Version imprimableIn the Middle East, Trump, who admires the authoritarian Benjamin Netanyahu and supports Israel, proposes to end the war there by turning Gaza into a U.S. colony and removing the two million Palestinians, in violation of international law. He suggests sending the Palestinians to Egypt and Jordan and hints that Saudi Arabia might pay for his plan. Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia have all objected to his plan, but Trump threatens to cut U.S. aid to them if they don’t go along. Once removed, the Palestinians, Trump says, will not be allowed to return to their country. With a realtor’s eye, he says Gaza will become “the Riviera of the Middle East,” an international resort, and one suspects that he himself might turn it into another Trump golf course.
In the western hemisphere, Trump wants to expand America’s control in the region that forms the base of its world empire. He says that he will by force, if necessary, take Greenland, a possession of Denmark, a member of NATO. Trump also wants control of the Panama Canal, claiming that China now controls the crucial waterway because a Chinese company has operations in ports on both the Atlantic and Pacific sides of the canal. Trump’s threat has led the country’s president José Raúl Mulino Quintero, in order to mollify Trump, to accept U.S. deportees of African and Asian origin in his country. Trump also wants to absorb Canada making it the fifty-first state, a statement that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called, “a real thing,” that is, a genuine threat. But there’s “not a snowball’s chance in hell” that it will happen, says Trudeau.
In another break with past practice, Trump is using tariffs aggressively not only against competitors like China but also against allies like Canada, Mexico and the European Union. Trump has for the moment delayed the 25% tariffs he proposed for Mexico and Canada, but increased those on Chinese goods by 10%, to which China responded in kind.
Trump’s immigration policy has also caused conflict. When the United States deported undocumented Colombian immigrants’ home in military aircraft and bound in shackles, leftist president Gustavo Francisco Petro refused to allow the plane to land because the country’s citizens were not being treated with dignity. Threatened with 25% tariffs, Petro yielded and urged undocumented Colombians to return home to avoid further friction with the U.S., saying he would provide support for those who came back. Petro also canceled an $880 million contract with Occidental Petroleum to engage in fracking, stating, “I want that operation to be sold, and for the money to be invested in clean energies. We are against fracking, because fracking is the death of nature, and the death of humanity.”
Finally, the decision by Trump and his partner billionaire Elon Musk to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, America’s 60-year-old soft-power arm, has led to the sudden cancellation millions of dollars in humanitarian aid—food, medicine, schools—in 100 countries and to the firing of many of the agency’s 10,000 international employees. Trump has thus become an enemy to millions. Detestable!
15 February 2025
