One might have hoped that the administration’s misadventure in Iran—an entanglement with a nation that has perfected the art of asymmetric resistance—would have tempered the President’s more imperial impulses. The Board of Peace has proved unequal to the task, and the United Nations, in our present political climate, is treated less as a forum than as a foil.
Yet even this evening, the President has taken to social media to make ominous noises about Greenland, as though the North Atlantic were a chessboard awaiting his next improvisation. We have recently indicted the ninety‑five‑year‑old Raúl Castro and now speak of Cuba—beleaguered, sanctioned, and running on the fumes of vanished Venezuelan oil—as though it were a dire threat to the republic. One begins to suspect that the Western Hemisphere is once again being cast as a stage for American anxieties.
I have written before that neither Cubans nor Greenlanders imagine themselves as Americans simply because Washington finds them geopolitically convenient. Life in Cuba is difficult, yes, but the island still manages basic healthcare, education, and a life expectancy that quietly rivals wealthier nations. Greenland, for its part, enjoys a social safety net that puts our own to shame. The simple act of lifting sanctions would do more for Cuban well‑being than any number of stern lectures about freedom.
Other nations understand this. Surinamese citizens, for example, hold Dutch citizenship and benefit from a metropolitan government that—whatever its flaws—remains attentive to its former colonies. The world is full of such arrangements, none of which require the paternal theatrics that Washington so often mistakes for leadership.
But America, and particularly this administration, tends to view its territories and near‑territories with the same confusion it reserves for pop culture figures like Bad Bunny: vaguely familiar, linguistically inconvenient, and not entirely welcome in the living room. The President made no secret of his irritation at having to assist Puerto Rico after disaster struck; to his credit, he was at least honest about his reluctance to perform the duties of his office.
We tell ourselves that we are helping people. Perhaps we even believe it. But increasingly our posture resembles ambition without purpose—colonialism stripped of even the pretense of missionary zeal. And the world, having grown accustomed to the rhetoric of American benevolence, now looks for ways to protect itself not from its neighbors, but from us.
That, it seems, is the protection they need.
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