Location, location: Why Trumps Greenland push is smart geopolitics

In business, Donald Trump was a real-estate guy.In the presidency, he might be one, too. The prospective foreign policy of his second term has taken an unexpected turn, with his recent talk of annexing Canada, buying Greenland and taking back the Panama Canal. Rather than the neo-isolationist that he’s often accused of being, Trump is talking like a neo-imperialist, at least in our own hemisphere. Even if President Trump does none of these things — he’s largely joking about the Great White North — his musings are a reminder of the crucial importance of geography and the control of territory.The first thing you need to do to understand the world, and to a large extent the behavior of nations, is to look at a map. “Geography is the most fundamental factor in the foreign policy of states because it is the most permanent,” the 20th century strategist Nicholas Spykman observed.

“Ministers come and go, even dictators die, but mountain ranges stand unperturbed.”The world was never “flat,” in the formulation of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that became the catchphrase of a complacent globalism. No, the world is full of mountains and steppes; rivers and coastlines; temperate, tropical and dry zones. Some nations, by virtue of their location, are secure, others vulnerable; some naturally rich, others resource-starved. The first thing you need to know about Britain, for instance, is that it is an island, “this precious stone set in the silver sea,” as Shakespeare had it. This basic, ineluctable fact has crucially shaped Britain’s strategic orientation and its national character.It is why it became a naval power committed to global trade, and why it considered far-flung places — courtesy of the waves — relatively nearby. The English Channel has been an indispensable buffer between it and continental Europe. There’s a reason Nazi Germany invaded Poland, France, the Soviet Union, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Lux...