16.01.2025
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Rise of lifeboat imperialism
What’s the big deal about Greenland? Paul Demarty examines Donald Trump’s promised new wave of American continental colonial expansion
Before he has even returned to the White House, Donald Trump has already made waves with a newfound zeal for colonial expansion.
On his shopping list is Greenland, the vast arctic territory off the north-west of North America, currently under the sovereignty of Denmark, and the Panama canal, which connects the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. It is Greenland which has grabbed the headlines, given its huge territory and relative novelty as an American colonial target (the Panama canal was, of course, largely a US creation in the first place, Theodore Roosevelt having secured the ‘independence’ of Panama from Colombia as a US semi-colony for the purpose).
“For purposes of national security and freedom throughout the world, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity,” Trump told his followers on Truth Social, the far-right Twitter clone he still uses as his primary internet megaphone. His most stupid son, Don junior, was later spotted on a fact-finding mission on the huge island, promising to “Make Greenland Great Again”. Trump senior, when pressed by journalists, refused to rule out the use of force in taking it (and the canal). Further excitement came when, in the course of a spat with Justin Trudeau, he suggested making Canada the 51st state of the union.
Long history
This all appeared to contemporary pundits probably more absurd than it should have done. They are simply not used to American politicians talking openly about colonial ambitions, since it has fallen out of fashion since World War II. US imperialism has since always come cloaked in the victim’s supposed desire for ‘freedom’, which is to be selflessly sated from on high by the indispensable nation. An oddly decadent version of this idea can be found in Chris Cutrone’s defence of the would-be Greenland purchase in Compact, which he justifies merely on the basis that America is the only truly revolutionary nation, the only one that truly believes in freedom, such that “all of America’s opponents … have been and remain slave states”. (Needless to say, there is no room in such a windy historicist hermeneutic for the carpet-bombing of Cambodia.)1
Conversely, Timothy Snyder - a Yale historian who has achieved some notoriety as an anti-Trump ranter over the last decade - argued on Twitter:
The way Trump [is] talking now about Greenland, Mexico, Panama and Canada plagiarises Putin in 2013, before the first invasion of Ukraine. All this stuff about borders not mattering, people secretly wanting to be ruled by us, the unreality of their countries - not very American, not even MAGA, but very Kremlin.2
Along with the rest of the ‘resistance historians’, who have fed the delusions of paranoid liberals by way of fatuous analogies and shameless presentism over this last period, Snyder has made a habit of making himself ridiculous. Even against such a background, however, this absurdity stands out. The United States was formed, after all, out of 13 colonies, which became 13 states with the revolution of 1776. There are, of course, 50 of them today. Two are obvious colonial possessions, not even being connected to the others by land (Alaska, purchased from Russia in 1867, as we suppose Trump intends to purchase Greenland from Denmark; and Hawaii, 2,000 miles into the Pacific, annexed after a great deal of skulduggery in 1898 and incorporated as a state in 1959).
The achievement of the present borders of the continental US in any case entailed a series of wars of conquest against indigenous populations, including the wholesale abrogation of various treaties and genocidal population transfers. It entailed a predatory war against Mexico in the 1840s, which secured territory from Texas to present-day California (though Mexico retained the isthmus of Baja California). There were other purchases, notably that of Louisiana from France.
That is to say nothing of the failed attempts - the ‘filibusters’ who tried to break Cuba from the rump Spanish empire repeatedly in the 1850s, the failed invasion of Canada during the war of 1812 (in all fairness, started by the British), the later plan to carve out a land corridor to Alaska through what is now British Columbia … the list goes on. It was possible in the mid-19th century for much of this to be blamed on the slave power in the south, whose inability to increase productivity produced an especially virulent expansionism in land. Thus when, in 1860, the senator and eternal compromiser, John J Crittenden, made a last-ditch attempt to save the union by extending the line of demarcation between slave and free states to the Pacific for all time, the Republicans rightly rejected it as in effect “a perpetual covenant of war against every people, tribe and state owning a foot of land between here and Tierra del Fuego”.3
Yet it turned out the problem was about more than slavery. Some of the worst atrocities against the native peoples were yet to come. In any case, beyond the United States themselves, there are a handful of colonial possessions, including Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. For a long time, there was also the Philippines, still today a major source of low-cost migrant labour.
