The New York Post sums it up best. The tabloids Wednesday front page shows Donald Trump pointing at a map of the western hemisphere with Canada as the “51st state”, the Gulf of Mexico is renamed the “Gulf of America”, the Panama Canal is reborn as the “Pana-Maga ” and Greenland as “Our Land”. Its title is “The Donroe Doctrine”, a play on the 1823 Monroe Doctrine when the US declared that the hemisphere would not limit European interference. As far as I know, Trump never mentioned America’s fifth president, James Monroe. But in refusing to rule out military action to seize any nearby real estate he wants, Trump is giving the doctrine a surprising rebirth.

This time it was the isolation of China, rather than Europe, that provided the rationale. In contrast, Trump often refers to William McKinley, America’s 25th president, whose 1890 tariff law (introduced by McKinley as a congressman) he greatly admires. But McKinley’s later actions as president are most relevant to this note. In 1898 he seized the remnants of a crumbling Spanish empire, including Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Philippines. His successor, Teddy Roosevelt, made his name leading the “Rough Riders” volunteer unit in the Cuban leg of the Spanish-American War. McKinley and Roosevelt constitute an overtly imperialist chapter in US history.

Should we take Trump’s territorial grab threats literally? I doubt Trump will go to war with Denmark, a NATO ally, or flood the Panama Canal with US paratroopers. But it is not out of the question. America invaded Panama in 1989 to remove, then imprison, strongman General Manuel Noriega. Twenty-three Americans and 314 Panamanian soldiers died in the small battle.

A more likely outcome is that a panicked Panama offers Trump preferential US shipping rates to get him off its back. Denmark, on the other hand, could give US companies favorable critical mineral and fossil fuel exploration rights in its part of the melting Arctic. There is almost always a money game behind Trump’s outburst. My guess is that Trump was kidding when he threatened to take over Canada, a less-digestible piece of real estate. But seriously, who knows? It’s like we’re living in an actual science fiction novel.

History has a funny way of shedding new light on events. The fact that the 39th president of America, Jimmy Carter, died a few days before Trump revived the claim of US sovereignty in Panama is an ironic twist. Carter gambled his presidency on returning the canal to Panamanian sovereignty to eliminate what he saw as Teddy Roosevelt’s immoral land grab. In addition to his ethical impulse, Carter’s actions are also tactical; his goal was to consign the Monroe Doctrine to history as he tried to cut off the Soviet Union’s corresponding expression of its own interests in central and eastern Europe. Carter is a man of his word. Trump is not.

The rule of thumb for Trump’s approach to foreign policy is simple. He believes that the world is a jungle where the bigger predators eat the smaller ones. He has great respect for other big animals, namely China and Russia, and a sense of carte blanche towards smaller animals. There is an upside as well as a downside to the Trump doctrine. The advantage is that his operating manual is very simple to decode. Trump’s transactionalism is clear. The downside is that he has no behavioral limitations.

The stock market or – less likely – the US Congress might stop him from taking over another country, but he won’t feel guilty. Along with countless others, I have often denounced the hypocrisies of the “liberal international order” in Washington. We will miss those pretenses when they are gone.

I turned this week to Richard Porter, former senior partner at Kirkland & Ellis and former executive committee member of the Republican National Committee. Although we disagreed a lot, Richard was a good friend. Richard, are you worried that Trump’s transactional approach is self-defeating? Why would any country make a deal with someone who would destroy it when he finds a new advantage?

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Recommended reading

• My column this week looks Elon Musk’s war with America’s allies. “America did not elect Elon Musk,” I wrote. “Yet he acts as Donald Trump’s de facto co-president. Musk’s self-appointed remit includes gunning for regime change in allied democracies. . . . His silence on Russia and China is more Here, too, is what I will do America’s farewell to Jimmy Carter at the National Cathedral on Thursday.

• It was offered by my colleague Martin Wolf sincere and intellectually irrefutable assessment of the recently departed Manmohan Singh, the architect of India’s economic transformation in the 1990s, and Narendra Modi’s predecessor as prime minister. Because I know Manmohan myself, I will double line what Martin wrote about his modesty and respectability. He was a great man who was at the right place for India at the right time. Just as the modesty of his character is rare and precious.

• I should have strongly recommend this piece by Catherine Rampell in the Washington Post on the legacy of Bidenomics, which “may not be so much”. Rampell offers a bracing and convincing rebuttal to some of the excessive praise that Bidenomics has received.

• Finally, I would strongly recommend Henry Farrell’s Substack, Programmable Mutter, on the impact of technology on politics, especially his note on why Silicon Valley took a right turn and again here at PKD dystopia. PKD stands for Philip K Dick, the science fiction novelist. Farrell convinced me to read Dick Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep? which is the inspiration for Blade Runner. I wish I could describe it as escapism.

Richard Porter answered

Self-defeating? On the contrary, Trump advanced American interests even before taking the oath; consider that he caused Mexico to restrict the flow of immigration, corporate America to remove the DEI, banks to remove the Net-Zero Banking Alliance and Facebook to stop censoring speech.

Boom! America is back, baby! And if you love America and free enterprise, he’s a blast of fresh air.

All human activity is transactional. What makes Trump different is not that he makes transactions, but his approach to transactions.

First, Trump is always, instinctively and frankly alpha, using every psychological strategy in our primate playbook to set the terms of our national advantage. He uses his large physical size, his hand, strong speech, facial expression, threat (or is it bluff?) happens.

Second, Trump has always been optimistic, comfortable taking calculated risks, and thinking outside the box. He naturally seeks to create, expand, acquire, build, and he wisely seeks ways to change the odds of success to achieve impossible success.

Third, he is unabashedly American. He is not ashamed of our history, does not admire inferior countries and is not afraid to express our interests.

To paraphrase Roosevelt, America has a big stick — and Trump is not one to talk softly. America has become a self-contained giant, picking up the tab for our Nato friends, and trying to curry favor with enemies by offering them money (Iran) and favorable trade and regulatory terms (China and the G7).

Other countries deal with us because we offer a market that their industries need to access, capital that their industries need to grow, protection against evil and the chance to be great with us once again. America is the quintessential country; we don’t have to suck to make the world a better place, we can stand up, ask others to do the same, and get the best deal possible for ourselves in the process.

Your feedback

And now a word from our Swampians. . .

In response to “The war for the workers”:

“In this new world where much has been automated there is no longer a hands-on path from education to productivity. As automation replaces workers, knowledgeable people are retained to perform the necessary exception processing but no training is done for the next generation; the manual labor used to train people is gone. We are in a critical period of time when my generation (boomers) is ready to retire but no one around us wants our jobs! Failure to work with the next generation in the US is why we are looking abroad. —Sara E Davis

“The argument that the H-1B visa is about saving wages is not true. It is almost entirely about the need for high-level engineering and related forte which the Americans are in short supply of. To be clear: It’s not about quantity but about quality. The left’s arguments against it go beyond their stated anti-capitalist stance while the argument on the part of some on the right stems from a lack of understanding of how the modern world works. This is enough to worry in and of itself but what is more disturbing is that there are concentrations of those on the left and the right that are completely in excess of approval for an acceptance of moderation. — Henry D. Wolfe