On Tuesday evening, President Donald Trump shocked the world with a proposal that was completely sudden, even by his standards. All Palestinians should be removed from Gaza, allowing the United States to take over it as territory.
There was immediate debate over whether Americans should take Trump with him in his words, and while much of his trajectory tried to soften his declaration on Wednesday, the fact that Trump suggested remains. Masu – Also – The United States unilaterally takes over foreign territory regardless of what the people currently living there are thinking.
First of all, it was Greenland that Trump said the US should seize. Since then, the Panama Canal, Canada, and now Gaza-Trump's territory wish list appears to grow day by day.
Many observers have seen this as a call to American imperialism. This is part of ignoring borders that can be found everywhere, from Russian invasions of Ukraine to Chinese intimidation of Taiwan.
But I think a better way to think about it is one of the denials of the great powers of geopolitics in the late 20th century. government.
The promotion of decolonization has been almost highly successful. When the United Nations was founded in 1945, there were 51 member states, many of which ruled vast colonial regions in Africa and Asia.
Today, the United Nations has 193 member states (South Sudan, who joined in 2011) and many other territories, including full members (particularly the province of Palestine). In many respects, the story of the past 70 years has been a story of colonization as independence movements around the world fought for freedom and self-determination, and colonial countries have retreated.
Trump wants not only to be rejected, but to cast it backwards. We call it a kind of recolonization – spiritually, if not literally.
What makes the promotion of recolonization so pronounced is that, with a few major exceptions, large powers ultimately have colonialism fundamentally wrong. It is that I have recognized the following. The original UN Charter stated that relations between states were intended to be based in part on “ethnic self-determination,” and by 1960 the United Nations said colonialism was “a fundamental human rights.” “It was a denial.”
What Trump is proposing in Gaza and elsewhere is his return to geopolitics, run by jungle law. After all, it is what colonialism is the most basic form. Your destiny is determined not by you, but by the rulers of foreign capitals. Simply because they are strong and there's nothing they can do about it.
It is worth noting that the two territories of Trump are stubborn in Greenland and Gaza, the last remaining two territories of the colonial era. That's not to say they're the same. Although Greenland is ultimately an autonomous territory with meaningful self-activity, albeit under Danish sovereignty, Gaza's status is highly contested, to say the least. (Hamas still primarily controls internal governance. Israel maintains external control, but the United Nations and many human rights groups consider it an occupying territory.) But both have long claims on the land. It is home to famous people who have And both are considered by some circles to be examples of unfinished decolonization businesses.
It would be cliché to argue that Trump sees geopolitics through the lens of a former real estate developer. In his remarks Tuesday, he meditated on Gaza being the “Middle Eastern Riviera.” And they can move elsewhere, just as real estate developers tend to care almost the hopes of those affected by their projects! – Trump doesn't seem to care about what the Greenlanders of Gaza and the Palestinians want.
But we should call this what it is – “recolonization” rather than an empire with all its grand ambitions. It reaches the dirty truth of the matter, the dirty reality of colonialism, the way in which it pollutes everything it touches.
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