One of the underrated accomplishments of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential run was that he criticized fellow Republicans for their foreign policy mistakes and lived to tell the tale. When Rep. Ron Paul (R–Texas) ran for president in 2008 and 2012, he was booed repeatedly for criticizing the Iraq War and other neoconservative foreign policy positions and he eventually faded from the race.
In 2016, by contrast, Trump repeatedly slammed the George W. Bush administration for the Iraq War, calling it “a big, fat mistake” and declaring that “we should have never been in Iraq.” Trump also received some boos but nevertheless won the nomination even as he blasted U.S. foreign policy as too war-prone. By the end of that GOP primary season, even New York Times columnists were famously proclaiming that Trump could be a more dovish president than Hillary Clinton.
When Trump ran for president again in 2024, he articulated similarly dovish themes. He blasted his former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley as a “warmonger“; he advocated talking with authoritarian leaders such as Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong Un; and he repeatedly declared that only he could avert World War III. His vice presidential nominee, J.D. Vance, maintained that Trump was “the candidate of peace.”
But in the first 100 days of Trump’s second term—when not roiling the global economy with tariffs—he has talked an awful lot about absorbing more territory regardless of how the occupants of that territory feel about it. In his second inaugural address, the president pledged that the United States would be a country that “expands our territory.” Some of Trump’s defenders tried to explain away that clause as a reference to space exploration, but that excuse has become less and less plausible.
In just his first two months in office, Trump has repeatedly and insistently declared his interest in annexing Greenland, absorbing Canada, occupying Gaza, reclaiming the Panama Canal, mining rare earths in Ukraine, and unilaterally using force in Mexico. None of this sounds particularly dovish or helpful in averting World War III.
Some of Trump’s more batshit suggestions—like sending the U.S. military to occupy Gaza—might be written off as pipe dreams. His repeated emphasis on territorial expansion, however, cannot be dismissed so easily. The president’s previous statements and first-term record help explain his obsession with expanding America’s borders.
First, Trump has always possessed a mercantilist, zero-sum view of world politics and the global economy. In that mindset, more territory is better than less.
Second, Trump believes that peace among the great powers can be achieved through spheres of influence. This means conceding parts of the globe to Russia and China—while expanding U.S. control over the Western hemisphere.
Third, changing territorial boundaries transgresses all sorts of international norms—and Trump loves transgressing.
Finally, Trump wants to emulate the leaders he admires. Putin and Xi are also into expanding their territorial control.
But the modern world operates differently from how Trump thinks it works. What might have worked in the 18th century is obsolete in the 21st. In trying to manifest his vision board of an expansionist United States, Trump is undermining key strategic pillars that have bolstered the free world for decades. If Trump achieves any of his desired territorial gains, the United States might be larger. But it will also be poorer and radically more insecure.
Trump’s Expansionist Targets
Does Trump actually intend to expand U.S. borders? While he’s talked a lot about territorial expansion since winning in 2024, it was not a prominent part of his campaign rhetoric. He bobs and weaves so much in his public statements that sometimes it seems the only certainty is that Trump likes uncertainty. Reports that he proposed swapping Puerto Rico for Greenland were dismissed as either absurd or naive. Can his more recent musings also be discounted as a madman gambit?
Trump has always been a real estate guy. He likes to own land. He did give hints about his interest in territorial expansion and resource extraction prior to his second inauguration. As far back as 2011, he talked about the alleged need to “take the oil” from Iraq, arguing that we would be “reimbursing ourselves” for the trillions of dollars spent on the Iraq War. During his first term, Trump’s comfort level with redrawing sovereign borders was higher than that of any other postwar president. His administration recognized Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights. To secure Morocco’s participation in the Abraham Accords, his administration recognized that country’s annexation of Western Sahara. Except for Israel, the United States remains the only country to recognize both annexations.
