Greenland, Canada, Panama: Trump wants them, but can he take them?

This is the kind of news that makes a journalist shiver in excitement. What a story. President-elect Trump wants to take over Greenland (wham, grab it), recover control of the Panama Canal (as Ronald Reagan said, “We built it, we paid for it, it’s ours”), and give Canada the chance to become American (a step up for the Canucks).

Oh, and rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. Trump may have just said this to wind up the new president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, who fails to have a sense of humour about anything.

I am holding back on Trump’s supporters who say Trump must also rename the moon as the American Moon, because the US got there first and planted a flag. There is reason in that, but for the moment it is an issue we can leave to one side. Panama matters more.

All of this is brilliant because somehow modern Mar-a-Lago Trump has discovered the spirit of America of 1823. In that year, President Monroe stood before Congress and announced that, from now on, the Old World and the New World were to remain distinct. Monroe said colonialism in the New World was over. If an Old World power tried to interfere in the affairs of the New, America would consider it a hostile act.

That’s it, the Monroe Doctrine, and the policy still stands. If a foreign power, say the Soviet Union putting missiles into Cuba in 1962, or Denmark now saying they have control and defence sovereignty over New World Greenland (Denmark defending Greenland from Russia or China, that is, somebody’s puppy takes on Godzilla), any of that would be for Americans a “hostile act.”

However, if America took over defence of Greenland, it would be a different sort of Godzilla hunkering down in Nuuk (capital of Greenland, I would guess you have never heard of it), fingering his nuclear missiles and growling “Don’t try anything.”

If I were a Greenlander, I know which I would prefer.

Of course, the indignant Danish government and its similarly-underdefended-allies in Europe say this could not happen. But Denmark has already told Greenland that if it wanted its independence from Denmark, then the people were free to take it. Which could well happen, and if an independent Greenland decided they liked the protections the USA could give, no one in Europe could stop them.

What would make Greenland turn towards America? Trump is a dealer. Greenland has 58,000 people. Offer each of them over the age of 18 $1 million tax-free as an opening bid to sign on to the States. See what happens.

As for taking back control of the Panama Canal, the decision by President Carter – who was an appalling president, the current obits on him are public relations tripe meant to harm the incoming Republican president – to give over eventual control of the canal was shipping and defence suicide. Carter signed the Torrijos-Carter Treaties, ratified by the US Senate in 1978. They sealed the sign over. I am more of a Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty kind of a person. That was the treaty President Theodore Roosevelt signed with a Panamanian representative in 1903. It established permanent – repeat, permanent — rights to the Panama Canal Zone that stretched across the isthmus.

Europeans may ask, Wasn’t this colonialism? Yes, it was, but the Monroe Doctrine only said the Old World could not colonise. The New World could.

Of course, the United States paid in the most fierce way for the canal. In the 1880s, the French tried it and gave up after 22,000 workers died in the effort. What could happen in Panama at the turn of the 20^th century? Yellow fever, malaria, dynamite explosions, railway accidents, electrocutions, drownings. Building a canal was no job for wimpish Europeans, where the worst thing that could happen to you was a coal mine accident. Health and safety? Get out of the way, we have to build a canal.

Trump can take back the canal. My advice to the Panamanians is to take whatever money Trump offers you and do not complain. Trump could always bomb the canal and make sure the zone goes back to being not much more than yellow fever, malaria and an increased death rate.

Now, Canada. Trump was winding up the ghastly Prime Minister Trudeau when he suggested the US could take over Canada. Most Americans would not want it. As a colleague of mine said after watching Canada perform in the Olympics, “Canada is a nation that is proud to be bronze.” Certainly, Trump must lean on the next Canadian government to establish true defence capabilities. Canada freeloads on American defence.

One Canadian politician, Elizabeth May (a Green, she would be), has suggested that Canada could instead take over that West Coast strip of leftwing life, California, Oregan and Washington State. She thought she was being provocative in replying to Trump. But I say, she has an idea. Trump should embrace it. Forget about Oregan and Washington, just offer California to Canada at cost price. Or ten per cent less than cost price. Just take it. As we say in Quebec, Au revoir.

And at last, Mexico. Whatever President Sheinbaum says, the Americans are free to rename the gulf as the Gulf of America, just as the Mexicans are free to keep it the Gulf of Mexico. On December 8 Sheinbaum showed a 17^th century map at a press conference with most of North American marked as Mexico. Not clever enough. Somewhere in Mexico there are the descendants of Aztecs and other peoples who were living in so-called Mexico long before the Spanish arrived. They mutter in any one of their 89 indigenous languages that, “We never called it Mexico before you lot landed.”

And as I say, it is all a brilliant story. But tip to Trump: start with off-loading California to Canada. That would be the best thing that has happened to the health of America since Salk developed the polio vaccine.