Donald Trump’s determination to rename the Gulf of Mexico could be a bombastic negotiating tactic — or signal a return to 19th century US expansionism, once labeled Manifest Destiny.
|
Listen To This Story
 |
On the surface, Donald Trump’s Day One announcement that he wants to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America” sounds patently absurd. Sure, American presidents are powerful, but nothing in the US Constitution entitles a president to control the naming of the planet’s geography. That’s usually left to a consensus among mapmakers, geographers, and a handful of explorers.
The name “America” is generally attributed to the 15th century Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci, who is credited with discovering that the American continents are not part of India or China. Vespucci referred to his newly discovered continents as the “New World” and allegedly left his signature, “Amerigo,” on a map revealing their location. A German cartographer, Martin Waldseemüller, published a 12-panel map, detailing various explorers’ accounts of the New World. Waldseemüller labeled the new continents “America,” using the feminine form of the Latin spelling of Vespucci’s first name.
More than a few world leaders, well aware of Trump’s ignorance of geography, are probably scratching their heads and asking themselves why Trump cares at all about the Gulf’s name, unless, of course, it’s just another of Trump’s nasty gestures intended to show disrespect for Mexico. The Gulf, of course, couldn’t care less what Trump decides to call it.
A French Fry by Any Other Name…
The current flap over names recalls the campaign by a few “patriotic” Republicans in 2003 to get the public to start calling french fried potatoes “Freedom Fries.” George W. Bush was getting ready to invade Iraq on the later-debunked pretext that Saddam Hussein was threatening the world with “weapons of mass destruction.” France was skeptical and consequently appeared disloyal in the eyes of the campaign being pushed by Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
It was hard not to think at the time that the real reason for going to war was to distract public opinion from the fact that Bush had been caught sleeping when terrorists launched the 9/11 attacks. Reporters had asked Bush about al-Qaeda, which carried out the attack, several weeks before it took place, and Bush, who was busy playing golf at the time, told them that there was nothing to worry about.
The suggestion that Saddam Hussein might be building an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction was the clincher that justified the war. The only problem was that there were no weapons.
At the time, I was reporting for Time in New York. Charles Duelfer, who had been lent by the CIA to the State Department and then to the United Nations to help manage the UN’s international commission tracking Iraqi weapons, told me early on that circulating accounts of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were a bluff by Saddam to intimidate his neighbors. “We have eyes on everything going in and out of Iraq,” he said. “There is nothing there.”
A friend attached to the UN’s French mission told me that the furor over Freedom Fries was not serious at first. “We think it is a joke,” she laughed. A short while later, she changed her mind and said that the rhetoric coming out of Washington was no longer a joke and that it had become unsettling. “People are beginning to be scared,” she said.
Diplomatic language among governments is usually calibrated to send a message that will ultimately be understood. Trump is so given to hyperbole and vulgar insults that it is hard to tell what it is that he really wants.
Now it is Trump’s rhetoric that is frightening people who find no humor in his expansionist bluster.
As it turned out, there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but the war, which began in the spring of 2003, cost the lives of 4,492 US servicemen and anywhere from 110,000 to 400,000 Iraqis. Another 32,292 American GIs were wounded, and quite a few were crippled or traumatized for life. The war also succeeded in destabilizing much of the Middle East. The cost to American taxpayers over a several-year period, not counting the ongoing costs at the Department of Veterans Affairs, was $728 billion, a sizable chunk of which went to defense contractors in the US.
The campaign to promote Freedom Fries was quickly forgotten; the damage from the war was not. What takes place in the White House may seem absurd, but it can also have lethal consequences.
What Global World Order?
None of this seems to bother Donald Trump, who has amazingly elevated his already formidable game of playing fast and loose with the truth, spouting lies and phony statistics, and generally not caring about the impact that wild rhetoric emanating from the White House is likely to have on the rest of the world. Half of what Trump tweets on X/Twitter is simply false. The rest consists of crude attacks against imagined enemies or stuff that he makes up out of thin air. Trump doesn’t care.
Diplomatic language among governments is usually calibrated to send a message that will ultimately be understood. Trump is so given to hyperbole and vulgar insults that it is hard to tell what it is that he really wants.
He has suggested that, on his orders, the US might use military force to seize control of Canada (an idea that Americans unsuccessfully flirted with at various points in the distant past) or simply take possession of the Panama Canal Zone and Greenland. What is he really saying? What is the message underlying his professed intention to rename the Gulf? Does he really want to invade Mexico along with Panama? Or has he become just another crazy old man running off at the mouth?
Remember the Alamo?
For Mexico, the immediate reaction is likely to be a flashback to America’s 19th century engagement in Manifest Destiny that ended with the US taking roughly 60 percent of Mexico’s putative territory by force. It’s relatively easy in the current climate to forget that until 1846-48, most of the territory west of the Mississippi River was technically part of Mexico.
That changed when Mexico’s president, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, encouraged American adventurers to settle in what is now Texas. To Santa Anna’s chagrin, when the Americans became numerous enough, they declared independence from Mexico. In his efforts to crush the rebellion, Santa Anna overpowered the defenders of the Alamo — killing Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, and a number of other early American heroes — but in the end the Texans won out and declared Texas an independent republic. They then campaigned to have it incorporated into the US as the 28th state in the Union in 1845.
The Mexican-American War, which lasted from 1846 to 1848, relied on the US Army to seize the territory north of Texas. Ulysses S. Grant — who served as a US Army lieutenant during the war and would eventually lead Union forces to victory during the American Civil War and then go on to be elected the country’s 18th president — wrote in his memoir that the US had literally to entice the Mexicans into attacking American troops so that Washington would have a pretext for going to war.
Grant also observed in his memoir that much of the western territory was sparsely populated except for Indian tribes, and the Mexican government was so disorganized that it eventually offered to make Gen. Winfield Scott, the commander of American forces attacking Mexico City, its president. Scott declined.
The US under the terms of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, gained control of the territory that now includes California, Arizona, New Mexico, and portions of Utah, Colorado, and Nevada. The Rio Grande was established as the new frontier with Mexico. It was a stunning land grab by anyone’s standards. Grant nevertheless felt that the way it was carried out left a bad taste in the mouth.
The Manifest Destiny branding added a messianic blessing to what amounted to one of the greatest land grabs in recent times.
One can easily see the current flood of Latin American immigrants as a sort of Manifest Destiny in reverse. It’s a safe bet that many Hispanics see it that way.
A Bully in the Global China Shop
So what is Donald Trump really trying to say in renaming the Gulf of Mexico? Is it prodrome to another attempted land grab, or is he just thoughtlessly tossing ideas out without considering their consequences? How does he think that Mexico will react to his remarks? Does he even care?
What works in a market doesn’t necessarily work in international diplomacy — not when some of the players have nuclear weapons and itchy trigger fingers.
For the moment, most people are taking Trump’s bluster as a negotiating tactic. Trump, after all, is a businessman. He is used to intimidating the other guy and then beating down the price of a transaction. What works in a market, however, doesn’t necessarily work in international diplomacy — not when some of the players have nuclear weapons and itchy trigger fingers. Mexico doesn’t have the bomb yet, but others (including friends and trade partners of Mexico) do, and they are watching Trump’s unhinged antics with intense interest.
The world used to take the US and the White House seriously. With Trump as president, America looks more like an enigma that raises an important and unanswered question: How did America come to this?
For the moment, priority goes to figuring out how to handle Trump and the serious fallout from his shoot-from-the-hip bombast.