Trump’s second-term rhetoric and actions about territorial expansion have been consistent and persistent enough to rattle treaty allies. Panamanian officials have been on edge since Trump started loudly complaining that China controls the Canal Zone. (China does not control the Canal Zone.) In March he told Congress, “My administration will be reclaiming the Panama Canal, and we’ve already started doing it,” causing the president of Panama to issue a public denial. In January there were multiple reports of a tense 45-minute phone conversation between Trump and Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, during which Trump issued a variety of coercive threats to pressure Denmark into ceding Greenland to the United States. One European official briefed on the call told the Financial Times, “Before, it was hard to take it seriously. But I do think it is serious, and potentially very dangerous.” In his first joint address to Congress, Trump declared of Greenland, “One way or the other, we’re going to get it.”
The same dynamic has played out with Canada. Almost immediately after Trump won his second term, he talked about Canada becoming the 51st state and derisively referred to then–Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “Governor.” Canadian officials including Trudeau at first nervously laughed off Trump’s rhetoric.
That changed after Trump was sworn in and started threatening tariffs, following through on his pledge to use “economic force” to pressure Canada into an Anschluss with the United States. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has repeatedly suggested that the only way for Canada to avoid tariffs is to become the 51st state. According to The New York Times, Trump told Trudeau in February that he did not accept the 1908 treaty demarcating the border between the two countries and wanted to revise it, including how lakes and rivers between the two nations would be governed.
Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick explained to the Canadian finance minister that Trump was interested in exiting the raft of agreements that governed the bilateral relationship. By March, during his last week in office, Trudeau told the Canadian press that Trump is threatening tariffs because “what he wants is to see a total collapse of the Canadian economy, because that’ll make it easier to annex us.”
Maybe Trump is bluffing when he threatens to annex portions of Panama, Canada, and Denmark. But the leadership of all three longstanding U.S. allies seem to think that he is serious, causing a dramatic downturn of U.S. standing in those three countries. It also jibes with behind-the-scenes reporting of Trump wanting a painting of James Polk—president during the largest expansion of U.S. territory in American history—hanging in the Oval Office. According to The Wall Street Journal, Trump has told visitors that Polk “got a lot of land.”
Why, exactly, is Trump so eager to expand America’s territory?
Trump the Mercantilist
Back in January 2016, The Brookings Institution’s Thomas Wright authored in Politico one of the earliest and most accurate assessments of how Trump thinks about international relations. Wright concluded, contrary to most foreign policy observers at the time, that Trump “has a remarkably coherent and consistent worldview” with three tenets.
First, Trump is deeply skeptical of the liberal international order that embraced globalization and the network of U.S. alliances. He believes trade deficits are a sign of economic weakness.
Second, he believes U.S. allies have cheated the United States out of billions of dollars by running trade surpluses and not paying enough for their own defense.
Third, Trump’s sympathies are with foreign strongmen who he believes are tough and firm and get what they want in world politics. The result, wrote Wright, is “a worldview that makes a great leap backward in history, embracing antiquated notions of power that haven’t been prevalent since prior to World War II.”
The whole point of international trade is that it can generate win-win outcomes where both sides benefit. Trump embodies the contrary doctrine that predated Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations: mercantilism. Mercantilists believed that prosperity requires trade surpluses—selling more across national borders than you buy—which in turn would allegedly augment the power of the state.
Mercantilists of the preindustrial era insisted states that ran trade surpluses would be able to afford the large standing armies that were the norm in a violent 17th century. Josiah Child, a leading 17th century mercantilist, made this point repeatedly: “Foreign trade produces riches, riches power, power preserves our trade and religion.”
Trump’s 2017 inaugural declaration that “protection will lead to great prosperity and strength” fits with that antiquated vision. Furthermore, if one believes trade is a zero-sum competition and the world an unsafe place, territorial expansion makes sense. The global distribution of territory is undeniably a zero-sum game; the more one acquires, the less territory is available for any competitor. Mercantilists believe in free trade within one’s sovereign territory.
After threatening tariffs on Canada this past March, for example, Trump posted on social media that the “only thing that makes sense is for Canada to become our cherished Fifty First State. This would make all Tariffs, and everything else, totally disappear.” Expanding territory creates a larger internal market, which both mercantilists and classical economists agree leads to a more productive national economy. Mercantilists like Trump will always prefer territorial expansion to more international trade, believing expansion is the path to power and plenty.
The geopolitical benefits of territorial expansion are tied into Trump’s desire to forge a great-power peace with China and Russia. Trump admires other great powers, and to judge from his rhetoric he views Russia and China as the only other states that truly matter in world politics.
