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Among the fusillade of President Trump’s executive orders, policy musings, and social media eructations, a seemingly absurd set of territorial demands have emerged: trading Puerto Rico for Denmark, incorporating Canada as the fifty-first state, annexing Gaza, and seizing authority of the Panama Canal away from Panama. While such proposals and notions are far-fetched, writes Fintan O’Toole in the Review’s March 13 issue, “they mark a transition of Trumpian modes from comedy to brutality.” No longer content to provoke with what in his first administration would have been nothing more “than a flight of fancy,” the president now hopes to bring about a savage rearrangement of world affairs:

Greenland functions for Trump as a terrestrial version of Mars, as that planet appears in the imagination of his sidekick, Elon Musk—a place where an elite can find refuge when climate change extinguishes the common herd of humanity.

Below, alongside O’Toole’s essay, we have collected five articles from our archives about Greenland, Gaza, Panama, and Canada.

Fintan O’Toole
From Comedy to Brutality

With his designs on Greenland and Gaza, Trump has signaled that his first term’s outlandish gestures are the second term’s savage demands.

Jehad al-Saftawi
The Gaza I Grew Up In

“Through my lens, and the events that I’ve witnessed, I have tried to show the human reality for people who were born into a situation with no option but to live it,…amid the intolerable deterioration of living conditions in Gaza. But I have tried also to show the glimpses of joy and hope as an alternative to the wretched paradigm of justice the political elite claims to be fighting for.”

—November 6, 2020

Eve Bowen
Olaf Otto Becker: Greenland Melting

“The bright color of the water contrasts with eerily pockmarked snow and ice that we might have expected to be a pristine white, but that appear instead in shades of white, gray, even black, darkened by dust that has traveled through the airstream from as far away as China….. Trenches resembling tire tracks develop and gradually turn into rivers, lakes, and moulins, all the while weakening the ice sheet and hastening its disintegration.”

—December 15, 2009

Jared Diamond
Why Did the Vikings Vanish?

“While there is still some mystery about exactly what happened to the last Vikings in Greenland, the basic causes of their disappearance are clear: their stubborn effort to subsist by a pastoral economy, environmental damage that they inflicted, climate change, the withering of their trade and social links with Europe, and competition and hostility of the Inuit. Above all, their society resisted change.”

—April 11, 2002

James Chace
Getting to Sack the General

“The canal itself not only bound the United States and Panama together but divided the country in two by a zone over which Panama has never had control. The only legal currency is US dollars, known as balboas. Panama can therefore pay neither its public employees nor its debts by printing money.”

—April 28, 1988

Mordecai Richler
Wilson in Canada

My fundamental quarrel with Edmund Wilson is he does not seem to have journeyed north so much to discover a country as to rediscover a vanished America. We Canadians, as I wrote in the Spectator years ago, are the English-speaking world’s elected squares. To the British, we are the nicest, whitest Americans. To Americans we represent a nostalgia for the unhurried horse and buggy age. In his youth, Mr. Wilson writes, he tended to imagine Canada as a vast hunting preserve, and even now he gets the impression in Canada of less worry and more leisure. Canadians, he feels, listen to one another, instead of “shooting off their faces.”

—September 30, 1965

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