“I was saved by God to make America great again.”

“America’s decline is over.”

“Ambition is the lifeblood of a great nation.”

If anybody thought that egotistical imperial machinations were only a thing of Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping, they need look no further than Trump’s inauguration speech. Like a Prussian monarch who believed in the divine right of kings, Trump spoke pompously and unapologetically of an expansionist agenda designed to aggressively assert the interests of US capitalism and imperialism across the world.

Since winning the election, Trump has repeatedly talked about annexing Greenland, retaking control of the Panama canal, renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, making Canada the 51st state, turning the name of the highest peak in North America, Denali, back to Mount McKinley, and pursuing “manifest destiny into the stars” by planting the US flag on Mars.

With talk like this, Trump seeks to send a message to US imperialism’s rivals and allies alike that he means business. To his other target audience, the American people, it is an age-old capitalist tactic: drive nationalist propaganda into the minds of ordinary people in order to construct an ideological justification for imperialist expansion, which serves the ruling class and the ruling class only.

Importantly, Trump’s claims to Greenland and the Panama Canal are no different than Putin’s claim to Ukraine or Xi Jinping’s claim to Taiwan and the South China Sea. Despite Trump’s best efforts to conceal this basic fact, “America First” has never meant that working-class Americans come first. It means that American capitalism, and by extension American imperialism, come first.

Trump 2.0 will plunge us even deeper into the new era, one dominated by the conflict between the two imperialist blocs led by the US and China. It is a conflict in which the working class of no country has any vested interest, and simultaneously one which only the international working class is capable of stopping.

Greenland

Mike Waltz, Trump’s new National Security Advisor, explained very clearly why the new administration wants to take control of Greenland. “This is about the Arctic,” Waltz said. “You have Russia that is trying to become king of the Arctic… This is about critical minerals. This is about natural resources. This is about, as the polar ice caps pull back, the Chinese are now cranking out icebreakers and pushing up there as well. So, it’s oil and gas. It’s our national security.”

Out of the European Union’s list of 35 “critical minerals”—minerals which are essential for modern manufacturing, technology, and energy—24 are prevalent in Greenland. The race for control over critical mineral extraction is an integral part of the current inter-imperialist bloc conflict. Greenland—more than three times the size of Texas, over one quarter the size of the lower 48 states, and the thirteenth largest country in the world by area—also has huge unexplored oil fields and untapped gas reserves. Meanwhile, with a population of just under 57,000, it is one of the least populated countries in the world, making the room for imperialist “development” enormous.

21st-century Greenland is a dream for profit-hungry capitalists and imperialism. As the polar ice caps melt due to capitalism-caused global warming, opportunities for fossil fuel extraction are opening up in completely new parts of the world, like Greenland and the surrounding area. Beyond the region’s natural resources, the melting ice opens up global shipping routes through the Arctic Ocean, creating new outlets for global trade. Not to mention the fact that the shortest distance from the continental US to Russia is over the North Pole, making control over the country an important consideration militarily. Hence the early warning radar system that the US military already has stationed in the northwest of Greenland.

Greenland is not just on Trump’s imperialist wish list. China has also made several overtures toward infrastructure projects on the large island nation, from a Chinese mining company’s 2017 attempt to buy an abandoned Danish naval base, to a CCP state-owned company’s bid in 2019 to build two airports as part of their plans for a “Polar Silk Road.” But China has been consistently turned away by the Kingdom of Denmark, of which Greenland is a territory, for fear of upsetting its relations with the US, a fellow NATO member.

Millions of ordinary people around the world are disgusted by the arrogance with which Trump talks about “buying” Greenland, a country whose people should have the same right to self-determination as those of any country. In fact, a recent poll shows that 85% of Greenlanders don’t want to become part of the US. Even worse, Trump recently refused to rule out using military means to seize control of the country. But while many ordinary people are stunned, most of the US ruling class is fully on board with asserting the interests of US capitalism and imperialism in the Arctic, even if they are unhappy with the public brazenness with which Trump talks about doing so.

John Bolton, former National Security Advisor under Trump’s first administration who then fell out with Trump, recently said in a televised interview, “I’d be satisfied with full American sovereignty over Greenland.” But then, he added, “I think there are ways that we can have quiet conversations with Denmark and the home-rule government in Greenland. I don’t think it’s appropriate to negotiate this in a football stadium under spotlight. I think that quiet diplomacy is the way to go here.”

Like Bolton, much of the US ruling class would far prefer a behind-the-scenes negotiation with Denmark (completely ignoring, of course, the will of ordinary Greenlanders). Beyond that, they are also not convinced that going as far as direct annexation is necessary. Bolton, for instance, in a different interview, pompously outlined alternatives that could still satisfy the needs of US imperialism while stopping short of full seizure of the country: “commonwealth status, like Puerto Rico, joint condominium with Denmark, independence but with a Compact of Free Association with the United States like Palau, Micronesia, and the Marshall Islands”—to name just a few of the United States’s colonial or semi-colonial subject nations all around the world.

Regardless of the exact form that US subjugation of Greenland would take, what’s clear is this: it won’t be native Greenlanders who benefit. US imperialism will drill for every last drop of oil, mine every last critical mineral it can find, and prepare for military confrontation, all toward the goal of improving its position in the inter-imperialist bloc conflict. Without a mass international anti-war movement, culminating in a revolutionary challenge in the main imperialist countries, it’s the planet and the international working class that will suffer.

Panama Canal

For the same essential reasons Trump wants Greenland, he also wants the US to retake control of the Panama Canal: to weaken the China-led imperialist bloc and secure a better deal for US capitalism and imperialism.

