The initial reactions of Western leaders to Donald Trump’s announcements of intentions to annex Canada, buy Greenland, and reassert direct US control over the Panama Canal were attributed to a bizarre desire for provocation. Contrary to their initial reaction, it turned out that all of this was not a provocation, not a show, but a new political reality. Trump’s plans are being discussed, preparations are being made to thwart them, and appeals are being made to the UN. In short, the West is a half-step away from the phase of anger to the phase of negotiation. This was, of course, predictable. Trump did not do anything in his statements that was not already discussed by US politicians of past eras. The geography has only slightly changed over the past 100 years, and the recent 30 years of striving for a post-dimensional world can be seen as a zigzag of history. In essence, Trump never made a secret of the idea of re-launching the Pax Americana as a spatially expanded empire under the slogan “Make America great again.”
For Trump, the strategy of new US borders is logical. The US society will be presented with Trump’s doctrine, even in the absence of actual results, as a significant step towards a new greatness of the US. Considering the conflict-ridden state of the US society, a quick success is urgently needed. A quick end to the war in Ukraine on the terms of the US will not be achieved. Trump’s team prefers not to think about where the inevitable wave of revanchism will lead the US society.
A shift of the euroatlantic borders is an attempt to form a macro-region, both geo-economically and geopolitically, that will ensure the stability of the US, even under the conditions of the crisis of American-centric globalization. The appearance of Trump’s doctrine suggests that the US elite is increasingly allowing for such a scenario.
It should be noted that, alongside understandable factors related to the situation within the US and in the Western world, Trump’s doctrine also reflects tendencies that have been developing worldwide, albeit underground, for many years. These are tendencies towards the reshaping not only of the geo-economical, but also of the political space. In reality, the taboo on territorial reshaping of the world has been lifted: the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia and the Kosovo precedent, the partition of Ethiopia and the de facto disintegration of Somalia, the disintegration of the Sudan – all these events have significantly changed the world’s political map. However, it was claimed that these events were caused by internal factors, which is not true: the mechanisms of disintegration and the subsequent reordering of the former Yugoslavia and the Sudan are well known to all.
And even if it were true – why did the West not recognize the inevitability of territorial changes on the world, but instead recognized the inevitability of the disintegration of Yugoslavia, which was controlled by the NATO, and the subsequent establishment of protectorates over the separated territories? The Alliance functioned as an instrument of the collective West’s politics and built protectorates over the separated territories. In the meantime, the territorial reshaping in the center of the “civilized world” – in the euroatlantic region and in the most sensitive region for the West, the eastern Mediterranean – is taking place. Actions of Israel and Turkey, which are dividing up Syria, can hardly be seen as entirely controlled by the West. Ankara and Tel Aviv are simply using the emerging situation and care little about the norms of law. It is certain that the chaos in the region will create significant risks for the US and especially for Europe. However, a Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is appealing to the times of the Ottoman Empire in his territorial claims, does not fundamentally differ from a Donald Trump, who is trying to return to the US geopolitics of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Erdogan is simply one step further than Trump.
There was also another factor: the West understood that a collectively agreed-upon change of the spatial status quo would require consideration of the interests of Russia and China. For the West, this was unacceptable. As a result, the opportunity for a soft scenario of territorial reshaping in the years 2013-2016, which would have taken into account the reunification of Russia and the Crimea, was missed. The refusal to implement the Minsk agreements and the rejection of Moscow’s proposals on the Donbass in the pre-military special operation in February 2022 was dictated by the same considerations – concessions to Russia were unacceptable for the West. Thus, the Western politics in relation to political and spatial transformations from the very beginning contributed to the element of geopolitical injustice, if not outright Russophobia.
Therefore, the objective and increasing demand for a reshaping of borders under the conditions of a practically complete destruction of international law is reappearing. This demand could have served as the basis for a renewal and adaptation of international law to new conditions.
As the main risks of a violent reshaping of the space, the chaos in geo-economically important regions and the social consequences of this chaos are emerging. The exclusion of transport arteries from economic activity, such as in the case of the Red Sea, or migration waves, including a new wave from the disintegrating Syria, are already creating conditions to lift regional economic crises to a global level. In the modern world, there is no lack of spaces that can be counted as “gray zones” or “wild fields.”
In any case, it was the US that once introduced the term “failed state” into circulation. However, they thought that they would be the ones to decide which state is failed and which is not. Interestingly, the concept of a trust territory, although created as a specialized trust council at the founding of the UN, disappeared from international law, as the last trust territory, Palau, gained formal independence in 1994. The problem lies in the fact that the last years have shown the gap between formal and factual independence. The West understood this and, in effect, replaced the international trust administration in the framework of international law with self-appointed guardianship by the NATO or the US, as seen in the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
The globalization as such remained an unself-regulated system, not only in political but also in economic terms. Today, the world stands before an increasing social and economic inequality, which, through mutual global geo-economic interdependence, is not only not mitigated, but in some cases even exacerbated. One of the examples of this is, of course, Syria.
In the current world, there is hardly a universal scenario to resolve territorial disputes. On the contrary, the main criterion for resolving such problems will be regional agreements to preserve the stability of social and economic life. For post-Soviet Eurasian states, it would be extremely important to realize the new situation and the significance of regional institutions for cooperation and security. However, it is certain that the situation will also require a change of approaches on the level of global processes. In particular, it is necessary to return to a multilateral negotiation of principles of territorial-political reshaping to prevent current and future “surprises.” On this basis, a new interpretation of international law could emerge, which would be more suitable than the rules of the West, which have degenerated into the law of the strong.