Trump Isn't Joking About Lebensraum
Trump's plans for Greenland, the Panama Canal, Canada and Mexico aren't just idle talk. A senior US insider tells us what to expect
Donald Trump has been talking a lot about re-taking the Panama Canal, buying Greenland (while not ruling out an invasion), and making Canada the 51st State. He looks as though he will make good on his promise to take military action in Mexico after he signed an executive order designating certain cartels as terrorist organisations. Many outlets and pundits have declared that these talking points are either bluster, impossible, or mere diversions. My assessment is that they are not.
Trump doesn’t really joke; he says outlandish things to see what sort of reaction he gets. In this case, with all of these proposals, Republicans responded with support and the American public barely noticed because “that’s just Trump being Trump.” In truth, Trump rarely drops an idea, even a bad one. He was intent on buying Greenland during his first term and never let the idea go. Thus, when he talks about acquiring new territory for the US, or using military force in Mexico, he is serious.
To execute any of these ideas he will first have to secure the support of Congress, abrogate treaties (by leaving NATO, for example), and remove any possible opposition within the Pentagon. Trump has the full support of Republicans in Congress for anything he does. There is no effective opposition left. He has promised to leave NATO and break treaties. He has also promised to sack at least 20 top military leaders within the Pentagon and with Pete Hegseth now confirmed as SECDEF their removal is likely to start soon.
In short, he is clearly laying the groundwork for, and removing barriers to an aggressive expansionistic policy over the next two years. What comes next is likely to be a mix of four strategies: Lebensraum, Anschluss, the hybrid Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, and “Wag the Dog” (but with a distinctly internet age twist). The following is a brief discussion of what each of these four operations would look like.
Mexico
Most GOP candidates in the 2024 Presidential Primaries were united in their belief that the US should take military action inside of Mexico, whether via air strikes, special operations, or even conventional force incursions into Northern Mexico. Trump has taken the initial step to acquire unilateral authority to use force inside of Mexico (and other Latin American states) by declaring cartels as terrorist organisations.
All of these military options are likely to turn out badly for the US. Regardless of what type of military intervention is used, it will almost certainly result in affected countries cutting off legal cooperation with the US. It will also encourage Mexico to close the border to the US for all traffic, including commercial, and to apply penalties to US companies in the region. Those companies might even be nationalized if the US military’s actions are egregious enough. It is a near certainty that American military action inside Mexico will have significant economic consequences for the US.
Although Mexico lacks the military ability to stop airstrikes, such attacks would likely unite the cartels, the Mexican government, and the Mexican public against the US, while accomplishing mostly random destruction and causing civilian casualties. The US could send in SOF Teams to carry out targeted raids (like was done against bin Laden in Pakistan), but this runs the risk of turning into a “Black Hawk Down” or “Benghazi” scenario where limited US forces are overwhelmed by well-armed locals affiliated with the cartels.
Invading Mexico with conventional forces would almost certainly turn into a brutal, protracted, and unwinnable counter-insurgency campaign against the cartels, the Mexican government, and locals angry with the US.
The cartels themselves have enormous resources, and the ability to make a bad situation worse. If the US were to conduct military action in Mexico, it’s possible it could trigger retaliation akin to Hamas’s 7 October 2023 raid into Israel in the southern US States. This would easily draw the US into tit-for-tat raids and counter raids that could resemble the 1916-1917 campaign against Pancho Villa.
The best-case scenario for military action inside of Mexico is that it only does significant damage to the US economy, and it turns much of Latin American hostile to the US. The worst case is everything above, plus a protracted counter-insurgency conflict along the US-Mexican border that results in significant US military and civilian casualties.
What I describe below isn’t written in stone. It takes Trump at his word and extrapolates how US interventions in four countries would potentially play out. If Trump were not President anymore, the driving impetus behind the land grabs would go away. There’s a reason why no normal Republican leader before Trump suggested such things. My goal in writing this is to help people recognize the warning signs if we see the Trump administration and social media beginning to do the things that support a concerted drive for lebensraum.
However, if Democrats were to re-take the House in 2026, it would preclude a declaration of war. This would complicate some of these scenarios. It will also motivate Trump to move quickly on each of them, and also to go to great lengths to use every means (legal, quasi-legal, and illegal but for the “official acts” clause) at his disposal to prevent Democrats from regaining the lower chamber.
Panama Canal
Historically speaking, the closest historical comparison I can make to the US “taking back” Panama is somewhere between Germany’s annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938, and the German invasion of Bohemia and Moravia in 1939. After the September 1938 Munich agreement ceding the Sudetenland to Germany, Hitler turned around and violated the agreement by invading parts of Czechoslovakia. This drew protests, but little else, leading Hitler to conclude Britain and France would stay out of it if he invaded Poland. It also resulted to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to carve up Poland between themselves.
