North American Imperial Redux

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We are mere five days from the commencement of the reign of Emperor Donald I the Munificent and his merry band of billionaires and the whole world is astir with wild expectations of his excellent new adventures. Donald I has already announced that he plans to expand his domain to include Canada, Greenland, the Panama Canal and perhaps the northern states of Mexico. People around the world are scratching their heads, wondering what any of that could possibly mean. What about the inviolability of national borders? What about national sovereignty? Has anyone read the UN charter lately? Is it still worth reading?

They really shouldn't bother. Emperor-elect Donald the Pecunious is a world-famous blabbermouth, blowhard and windbag and everything that comes out of his mouth has to be divided by at least a thousand. Drain the Washington swamp? No, it is fecund and fetid as ever and is growing ever larger. End the Ukraine war within 24 hours? No, the latest promise is half a year. Make America great again? Maybe, but Americans are much too ignorant, fat and lazy, so let's just give H1B visas to a million Indians and let them try. And so on and so forth...

But this is all puffery and grandstanding that in America is considered kosher as the main ingredient in political campaigns. After all, nobody in America ever got shot for breaking their campaign promises and lying while running for office is considered... well... lying like you are running for office because candidates who don't lie aren't even taken seriously. It's the political culture of the place. Some call it "democracy." I don't.

What is really going on is quite dire. Trump will enjoy the thinnest of House and Senate majorities for the next two years and will most likely become a lame duck thereafter. During this period of time, he will face the mother of all debt limit fiascos, seeing as the interest rate set by the market on 10-year Treasuries has waved good-bye to the rate set by the Federal Reserve, all while the Treasury has to roll over a third of the total Federal debt of over $36 trillion. With foreigners balking at buying up even more US debt paper, the only remaining choices are money-printing, which drives up inflation, and very large and politically suicidal cuts to defense and social programs.

The US is bankrupt and needs to be reorganized. However, such reorganization would require a modicum of national unity, and that's in very short supply. Half the country applauds whenever somebody says that Americans come in two varieties — male and female, and half the country believes that they have a Swiss army knife between their legs and that lesbians make great fire chiefs.

But there is one thing all Americans agree on: they all want to strike it rich. A relatively tiny number of them is ridiculously rich already and the rest just want to get ridiculously rich no matter how. Vivek Ramaswamy swindled his way to a grand fortune by selling an Alzheimer's drug that doesn't work — but he is rich, bitch, and that's all that matters, so please let him reform the Washington bureaucracy. Won't he try to enrich himself some more in the process? Won't that be fun to watch? Maybe he'll figure out a way to save a few hundred billion by outsourcing government functions to Indians on H1B visas... Velcome to Vashington!

But why does Donald want Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal? There seem to be two plausible reasons for this ardent desire. Neither has anything to do with a thing called "geopolitics." It was dreamed up by some Brit, who claimed that "whoever controls the heartland controls the world" (as if controlling the whole world is even theoretically possible). The heartland is, roughly speaking, Russia, which controls itself. Therefore, control of the heartland by anyone else is not even theoretically possible. We are done discussing "geopolitics." And now, back to why Trump wants territories C, G and P.

First, America is no longer a contender for items such as the former Ukraine, or the Chinese province of Taiwan, or any other geopolitical prizes that were previously thought to be securely within the fold of the great American global empire. It is as if the lord of the manor, in his dotage and heading inexorably toward bankruptcy, decides to relinquish his claims on the fields, the pastures, the mills and the hunting grounds but draws the line around the woodlot, the ice house and the fish pond. "May I please keep these?" he pleads with his creditors.

Sure, say the Chinese, but Taiwan and the Spratleys are ours and please get your military out of South Korea, Japan, Guam and the Philippines. Sure, say the Russians, but the former Ukraine is all ours and please get NATO back to where it was prior to the reunification of Germany. Oh, and Sweden must be militarily neutral and the Baltics are our territory, per Treaty of Nystad of September 10, 1721, and Finland must be militarily neutral, per Treaty of Paris of February 3, 1947. Sure, says Iran, but first get your military bases away from our borders.

If Lord Donald does all of that, he will be able to save huge amounts of money on defense (no more foreign military bases; no more aircraft carriers) and will get to keep the wood lot (Canada), the ice house (Greenland) and the fish pond (Panama). He will then be able to settle in to a comfortable senescence, lighting the fireplace with wood from the woodlot and dining on frozen fish. With that bit of downshifting, he could start dressing shabbily and change his name to Frump.

There is a second reason for grabbing these immense but unprofitable assets: they may provide collateral for a bit of further borrowing, to compensate for the loss of Ukrainian fields, mines and factories. A bit of financial sleight of hand (which Americans are so good at) will reappraise the collateral value of the Greenland glaciers as bottled water and of the pines of the Canadian boreal forests as stylish bedroom furniture. This new pool of fake collateral will support a temporary resumption of money printing, warding off fiancial collapse long enough for Trump to complete his term in office. Given the sorry condition of his domain, what more could this man possibly ask for?