What, then, is the use of Greenland - its importance to national security? (We can forget freedom throughout the world for now.) There is, first of all, its rich deposits of raw materials, including oil, various metals, precious stones and rare earth minerals. The latter are maybe the most strategically compelling, since oil - despite its continuing importance - is to be found in greater quantities elsewhere. The rare earths are of increasing importance to novel industries (most obviously the batteries necessary for modern electric vehicles, electronic devices and so forth). China has a strong hand in this trade - disturbingly, from a US point of view - with ample supplies of its own and favourable relations with other producers via its ‘belt and road’ initiative. Seizing a vast source of these valuable minerals would be a strategic boon for the US.
Cooked
Many of the other attractions come down, ultimately, to global warming, for all Trump affects not to take it seriously. There is the mere matter that Greenland is so large. As the atmosphere warms, the ice sheet that covers more than three quarters of its territory will shrink, increasing the potentially habitable territory - just as the danger arises that substantial parts of the existing USA may be made uninhabitable by the same changes. The existing population, largely Inuit, is so small as to be an irrelevance from the point of view of colonisation of this very old-fashioned sort.
There is, finally, a strategic angle too. Greenland is not the only thing that is melting. Shrinking ice sheets are opening sea routes in the Arctic. The Russian government is already investing in making trade easier off its own vast Arctic coast, creating new fleets of icebreakers and the like. China recently declared itself to be, in some sense, an Arctic power, suggesting it has its own designs in this respect. Acquiring Greenland has obvious strategic benefit in the new wave of great power competition.
All this frenetic activity on the part of the world’s security states somewhat belies the official optimism expressed at the various Cop climate conferences and the like, that we are in the midst of something called the ‘green transition’, and that, if everyone does their bit, we will prevent catastrophe. But it is clear from the actions of the great powers that in their view, or at least in the view of factions of their state cores, that we are - as the kids say today - already cooked.
Of those great powers, only China can be said to have made any real effort towards a ‘green transition’ (from an exceptionally dirty starting point), and its success in cornering the market for renewable energy infrastructure has had the effect not of shaming the US into catching up, but provoking it into more and more extravagant acts of economic sabotage. For all the talk of green infrastructure, it was plain that the Biden administration’s policy was that it was better for the roll-out of renewables to be stalled completely than for China to be the main beneficiary.
Trump, as ever, represents not some huge strategic revolution, but America’s loss of belief in its own comforting lies. Greenland must be had at any cost, so we can get one over on the Chinese. As its ice sheet melts, it will be covered with those great achievements of American freedom - lithium mines, vulgar suburban housing, branches of Chuck-E-Cheese - to serve as a place of retreat, as California burns, Florida returns to the sea and temperatures in the south-west exceed the limits of human habitability; and it will be an unsinkable naval base to control what new trade goes on in the far north.
In the early 1970s, Garrett Hardin, the ecological thinker most famous for the tragedy of the commons thought experiment, offered another, which has become known as ‘lifeboat ethics’. Imagine the countries of the world as lifeboats cast off a sinking ship. Some - the rich countries - are relatively well appointed and have limited spare capacity. Others - the poor countries - are overcrowded and in poor repair. Frequently people are cast away, and try to find a berth elsewhere. But, if the ‘rich’ lifeboats try to take on too many drowning souls, they too will be endangered. Thus, in utilitarian terms, the rich countries may be justified in hoarding their resources and putting up hard borders.
Putting to one side the problems with Hardin’s Malthusianism, what seems to be going on with the Greenland business - at least if Trump is serious, and there is no real reason to doubt it - is a kind of lifeboat imperialism. It is as if the sailors of one of the ‘rich’ lifeboats piratically boarded another so as to have more room, or a back-up plan if a leak is sprung. Since the capitalist world order has shown itself utterly incapable of the kind of coordinated action needed to actually face ecological disaster, the only remaining option is a new scramble among the great powers to ensure that the worst consequences are faced by others.
As Thucydides had it, the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.
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www.compactmag.com/article/the-future-belongs-to-america-so-should-greenland.↩︎
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Quoted in J MacPherson Battle cry of freedom Oxford 1988, p115.↩︎