Much like Bohemia and Moravia, Panama would be a “trial run” for some of the tactics that the US could use with Greenland and Canada. It would also serve to gauge the reactions of other world leaders to US aggression and naked military hegemony. It is worth remembering that the US invaded Panama in 1989 to depose Manuel Noriega and replace him with a leader friendlier to US interests. This led to protests by the international community, but little more. The key difference here is that the US is seizing territory with the intent of keeping it forever.
Trump will lead off with a combination of economic threats and cajoling to induce Panama’s leaders to give rights to the canal back to the US. This is likely to fail. Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino has declared, “The canal is and will remain Panama’s and its administration will remain under Panamanian control with respect to its permanent neutrality”.
After sticks and carrots fail, we will likely see a new brand of hybrid cyber-warfare in the lead up to the invasion of Panama, mixed in with some Iraq-in-2003 intelligence shenanigans. Trump has dismissed large swaths of the National Security Council. Intelligence professionals are being subjected to loyalty oaths. We will likely see Trump lean into the Intelligence Community (IC) to produce speculative, flawed evidence of Chinese misdeeds in Panama to justify an Authorization for the Use of Military Force by Congress in Panama.
At the same time, algorithms on X, Meta, YouTube, and TikTok will steer people towards pro-invasion content, and away from anything against it. There will also be a deluge of hoaxes, misinformation, and deep fakes meant to shape US and world perceptions about what is happening in Panama. The Russian “firehose of falsehood” method will be applied to social media in a way we’ve never seen before, ensuring that as many people as possible favour invasion, while almost everyone else is not able to discern what is true.
This will make the run up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq look like amateur hour. It won’t just be the US public unable to tell what’s really happening; the entire world depends on social media for information and will not be able to discern truth from fiction. Given that Meta and X are in Trump’s pocket, they are more likely to boost the flow of misinformation than to stop it.
It remains an open question whether a second US invasion of Panama would target only the canal, or whether it would also aim to replace the Government with a puppet. We will get a hint as to which path the US is planning to take based on the disinformation being produced on social media: is it pushing the narrative that Panamanians are oppressed and need liberating? Oh look, here’s a potential replacement leader in exile, talking to Sean Hannity on Fox.
Militarily, the US has the resources to retake the canal, but it would leave them in a precarious position in the long term. US forces would be isolated, surrounded by a million Panamanians who regard the US as occupiers rather than liberators. The US has no bases in Panama, meaning that supporting and maintaining the canal would be difficult without the cooperation of the Government. It also doesn’t address the Chinese owned facilities along the canal which Trump has claimed represent a national security threat.
This likely plays out the way it did for Hitler in Bohemia, and in Panama in 1989: protests, but little else, while the US achieves its military goals quickly. Also, like Hitler’s 1939 actions in Czechoslovakia, global reactions will tell Trump how much push back he would get if he goes for Greenland.
Greenland
Trump has long coveted Greenland. It has potential petroleum and mineral resources to be exploited, and it would likely make exploiters extremely rich (along with Trump, who absolutely would take bribes to hand out rights). It also has legal and military value as an access point to the Arctic Circle. The US has maintained a base in Northern Greenland (known as Thule or Pituffik) since World War II. Taking Greenland fits Trump’s obsession with an American Lebensraum in North America. He wants to be remembered as a strong and great leader who expanded their empire, like Vladimir Putin, Xi, Orbán, or Andrew Jackson.
But, why Trump wants Greenland is irrelevant: what is more important is understanding his strategy to get it. The foremost thing to remember is that Greenland is not for sale, at any price. The 57,000 people living in Greenland do not want to be a part of the US.
Trump will first ensure that Congressional Republicans pony up the dollars to pay whatever he offers Denmark or Greenland. He will also mix in threats of economic sanctions against Denmark, particularly on the Danish pharmaceutical manufacturers that make popular weight loss drugs. At the same time, the US will have either withdrawn from NATO, or at a minimum will have made it clear that they have no intention of honoring their Article 5 obligations.
Trump’s goal will be to arrive at something like the Munich Agreement by using threats and bluster to get Denmark (and NATO) to cede Greenland to the US, rather than fight over it and its 57,000 residents. Trump, who thinks of himself a businessman, could shower Denmark and Greenland with outrageous sums of money; but he would rather see how much he can keep the price down through bullying, which has been his modus operandi since the beginning of his career. He enjoys humiliating people, and giving Denmark (and Greenland) pennies on the dollar would make his day, while reinforcing his own narcissistic self-image.
