number of vessels waiting to pass through reached 160, delaying passage by as much as 21 days. Panama started auctioning off rights to jump the queue, which doubled the cost of transit for shippers that availed themselves of this short cut. It wouldn’t astonish me to learn that the Central American nation has taken economic advantage of the situation, but Trump’s complaint is a bit rich coming from the guy who sells $60 “God Bless the USA” Bibles. (The “Inaugural Edition” will set you back $70.) In any event, Trump is bluffing. We aren’t going to invade.
Even so, Trump posted Sunday (while announcing on Truth Social that Ken Howery was his choice for ambassador to Denmark) that “For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.” This time the offer was rebuffed by Greenland’s own prime minister.
The island is rich in natural resources, including a few rare-earth minerals of commercial importance and of course oil (though the United States has plenty of the latter already). The presence of these natural resources would put the price at $1.7 trillion, The Washington Post’s Christopher Ingraham estimated in 2019, which means buying Greenland would probably cost more than $2 trillion today. (That’s assuming Denmark were willing to sell, which, again, it is not.) No way would Congress appropriate $2 trillion to buy Greenland. Instead, we’d have to invade. That would mean waging war against NATO, since Denmark and Greenland are both member nations. China and Russia, I figure, would take NATO’s side. In the unlikely event that human life survived this conflict, the United States would inherit not only Greenland’s natural resources but also Greenland’s 57,000 inhabitants, most of them Inuit fishermen—a population sufficiently impoverished that Denmark must subsidize the country to the tune of more than $500 million annually.
These flirtations with neoimperialism are of course nonsense. Trump’s not going to take back the Panama Canal or seize Greenland any more than he got Mexico to pay for his idiotic border wall. The Panamanians, the Danish, and the Greenlanders don’t take these threats seriously, and neither should you. It’s just our senile president-elect spouting off again.
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