Trump’s Trade Routes

Since his re-election as president of the United States, Donald Trump has revived his plan to ‘buy’ Greenland from Denmark, and in his inaugural address threatened to ‘take back’ the Panama Canal. Around 5 per cent of global trade goes through the canal, 2400 miles south-east of the southern tip of Texas, and 74 per cent of the total volume of cargo is carried to or from the US (China is second at 21 per cent).

While Trump’s schemes to impose tariffs on Chinese, Canadian, Mexican and European imports have been taken seriously enough to be refuted by economists, journalists and businessmen, his declarations about Greenland and the Panama Canal have mostly baffled and amused. But the threats are more than just another example of Trump’s trolling-as-policymaking. They are expressions of US imperial atavism.

In the 1850s, as speculators and fortune-hunters travelled from the East Coast of the US to California for the Gold Rush, Wall Street investors constructed a railway across the Isthmus of Panama, then controlled by Nueva Granada (later Colombia), to avoid the long and stormy maritime journey around Cape Horn. The isthmus route shortened the intercoastal voyage between New York and San Francisco to two weeks. The railroad was phenomenally successful, making an average profit of 53 per cent in its first fifteen years.

As the US consolidated its power across the West in the decades that followed (brutally suppressing Indigenous people, farming expansive swathes of land and exploiting the plentiful natural resources), Western settlers, oil companies, other businesses and the US government all sought more efficient forms of transport between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the US. The Suez Canal had already proven its value to the British Empire, and the French were trying – and failing – to replicate their success by building a canal across the isthmus in Colombia.

In 1903, a number of Panamanian businessmen who worked for the US-owned Panama Railroad Company sought the help of Teddy Roosevelt’s administration to cede from Colombia. A coup d’état funded by Wall Street cleaved Panama from Colombia, and the new Panamanian national leaders handed the Canal Zone to the US as payment. (The US had already invoked the Monroe Doctrine and intervened militarily in Panama seven times since 1846 to ensure its hegemony over trade routes and resources.)

Over the next decade, the canal was completed under the supervision of the US Army Corps of Engineers, on the backs of subjugated Afro-Panamanian and Caribbean workers, many of whom died from tropical illnesses and overwork, as meticulously documented by Julie Greene. Nearly half of the canal’s fifty-mile route passes through Lago Gatún, an artificial lake created by damming the Chagres river. A system of locks raises the ships passing in either direction to the level of the lake and lowers them on the other side.

Panama’s oligarchs ensured that the country remained a stalwart client of the US, serving as an offshore ship registry for oil tankers and banana boats, and later as an offshore corporate haven teeming with shell companies. In its first few decades the canal facilitated the transport of oil from California to the East Coast. By the end of the 20th century, corn and soybeans were the most voluminous US commodities passing through.

The cosy political arrangements of Panama’s plutocracy were disturbed by a 1968 coup d’état by General Omar Torrijos, who admired Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal. Torrijos mobilised regional and global support for Panamanian sovereignty over the Canal Zone and in 1973 hosted the United Nations Security Council in Panama City, where it voted on a Panamanian proposal to terminate ‘all American jurisdictional rights within Panama’. The US, predictably, vetoed the resolution.

But the process had been put in motion and in 1977 Jimmy Carter signed a treaty to return the Canal to Panamanian sovereignty on 31 December 1999. After Torrijos died in a plane crash in 1981 there was speculation (but no hard evidence) that the US had assassinated him.

Even though the treaty gave the US the right to intervene militarily to guarantee the canal’s ‘neutrality’, there was a swift backlash to it from Republicans. Ronald Reagan claimed that the canal was ‘America’s birthright’: ‘We built it. We paid for it. It’s ours.’ The US right, exhausted by its failures in Vietnam, global anticolonial sentiment, Watergate and stagflation, united in opposition to the Torrijos-Carter treaties. The Panama Canal was an issue that both ‘stab-in-the back’ paranoid conspiracists and economic nativists could get behind.

After it regained its sovereignty over the Canal Zone, Panama began an expansion of the canal. By 2016, it had been widened and deepened and acquired two new lock systems to allow for the passage of more and larger ships. The $5.5 billion enlargement was funded in part by loans from European, American and Japanese development banks. Since the completion of the new lock systems, China has invested in a bridge across the canal and container terminals at both ends which are operated by Hutchison Ports, headquartered in Hong Kong. They are the basis for Trump’s specious claim that ‘China is operating the Panama Canal. And we didn’t give it to China. We gave it to Panama, and we’re taking it back.’

