Donald Trump has not yet been sworn into his second term of office, but there are disturbing signs of what may come in his upcoming administration. On January 7, President-Elect Trump told reporters that “we need Greenland for national security purposes.” This came after a similar statement Trump posted to Truth Social on December 22.
In the same press conference, Trump maintained that “the Panama Canal is vital to our country” but that “it's being operated by China,” and that it was “built for our military.” He condemned the Carter administration’s policy of “giving” the Panama Canal to Panama. When pressed, Trump refused to rule the use of military force in relation to both places.
In addition to these remarks, Trump also suggested renaming the Gulf of Mexico, floated using “economic force” to annex Canada, and referred, facetiously, to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as the governor of the 51st state.
Some observers and even world leaders have dismissed such remarks as bluster, negotiation tactics, humor, or mere rhetoric. Others have applauded Trump, and endorsed the idea of territorial expansion.
Regardless of the merits, territorial threats are one of the most dangerous traits of demagogic political leaders. Demagogues are leaders who rouse their population against some perceived threat, whether internal or external, rather than provide a positive, inspiring, and inclusive vision of the world or their nations. Demagogues often come to power railing against those threats (as Trump did, railing against Mexicans and Muslims), and cling to power by continuing to rouse supporters or the general population against these perceived threats, often with increasingly febrile rhetoric.
Trump is just one of a growing coterie of world leaders who have come to power in the last decade using this political tactic. Although demagogues are dangerous to their own societies, their ultimate danger extends to the world stage. The grievances and threats, real or perceived, that bring demagogues to power, are rarely confined within the borders of their own societies. Many, if not most, of the world’s most prominent demagogues focus much of their attention on the threat of populations outside of their borders, including migrants, and therefore tend to foment a xenophobic sentiment. The threat of the apparent “other” is central to their rhetoric and the imagined community they help define. The feared or hated “other” not only gives a target to inchoate feelings of resentment and anxiety, such rhetoric helps to define and bind the “real people,” — the “we.” This is how demagogues foster belonging based on othering, rather than without it.
But the “threat” is not merely outsiders, social groups in foreign lands, or migrants or immigrants generally. The identification of threats tends to be focused on a particular group or class of migrants. This is a cue to the threat that the demagogue is rousing the populace against. In France and Germany, the main concern is migrants from North Africa and the Middle East. In the United States, the focus and perceived threat is largely from Latin America and Mexico. In the Dominican Republic, the perceived threat is Haitians. In India, the perceived threat is Bangladeshis, among others. This explains why Trump, in his first term, bemoaned the lack of immigrants from Norway. If most immigrants to the US were Norwegian, he wouldn’t be able to demagogue the issue in racial, religious, or cultural terms. To abstract the problem as mere xenophobia or even demagoguery may miss the substance of the perceived threat in particular cases.
One of the reasons demagogues are dangerous to republics and other free societies, as the framers of the U.S. Constitution observed, is because they tend to vitiate civil liberties and traduce the rights of the people, generally in the name of security. As Alexander Hamilton observed, “History will teach us that [of the] road to the introduction of despotism [...], and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.”
But what he neglected to note, and perhaps did not fully appreciate in 1787, is that the ambitions of demagogues are not easily confined to the borders of their country. Too often, their ambitions extend to conquering or otherwise acquiring their neighbors territory, as the long line of such tyrants, from Napoleon to Hitler to Putin amply illustrates. Demagogues are dangerous, not just because of their tendency to despotism, autocracy, and tyranny, but because they are a threat to regional and global peace.
Like Pandora’s Box, the dangerous nationalistic, chauvinistic, and jingoistic forces and energies released or fomented by the demagogue are nearly impossible to contain once uncorked and loosed upon society. This is why they not infrequently produce periodic episodes of communal violence, like race riots like the Tulsa massacre, or religious riots like those under Modi in Gujarat in 2002. Such energies also spill over onto their neighbors, if not in service of outright world conquering ambitions, then more often, at least in recent years, in service of “returning” neighboring territories to some conception of the nation’s historical and grand past, such as the Russian “Rusky Mir” (see Ukraine, Chechnya, Georgia), or greater China (see Tibet, Hong Kong, and Taiwan).
History has shown that demagogues tend to do more than make idle threats and rattle sabers, but too often employ military force to channel the energies and dark forces they have unleashed. It is not difficult to imagine, a few years from now, with his poll numbers sagging, how a demagogue like Trump could initiate some military expedition to bolster his flagging support.
Even non-demagogic leaders are hardly immune from such incentives. See, for example, Margaret Thatcher’s use of military force in the Falklands, or Ronald Reagan’s invasion of Grenada, George Bush’s Operation “Desert Shield” against Iraq, or even Bill Clinton’s decision to allow NATO to bomb Serbia. Although there may have been independent justifications for the use of force, in each case, historians have observed the beneficial political effects as well, with resulting boosts in poll numbers and public support.
In short, in the modern world, territorial expansion — seeking and acquiring new land through the use or threat of force — is not a sign of a healthy thriving society. Quite the opposite, it is a sign of an aggressive, belligerent, and demagogic society, whose internal ills cannot be resolved, whose fears and anxieties cannot be soothed, and therefore whose leaders are redirecting its derangements externally. The predictable result, sadly, is violent conflict, war and a more contested and dangerous world.
Let us hope that Trump’s latest round of remarks are not foreshadowing the eventual use of force to achieve expansionist territorial ambitions; but if it is, we should be prepared to oppose such actions and expose the underlying dynamic for what it is: the machinations of a dangerous peace-threatening demagogue.
Editor's note: The ideas expressed in this blog are not necessarily those of the Othering & Belonging Institute or UC Berkeley, but belong to the author.