Every year, 13,000 ships carrying approximately 500 million tons of goods pass through the Panama Canal—a full 5-6% of all global maritime trade. Over 70% of containers passing through the canal are either heading to or leaving a US port, making the US its biggest user, with China a distant second. The 51-mile long canal was built on land seized by US imperialism in 1904 but, since the canal’s return to Panama in 1999, has been controlled by the Panama Canal Authority (ACP), a Panamanian government agency.

Control over the canal means charging ships entry fees (revenue from the canal totaled 4% of Panama’s GDP last year), including the ability to adjust fees for political reasons. This could mean favoring countries in one imperialist bloc with lower prices and raising prices on those associated with the other bloc, or using the threat of increasing passage fees as a weapon in negotiations and inter-imperialist conflict like Trump is doing with tariffs.

While the ACP—under the current US-friendly Panamanian government—already gives the US Navy a sizable discount, charging only $1 million in fees per year, a fraction of what is charged for commercial vessels, this doesn’t come close to satisfying Trump’s appetite for full imperialist domination. Currently, CK Hutchison Holdings, a Hong Kong-based shipping company controlled by the family of Hong Kong’s richest man, manages two of the Panama Canal’s five ports, one on either side of the canal. This gives them (and by extension the Chinese government under the CCP’s 2020 national security law) the ability to gather intelligence on all ships passing through the canal, and even potentially to sabotage the locks on either side. As Trump’s new China-hawk Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned, this could give China the power to turn the canal into a “choke point” in a moment of conflict. This danger for US imperialism is already seen in the role played by the Iran-aligned, and therefore China-aligned, Houthi rebels in Yemen, who created a similar “choke point” in the Bab al-Mandab Strait.

While an actual US military invasion of Panama is highly unlikely at this stage, Trump’s sharp rhetoric is designed to keep other governments—foes and allies alike—on their toes, giving new proportions to Richard Nixon’s “madman theory.” It’s also possible he is “starting high” in an effort to force the Panamanian government to accept a deal that, while falling short of full US control over the canal, would still secure US imperialism a vastly stronger position and give China a significantly weaker one.

Walter Luchsinger, president of the US-Panama Business Council, told the Sunday Times, “Money talks here … pay us and we will get rid of the Chinese.” Once again, like with Greenland, and as is the case in all imperialist ventures, the will of ordinary Panamanians matters not.

In the last two decades China has developed closer economic ties to many Latin American countries, and it is now South America’s top trading partner. With his recent threats, Trump is also sending a message to other Latin American countries to think twice before getting closer to Beijing.

Dusting Off Old Ideas for the New Era

As shocking as Trump’s rhetoric may be, it’s important to understand that the essence of his approach is neither new nor unique to Trump, though of course he adds his own Trumpist spin. Imperialism is an inevitable byproduct of capitalism and it would be a major mistake for the workers’ movement or the left to underestimate just how far the inter-imperialist bloc conflict can go in this new era. Some may think that the time when imperialist nations fought over how the world was divided up is over. But so long as capitalism exists, nations will compete for the division, re-division, and re-division again, of the world according to the needs of their own capitalist classes.

Over 100 years ago, Russian Marxist and one of the key leaders of the Russian Revolution, Vladimir Lenin, described the roots of imperialist policy and conflict in his groundbreaking book, Imperialism: The Highest State of Capitalism. “Capitalism,” Lenin explained, “has grown into a world system of colonial oppression and of the financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the population of the world by a handful of ‘advanced’ countries. And this ‘booty’ is shared between two or three powerful world plunderers armed to the teeth… who are drawing the whole world into their war over the division of their booty” [Lenin’s italics].

As unprecedented as Trump’s approach may seem, a basic study of US history reveals he is simply dusting off old ideas for the new era. Speaking of “manifest destiny” in his inauguration speech, Trump brought back this centuries-old notion of American exceptionalism, that it is the country’s god-given right, its destiny, to expand its territory at the expense of other peoples. This idea, also thoroughly imbued with racist connotations, is once again being used to justify an expansionist agenda.

Many comparisons have recently been made between Trump’s foreign policy to the Monroe Doctrine, the early 19th century idea promulgated by President James Monroe that European countries should stay out of the Western Hemisphere, leaving colonial ventures in the region to the then up-and-coming US. Trump’s claims to the Panama Canal evokes the legacy of Teddy Roosevelt, the president under whom the US first seized land in Panama to build the canal. Famously, Roosevelt’s approach—“Speak softly and carry a big stick”—combined peaceful, behind-the-scenes diplomacy with the willingness to act militarily and decisively if need be. Trump, it can be said, advocates speaking loudly and carrying a big stick.

From Ukraine to Taiwan, to Greenland, Panama, the Middle East, and ever-more countries and territories in every corner of the globe, the great power competition over the imperialist plunder of the world is once again reaching gruesome proportions. As International Socialist Alternative has commented: “Today’s conflict is a battle for world domination between two imperialist blocs which can only end in the decisive victory of one side or the ruination of both. The only way to prevent a global war in the long run is socialist revolution within the camps. This seems far-fetched to many, but because of the massive social and political contradictions within both key imperialist contenders and the massive power of the international working class, such an outcome is truly possible, and is what our program unashamedly points towards.”

Put even more succinctly, as Polish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg explained over 100 years ago during the First World War, humanity faces a crossroads between “socialism or barbarism.” The re-entry of Trump onto center stage in the inter-imperialist bloc conflict makes this warning even more true today.