On January 7, a Trump-branded plane landed in the middle of the day at the snowy airport of Nuuk, the capital of Greenland. Donald Trump Jr, the eldest son of the future American president, gets off, officially for a private trip. A few hours later, “Don Junior” is already back on American soil. And on the conservative Fox News channel, he is very critical : “It seems that there is a lot of racism there, he insists. Many Greenlanders came to see us and told us that they were treated like second or third class citizens in Denmark on a daily basis. [et] that they were being asked to return home.”
This calibrated escapade reinforces the expansionist aims, at least destabilizing for its allies, of the United States of the “Trump 2” era. Because at the time when the son was in Nuuk, the father, for his part, was holding an explosive press conference. During this, he refused to rule out any use of force to annex both Greenland and the Panama Canal, following a question on this point. “I can’t assure you, on either of them,” he asserted with pride.
At Christmas, the businessman reiterated the claims of his first mandate on the large Arctic island, affirming that its inhabitants need the United States “for their national security” and “want [qu’ils] are present”, adding “we will be”. He also castigated a Panama making “pay [les] ships [américains] more than the ships of other countries” for the passage of the canal, promising that “this total scam […] will cease immediately”. And that’s not all: he affirmed that, for him, Canada is a possible “51st State” – since then, his Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, whom he described as a simple “governor”, resigned – and announced plans to rename the “Gulf of Mexico” to the “Gulf of America.”
Vladimir Putin, falsely ironic, had affirmed that “Russia [n’avait] no borders”, that is to say none other than those it gives itself. Donald Trump seems to join him in this approach of force to the detriment of law. “This coincides with the Putinian and Chinese vision of a a world which would no longer have an international order, with American hegemony, but a world made up of spheres of influence controlled by regional powers, points out the geographer and former diplomat Michel Foucher. If Trump says that he is the whole of North and Central America, what argument can the West put forward to a Kremlin which considers that there is no Ukraine?
Trump’s outings send a bad signal to the Ukrainians. As they fear, they could well find themselves pressured by the White House to make lionine concessions to Vladimir Putin, after thirteen years of defending their territory against Russian imperialism, from the annexation of Crimea to the bloody invasion started in February 2022. The recent declarations of the 47th American president constitute in any case a new nail in the coffin of the international order as it was structured during the Cold War and Next. “The presidency of Joe Biden is the last spasm of an America guardian of post-1945 order, believes Michel Foucher. His vision of things was completely out of step with that of American public opinion and that of the Republicans.” In this tipping point, it is urgent for Europeans to give themselves the means to take charge of their security.