During the Battle of Britain – the air battle between the British Empire and Nazi Germany over the British Channel in 1940 – British Prime Minister Winston Churchill saw himself in the difficult scenario of facing both the world’s most powerful army and the opposition faction in the English parliament at once.
The pilots who defended England came from more than 20 nations, including Canada, Czechoslovakia, Poland and the U.S. This battle, paired with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s maneuvers to turn the U.S. into the “arsenal of democracy,” are the founding myth of NATO – the largest military alliance in history.
Since then, the traditional values of Western civilization have been defended by the alliance against external threats. NATO, like the United Nations, has been vital in establishing international cooperation on a number of issues, and even more importantly, in preventing many regional conflicts from escalating into continental wars.
Kosovo, Katanga, Sudan, Pakistan, Macedonia, the Aegean Sea, among many other places with significant economic and political unrest have benefited from NATO intervention. The Russian threat remained under control while the U.S. and the remaining European countries proved to have a strong connection and collaboration.
Today, President Donald Trump’s threat of taking Greenland, added to the declarations of annexation of Canada (another NATO member) and Panama, destabilized a bond forged with fire and steel decades ago. As if to get along with an entire continent (the non-NATO countries in Europe are even more dissatisfied with the recent statements from Washington D.C.) is not enough, also Trump does what he can to break diplomatic relations with Colombia and Mexico.
Both countries are among the most reliable NATO allies outside of Europe, but Trump had no better idea than to threaten them with bombing within their borders.
The Greenland issue is no more than another link in an increasingly imperialist rhetoric. Also, the policy of looking for problems outside the U.S. (as if there weren’t enough internal problems) contradicts several of Trump’s major campaign promises and MAGA premises over the past year.
Trump promised not to engage military forces in international conflicts, yet in one year he has bombed seven countries, with mixed results. In turn, he also promised to stop the imperialism and interventionism characteristic of the U.S., but instead it seems that he has enacted a campaign to promote this “American irredentism.”
It may be valid in Venezuela, but Greenland and Canada are sovereign territories, protected by the European Union and NATO as a whole, over which the U.S. can hardly have any serious and legitimate claims.
Although historically Canada and Greenland have been the subject of disputes between Americans and Britons, it seems that these conflicts belong more to the past than a persistent territorial dispute, such as the Falkland Islands or Western Sahara. Since World War II, there have been no more territorial changes between these three countries.
On the other hand, Trump gives increasingly more economic outlets to China, even though he has been arguing about the great danger of the Asian giant since 2016. In its second period it was assumed that many of the tariffs and economic policies were aimed at economically isolating China to curb its growth.
But, the effect has been quite the opposite. With several of America’s allies and trading partners getting farther away, today many countries are seriously considering turning China into their new buyer, whether of natural resources or other more developed products. In turn, the rift between Europe and the United States gives more air to the Russian Federation, which is in a race against time to get out of the Ukrainian conflict as soon as possible and redirect its efforts into the Baltic and the steppes of Eastern Europe.
What we see today from Trump, in regards to his imperialism and outright disregard for NATO and our allies in general, seems more the claims of a whimsical child than those of a ruler of a sovereign nation. Let us hope that these claims have exactly the same consequences as a whimsical child; No gain, and no loss. Imaginary.