This can be seen most clearly in how Trump has attempted to negotiate a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine. The new administration has been very willing and eager to strong-arm Ukraine into a variety of territorial and tactical concessions. In contrast, Trump has been deferential toward Russia. Recall that during the now-infamous Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump asked a reporter, “You want me to say really terrible things about Putin and then say, ‘Hi Vladimir, how we doing on the deal?'” Five minutes later, Trump was saying terrible things about Zelenskyy to his face.
Throughout his first term and the first 100 days of his second term, Trump has demonstrated flexibility with respect to how other great powers handle their periphery. While members of his Cabinet protested China’s authoritarian crackdowns during his first term, Trump himself signaled to Xi that he would refrain from criticizing Xi’s actions in Hong Kong and Xinjiang in the interest of securing a bilateral trade deal.
Despite imposing tariffs on China, there is persistent speculation that second-term Trump is seeking a grand bargain with Beijing, much as he desired during his first term. Trump also suggested during his first term that Crimea was historically part of Russia. In 2025 Trump has reportedly proposed that the United States recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea and urge the United Nations to do the same in return for an end to the war in Ukraine.
How does this connect to Trump’s own territorial ambitions? All these statements are signs that Trump believes in great powers divvying up the world’s assets, as Monica Duffy Toft, my colleague at Tufts University’s Fletcher School, argued recently: “Today’s geopolitical landscape particularly resembles the close of World War II, when U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin sought to divide Europe into spheres of influence….If Putin, U.S. President Donald Trump, and Chinese President Xi Jinping were to reach an informal consensus that power matters more than ideological differences, they would be echoing Yalta by determining the sovereignty and future of nearby neighbors.”
In this scenario, Trump would be cutting a deal in which Russia and China could expand their own spheres of influence. In return, the United States would have free rein over the Western Hemisphere. This would empower Trump to use America’s military and economic power to redraw the map, expanding into Greenland, the Panama Canal Zone, and, oh yes, Canada.
These actions would violate a welter of international treaties to which the United States is a signatory. For Trump, however, such legal impunity would be a bonus rather than a hindrance. His political superpower has always been to violate norms and laws and then emerge unscathed. If redrawing global borders helps to foster some kind of peaceful great power concert, Trump could plausibly argue that his outside-the-box thinking helped to reduce global tensions while expanding America’s size.
Putin’s forcible acquisition of Crimea in 2014 caused his poll numbers in Russia to skyrocket despite the economic deprivations caused by the ensuing war. Nationalism plays well, and redrawing the map is a world-historical act that burnishes a leader’s historical legacy. This lesson has not been lost on Trump. According to a Wall Street Journal report: “Trump remains serious about growing the country during his time in the White House. He views it as a part of his legacy, five people who have spoken to him say.” If Trump could succeed in expanding U.S. territory, perhaps current citizens and future historians will look kindly upon him as well.
Perhaps the combined efforts of China, Russia, and the United States can shift norms about territorial borders back to the Age of Empires. But the idea any of this will benefit the United States is nuts.
Annexation Talk Leads to Resistance
In 1917 the United States purchased the U.S. Virgin Islands from Denmark for $25 million—the most expensive purchase of territory per square mile in American history. It has been more than a century since the United States annexed any territory in the Western Hemisphere. Indeed, the overarching global trend since the end of World War I has been for states to shed territory rather than add it. When the U.S. acquired the Virgin Islands, fewer than 60 sovereign countries existed. More than a century later, the disintegration of empires and subsequent waves of decolonization have pushed that number close to 200.
The fundamental driver for this increase is the secular surge in nationalism. Countries and people that have any history of independence or autonomy usually do not like to relinquish it, regardless of the material consequences. It is therefore not surprising that Trump’s rhetoric about buying Greenland and absorbing Canada have not gone over well with the local populations.
In mid-March Greenland held elections—and Qulleq, the most pro-American party of the bunch, failed to garner enough votes for a seat in the parliament. All the major parties in Greenland categorically rejected annexation by the United States. When Vance visited Greenland in late March, his initial plan to speak to supportive locals was scrubbed—because there were no local supporters. One could argue the U.S. military could easily control the island if push came to shove. But unless Trump was prepared to use force against the 56,000 native residents, such an effort would prove extremely messy.