Assuming that he fails at a Greenland Purchase, he is unlikely to take “no” for an answer. This is where the new form of hybrid warfare first tested in Panama kicks in, with new additions: boots on the ground, quislings, and a Vichy government-in-waiting.
We will see the same sorts of algorithmically driven misinformation and propaganda on Trump-allied (or controlled) social media as we did for Panama The messages will be that people in Greenland really want to be Americans, and are being oppressed by their local government and Denmark. There will be innumerable pieces about how bad things are for people there, and how much better they would be if the US came in and developed the island. We’d see real people, actors, and deep fakes all claiming to be Greenlanders who want to become American, and allegations that they are being oppressed in ways that appeal to an intended audience.
At the same time, a flood of US oligarch money will be given to people protesting to join the US. If you Astroturf a movement in this way, it makes the rest of the online propaganda seem plausible. We saw a preview of this with the Canadian trucker convoy of 2022, where 44% of the money funding it was coming from the US. In a country of 57,000 people, it would be relatively cheap to build an Astroturf movement and buy off key individuals. Consider that Elon Musk bought the US Government for the bargain basement price of $250 million dollars: the equivalent for him of what you or I might find under the couch cushions.
It's also possible we’ll see Americans in Greenland actively agitating and stirring up trouble, while producing fake interviews with people in Greenland, the way Don Junior visited and tried to stir up sentiment in favor of becoming a territory of the US. (If you’ve ever visited American Samoa or Puerto Rico, you should have a good idea how the US treats its territories and invests in their infrastructure.)
The goal is to “flood the zone with bullshit” to sufficiently confuse the issue for the world public, and particularly in Europe. If most people aren’t quite sure whether people in Greenland want the US to “liberate” them or not, will they be willing to invoke NATO Article 5 against the US over it? Trump’s calculus, much like Hitler’s in Austria in 1938, Czechoslovakia in 1938-1939, and Poland in 1939, would most likely be that NATO wouldn’t fight over an island of 57,000 people in a war they cannot possibly hope to win.
The most likely outcome would be Trump taking over Greenland with the assent of the US Congress, a neutered Pentagon, and a Europe confused by waves of online disinformation fueled by fake pro-American movements. This bit of lebensraum-ing will lead to what Trump hopes is Anschluss but is more likely to turn out like Poland.
Canada
By the time we get here, Trump would have already taken back the Panama Canal and found a way to annex Greenland. Trump has long set his sights on making Canada a part of the US. The Republican Party would prefer it to be a territory, with no say in the US government. “The Canadians, they are going to elect two Democrat senators; we don’t want that. Territory status isn’t too bad,” according to Representative Byron Donalds.
Canadian support for being a part of the US runs around 20% at best, and triggered increased feelings of nationalism in the other 78%. Most Canadian leaders (outside of Alberta) are taking a “F*** You” attitude towards Trump’s threats of tariffs. Politicians there are engaged in competitive outbidding to see who can be the most hostile to Trump, his tariffs, and attempts to make the Canada part of the US. Only Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has shown receptiveness to treating the Trump administration, and its punitive tariffs, with kid gloves.
If Trump has successfully acquired the Panama Canal and Greenland via some combination of threats, coercion, or military force, his eye will turn to bringing Canada into the fold. By this time, the US has discarded NATO, Congress has been cowed, the military brass tamed and staffed with yes men. He believes that he is coming from a position of military strength: Canada and NATO cannot possibly hope to stop a US invasion.
The tactics, techniques, and procedures used to muddy the waters with Panama and Greenland would be fully brought to bear on Canada. Every source of media available will be flooded with stories of how oppressed Canadians are in a system that doesn’t prioritize Christians, bans guns, tolerates transgender people, and is full of socialists and socialized medicine. Tales of horror and woe will be inescapable on both traditional and social media. It doesn’t matter if any of this is true or not. It only has to seem plausible enough that people in NATO countries do not know what to believe.
Any Canadian of any note who favors becoming part of the US will be given a massive platform. People will be bought and movements Astroturfed to create the impression that there is a lot of ardent support for becoming part of the US. We could also see some of Russia’s “little green men” hybrid warfare strategy of Americans, posing as Canadians, swelling the ranks of protesters against the Canadian government, stirring up trouble, and generally contributing to the impression that this is a mass movement with ardent, widespread support.
Polling data suggests conservative Canadians are more open to the idea, and the goal will be to get the (presumed) Poilievre Government to capitulate because they believe it is the will of his base…and because of promises of wealth beyond Conservative MPs’ wildest dreams of avarice if they vote to become a part of the US.