While Trump’s channelling of Teddy Roosevelt’s macho imperialism and Reagan’s malignant geniality is a form of preening, his fearmongering about China draws from policy papers published by right-wing Washington think tanks itching for a new Cold War. Among those supporting Trump’s threat to invade Panama is John Yoo, notorious for the War on Terror torture memos and an obstreperous defender of executive privilege. Yoo and Robert Delahunty, who appeared as a witness for Trump in one of the many cases against him, have written a piece for the American Enterprise Institute calling for the invocation of the Monroe Doctrine to keep out the Chinese. The hawkish new secretary of state, Marco Rubio, is to visit Panama soon.

The story of the longstanding US interest in Greenland is stranger still. Greenland, then a province of Denmark, was considered crucial to US defence during the Second World War. Strategically located midway between Europe and the Americas, the island was also major source of cryolite aluminium ore, necessary for Allied war efforts. Only days after Denmark fell to Germany in April 1940, the US secretary of state, Cordell Hull, declared that the Monroe Doctrine applied to Greenland, warding off possible German interest in the island.

With the start of the Cold War, in the summer of 1946 the US navy launched an Arctic expedition codenamed Operation Nanook to install a weather station at Thule in Northern Greenland and use the town as a base for mapping the North Pole. The US also offered Denmark one billion dollars to buy Greenland. The offer was rejected. The weather station gave way in 1951 to a US airbase, whose construction required the forced displacement of the Indigenous Inuit population.

In 1959, as the nuclear arms race heated up, the US strong-armed the Danish government into approving the establishment of a nuclear-powered US army research and development facility deep beneath the Greenland icecap. As Henry and Kristian Nielsen recount in Camp Century: The Untold Story of America’s Secret Arctic Military Base under the Greenland Ice (2021), the US Army Corps of Engineers had begun building the base even before Danish approval was secured. Although it was presented to the Danish as a research facility, the Nielsens cite declassified US plans to store six hundred nuclear missiles in its tunnels. The plan allowed the army to compete with the Minuteman and Polaris programmes of the air force and navy. Camp Century was envisaged as a node in a planetary network of underground bases used for launching intercontinental ballistic missiles towards the Soviet Union.

The missiles never arrived at Camp Century but the site was used by the US Army Chemical Corps to research the survival chances of tunnel-dwellers after a chemical or biological attack. The Snow, Ice and Permafrost Research Establishment (SIPRE) studied polar whiteouts to counteract their effect on military guidance equipment, and drilled deep into the icesheet to study the earth’s climate across time. Camp Century researchers were also interested in whether long-term dwellings and railways could be built under the ice – not too distant from Dr Strangelove’s plans for underground bunkers where the human race could reproduce after a nuclear holocaust.

Camp Century shut down in 1963 but nuclear planes continued to fly over Greenland. In 1968 a B-52 carrying four hydrogen bombs crashed seven miles from the Thule air base. The Danes and Greenlanders who helped with the clean-up complained of ill health for decades afterwards. A report by the Danish Institute of International Studies indicated that the US had stationed 48 surface-to-air nuclear weapons and a number of air-to-air missiles at Thule between 1958 and 1965. The daily overflights by nuclear-armed B-52 bombers continued for some years afterwards as part of the Airborne Alert programme.

If Greenland in the 1960s lay beneath the flight paths of US nuclear bombers, in the last two decades it has increasingly been seen as sitting alongside a future transpolar sea route. The Arctic Ocean is currently impassable without icebreakers, but as climate change melts the icecap, the sea may become navigable from July to November as early as the next decade. The transpolar route, unlike the Northwest Passage, plies international waters and would considerably reduce the length of the journey from Northern Europe to the Northern Pacific. Russia has already ordered Arctic-capable tankers to transport oil and LNG from its fields in the Southern Barents Sea to Murmansk, and hopes to expand to shipping commodities to Europe and East Asia.

Where Greenland’s aluminium ores were exploited by Britain and Canada in the 1940s, Trump’s acolytes covet the island’s rare earth minerals. As in the Balkans, where ongoing struggles over mining rights for lithium have put the EU and local environmental activists at loggerheads, Greenland offers a battleground for the new Cold War between the US and China.

When Sarah Palin was campaigning as John McCain’s running mate in the 2008 presidential election, she was widely mocked for saying that Russia was visible from Alaska. In 2019 she wrote a piece for Breitbart News in which she cited America’s continued use of the Thule Air Base and Greenland’s strategic mineral reserves as excellent reasons for the United States to purchase Greenland from Denmark. The piece was headlined: ‘Trump can see Greenland from his house.’