A similar dynamic has played out in Canada. Prior to Trump’s chatter about Canada becoming the 51st state, Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre was trouncing the ruling Liberal Party in the polls. It looked like the 2025 Canadian elections would be a familiar echo of the 2024 U.S. election. But as Trump kept insisting that Canada join the United States, the vibe shifted. Suddenly Canadians were booing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at sporting events, enlisting in the military at higher rates, and changing their mind about the upcoming election.
Poilievre had categorically rejected the idea of joining the United States but his stylistic similarities to Trump hurt his standing. By late March, the Liberals surged ahead in national polls for the first time in three years ahead of the April 28 election.
Again, the United States likely has the military might to shift the border. Whether Trump is prepared to invest in the necessary coercive apparatus to crack down on restive Canadians is another matter.
Even if Trump doesn’t care that residents of potential annexed areas aren’t happy with the idea, neither the economic nor the security logic for expanded territorial control makes sense. Trump clearly believes that Russia is a great power, but the only dimension on which that is true is in its possession of nuclear weapons. Even though Russia is far and away the largest country in terms of geographic size, its share of global economic output peaked at 3 percent during this century and has been on the decline for years.
Similarly, why would the United States need to own Greenland? The island is already extremely open to foreign direct investment, so it’s not like sovereign control is an economic necessity. The U.S. already has a large military base there, and—prior to the president’s annexation threats—Denmark had signaled a willingness to allow an even greater U.S. military presence. Beyond the perceived prestige of expanding U.S. territory, the difference for real U.S. goals between Greenland being an independent republic, a protectorate of Denmark, or a part of the United States is negligible.
Trump administration officials claim they need Greenland to ward off encroachment by Russia and China. But this just highlights another problem with Trump’s logic: the hard limits of a sphere-of-influence approach to the world.
Neither Europe nor the Middle East nor the entire continent of Africa have a “natural” hegemon. The reason Russia is interested in Greenland is that Moscow believes the Arctic is part of its sphere of influence; China similarly likes to talk about the Arctic as part of its Polar Silk Road. In those regions one can envision Trump’s great powers gamesmanship leading not toward global stability between three regional hegemons, but rather to a new “Great Game” with all of the geopolitical tensions that come with it.
Furthermore, while it is easy to suggest that the United States can trade American hegemony in the Western Hemisphere for Chinese hegemony in the Pacific Rim, quite a few other countries would have a problem with that entente. Longstanding U.S. allies such as Japan and South Korea will resist being viewed as a part of China’s sphere of influence; so will newer partners, such as India. Similarly, a lot of Latin American countries will not want to abandon their trading relationship with China. At present, China is South America’s top trading partner and the second-largest trading partner for all of Latin America. China has signed trade agreements with Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Peru; 22 countries in the hemisphere are part of the Belt and Road Initiative. One can debate the geopolitical merits of cozying up to China, but a protectionist Trump administration is not going to persuade these countries to abandon the Chinese market willingly.
At any rate, trading the current set of U.S. allies for an expanded United States is a horrible deal. European and Pacific Rim allies are technologically sophisticated economies providing an important source of America’s foreign direct investment. The democratic regimes populating these regions have also proven to be extremely stable and durable. Sacrificing them to a sphere-of-influence approach is like trading Luka Dončić for Anthony Davis.
Trump might think expanding America’s territory will be the ultimate political win. But annexing territory does not have the same benefits in the 21st century that it did in the 18th. Stockpiling some rare earths might make sense as a security precaution, but equating control of natural resources with power or plenty misreads an awful lot of recent economic history. Based on the reactions to his recent rhetoric, Trump will not be able to rewrite U.S. borders without the use of force. Expending blood and treasure to acquire territory that is already under the control of loyal allies seems like too high a price to pay.
Just before World War I, Norman Angell explained in The Great Illusion that the gains from trade far outweigh the gains of plunder. The horrific costs of the Great War proved a very costly confirmation of Angell’s argument. With Trump’s lust for expanding America’s borders becoming readily apparent, we risk having to relearn this lesson the hard way.