If the Trump administration fails to annex Canada voluntarily, they will use the Astroturfed movement that they created to act as a casus belli to “liberate” those poor, oppressed conservatives trapped in a socialist hellhole. Very few people will know what to believe after the entire media ecosystem has been flooded with deliberate, targeted, carefully curated, choreographed, and algorithmically disseminated bullshit.
This follows the axiom that the goal of modern propaganda is “nothing is true, and everything is possible”. If people believe that the truth is unknowable, it paralyses them. The co-option of most social media by Trump’s administration allows them to paralyse the national will of every country plugged in to these networks. Democracies do not stand a chance against this new form of hybrid warfare.
At this point, if Canada has failed to give in to demands and economic blackmail, they and NATO will be given an ultimatum presented as a fait accompli: you will let US troops in. You cannot stop us by conventional means. The three options to NATO at this point are to allow us to annex Canada, fight a conventional war they cannot hope to win, or to use nuclear weapons against the United States and engage in mutually assured destruction. At the same time, the public in NATO countries will have been subjected to a barrage of disinformation for months, and support for a futile (and bloody) conventional war or a nuclear exchange will be low.
This will likely be the thought process of the Trump administration if they have made it this far. The problem with this thinking is that like most historical US leaders, they’re not prepared to deal with an insurgency. And Canada is no exception.
Imagine a country with the population and GDP of California, with a land area larger than the United States, having no say in its own governance. Now imagine it has been invaded, and that getting military-style weapons from the country that invaded them is ridiculously easy. Imagine that the country doing the invading doesn’t have the troops or the resources to lock things down adequately.
On top of that, unlike Iraq, there is a clear and mostly coherent sense of nationalism in Canada (they’re still very proud of burning the White House down in the War of 1812.) There’s also the matter of people who would come from other countries, including the US, to participate in an insurgency in Canada.
Russia assured their people in 2022 that Ukrainians were just like them and wanted to re-join the old Soviet Empire. It didn’t work out like that. If anything, Canadians are less enthusiastic about being a part of the US than Ukrainians were about being part of Russia. It’s hard to see this turning out well for the US in the long run. There’s a reason why the 20th Century saw the end of non-contiguous empires.
Conclusions
Trump might appear to be joking, or playing coy about his intentions with Mexico, Panama, Greenland, and Canada. But he’s not. He plans on military action against cartels, and he is dead serious about acquiring the canal, plus Greenland, and annexing Canada. His “jokes” are just thinly veiled desires. Militarily, he could accomplish all of these. Hanging on to them is another matter.
His plans rely on a lot of the same calculi employed by the Germans leading up into World War II, and the Russians before their invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022. Even if he doesn’t set off a massive conflict, it will result in the US becoming a nuclear armed pariah state. Unlike Germany and (to a lesser extent Russia), the US will have a plethora of ways to anesthetize sentiments in NATO countries that use some of the same social media platforms as the US public.
We will see a combination of what we saw in the last US election on social media, with “wag the dog” guidance from the White House, while employing “little green men” like hybrid warfare and Astroturfing to give the impression that pro-annexation sentiment in other countries is home-grown. Quislings will be elevated at every opportunity and paid to tell the public how much their countries really need the US to come in and give them freedom.
The most obvious way this sequence of events derails is if the US gets in over its head by starting a low-intensity conflict with Mexico and the cartels. If the bulk of the US military is constantly parked on the border to prevent more incursions and raids into US territory, they won’t be available for the occupation of Panama, Greenland or Canada. Thus, to put it bluntly, the best hope for the world is if the US screws it up by the numbers with Mexico as quickly as possible.
Any hope that saner voices in the room will regain control is probably moot: the Republican Party seems utterly unwilling to rein in Trump at this point, no matter what idea he puts out there. I’m uncomfortably reminded of the Chinese Communist Party following Mao off a proverbial cliff as he got dotty, weird, and radical in his old age.
The world is on a precipice. Trump and his team know he’s not joking. What I have laid out above is what I believe their over-arching strategy will be to achieve his goals of empire. Most of the rest of the world is going to have to realise that this is not him trying to divert people away from talking about tariffs: this is an actual clear and present danger to global democracy and order in the same way that Germany and the USSR were, and modern Russia continues to be.
totally agree. The missing piece is that he’s Putin’s Manchurian candidate and nobody in the USA seems to be doing anything about it.
And Musk too. My question is will the US military, the Generals, do what he says, in clear defiance of international and democratic norms? And knowing, surely, that “winning” will result in in war of attrition on the ground and be a “just” cause for atrocities against US citizens.