America has fallen through the looking glass into something resembling Lewis Carroll’s sequel to “Alice in Wonderland. We are now in an un-wonderland where the Red Queen’s demand for “sentence before verdict” has become the law of the land.
A few examples underscore why America’s world has been turned upside down.
Taiwan is a case in point. Congress has made it absolutely clear that China is this nation’s greatest threat and believes that its president, Xi Jinping, is serious about preparing his army to seize and occupy Taiwan by 2027. So the U.S., according to the Taiwan Relations Act must help Taiwan defend itself. And under certain circumstances, the U.S. might help defend Taiwan with its forces.
The legal and moral argument is that international aggression against an independent state cannot be tolerated. As the U.S. and its NATO allies have come to assist Ukraine against unprovoked Russian aggression, Taiwan could fall into this category.
But Taiwan’s legislature, controlled by the opposition Kuomintang party, has voted to freeze its defense spending, raising profound questions about the island’s commitment to independence.
China’s leadership rightly observes that Donald Trump has now looked south to the Panama Canal and north to Canada and Greenland as potential acquisitions or in the case of the canal, a reacquisition. Aside from the apparent hypocrisy between that and the jusification for defending Taiwan, some interesting issues will be raised if Trump’s aspirations turn into policy actions. An invasion of Greenland would violate NATO’s Article 5 in which an attack against one is an attack against all. Denmark, a NATO country, remains Greenland’s sovereign.
This would not be not the first time one NATO member attacked another. Greece and Turkey went to war over Cyprus. The United Kingdom and Iceland waged a “cod war” over fish.
But any U.S. attempt to seize the possession of another NATO member certainly stretches the boundaries of the looking glass. And what would NATO do if Denmark requested Article 5 protection?
The idea that Canada is likely to become a province of America or its 51st state is nonsense. Merely raising this proposition must come from deep within the looking glass because of that nonsense.
However, reclaiming the Panama Canal has had its advocates ever since the Carter administration gave it up in 1979. The canal is a vital waterway and a chokepoint between the two great Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
It was built to accommodate U.S. battleships with a beam of about 110 feet. Today, however, the canal can accept a ship with a beam not greater than 160 feet (51 meters), meaning that neither supertankers nor American nuclear aircraft carriers will fit. Thus, the canal has limitations.
Further, while China has the lease on the management of two of the five ports, the Panama Canal Authority — not China — owns and operates the canal itself. Also, drought has reduced the amount of water needed for ships’ passage, reducing the number of ships transiting the canal each day by nearly 40 percent, to 24 per day. So if Trump were to reclaim the canal, aside from provoking an international crisis and unlimited lawsuits, what would that achieve?
Why then is Trump discussing the acquisitions of Greenland, Panama and Canada? Perhaps Trump has one particular target in sight. He could be using the other two to mask his priority. Or he could he be using these three as disinformation and misdirection, to focus attention on what are really non-issues. Only Trump knows.
The point is that Trumpland is an un-wonderland. And the only rules are the Red Queen’s, or in this case Trump’s.
Harlan Ullman Ph.D. is United Press International’s Arnaud deBorchgrave Distinguished Columnist, senior advisor at Washington D.C.’s Atlantic Council, chairman of two private companies and principal author of the shock and awe military doctrine. His next book, due in 2025, is “The Great Paradox: Strategic Thinking in an Unstrategic World.”
