big countries and norms

implications?

President-elect Donald Trump’s news conference Tuesday offered indications he envisions an expansive application of protecting national security, a consideration every world leader will readily understand in principle. Many Americans will relish protecting our interests and preferences as an obvious step.

The problem may be others deciding to apply that principle to their own situations. The ramifications will be interesting to see.

Whatever else we can say about the past eighty years under “norms” embodied in the United Nations and its carefully-crafted system based on international law and recognized nation-states, the foundation being that all recognized states share the same rights and responsibilities. The universality of this system, much like our own of universality in a Senate where big states and smaller states each have equal representation, means that what applies to one, applies to all, regardless of religion, form of government, population size, or geographic span. Don’t ever forget that before the organization launched, largely as a result of our guiding hand, the world had some pretty cataclysmic conflicts.

Fast forward to the twenty-first century where one of our most common criticisms of the PRC is that it seeks to rewrite that system, trying to “alter the norms” to favor their interests. The now infamous exasperation on the part of Foreign Minister Yang Jeichi in Singapore on 19 July 2010 following Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s offer to arbitrate between states claiming various rights in the South China Sea expressed Beijing’s position. “China is a big country and other countries are small countries and that is just a fact” is often seen as both CCP’s hubris and demands. The shock at the blatant threat implied set into motion closer alliances against the overbearing China.

Indeed, while Beijing exerts ever-greater pressure on Taiwan and, to a lesser extent, the Philippines, the strengthening of alliances over the past fifteen years to thwart Chinese leaders from acting on the avowed perception of implicit relative “rights” has succeeded to an extent. China definitely threatens those over whom it asserts “bigger” status but it has not actually seized land from anyone since 2010 (Ironically, its closest move towards armed conflict was against also huge India earlier this decade). Taiwan and other nations worry about the future but Beijing’s behavior so far illustrates that multilateral deterrence can work.

The same cannot be said for Vlad the Impaler in his decade-plus series of actions against Ukraine. As we recall, the initiation of large-scale armed invasion in 2022 laid raw Russia’s intentions to pursue Putin’s broad and historically curious “remembrance” against a nation he clearly saw as unlikely to fight back effectively but threatening to Russia.

As true with condemnations of China’s island-building efforts in the South China Sea or exercises surrounding Taiwan, the industrialized world came to Ukraine’s defense. NATO countries, for the most part, charged Putin with destroying the post-World War II order. Putin, largely isolated in his Kremlin conference rooms, continues waging his war against Kyiv while NATO capitals provide Ukraine with massive assistance to prevent the country falling into Vlad’s hands. Fears are rising that struggle could the Russian may still win if the incoming Washington administration adheres to candidate Trump’s weak enthusiasm for preserving the commitment to nation-state integrity under those same liberal international order norms China is undermining.

The President-elect’s declaration on Tuesday mattered not so much as to how he will find an incentive or a coercion for Greenland to join the United States. Nor is the question of Canada’s future as a sovereign neighbor the biggest piece of it all. The true consequences of the press conference will likely be how Beijing and Moscow decide to apply what they heard from Mr. Trump.

Did he just provide them with the justification to remake the norms of the contemporary era for security as they define it?

Mr. Trump’s aspirations mentioned enhancing U.S. national security by procuring Greenland, returning the Panama’ Canal Zone to U.S. jurisdiction despite a negotiated agreement to transfer it to Panama’, and bringing Canada under U.S. control to make a great country. Each of those three arguments, simply on the merit of the case, should lead to extended public policy discussion in the United States and in the relevant interlocutors.

The world only seemed to become hardened into the current boundaries in mid-1945 when World War II ended and the United Nations came into play. We were, remember, looking for a path to assure we never against faced a war with the tens of millions of deaths we saw between 1931 and 1945.

The world chessboard of nations has changed, of course. Decolonization of much of Asia, the Middle East, and Africa transpired beginning in 1946. India and Pakistan became independent states as the result of the 1947 “Partition” of the former British Empire, with Bangladesh called East Pakistan and the western portion of a single Muslim country surrounding India unsurprisingly referred to West Pakistan. But Bangladesh’s unwelcome split into its own nation left Pakistan as a separate state in 1971 following a civil war within the Muslim entity. Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, and other portions of the Middle East came about after the U.N. system began in 1945. People forget that Czechoslovakia dissolved into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in the 1990s, both ethnic regions preferring their independence from the other. East Germany blended back into the German Republic after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, eradicating the Democratic People’s Republic of Germany in the process. The USSR itself disappeared on 31 December 1991.

In other words, nothing about the sanctity of borders established by the United Nations is immutable. Borders can change, although the cases above in the preceding paragraph did so within existing countries rather than because an outside country set out to absorb other countries. Put otherwise, the transformation of these cases was not due to an outside force but because of internal dynamics of one form or another.

Mr. Trump’s concern about national security of the United States will echo happily in both Beijing and Moscow. Beijing’s position for seventy-five years has been that Taiwan’s peculiar, regretful ‘“unaffiliated” status as an unreconciled item of the Chinese civil war results entirely from interference by foreign (aka U.S.) forces in China’s domestic affairs. No U.S. president formally accepts that argument, though we did shift diplomatic relations from Taibei to Beijing almost fifty years ago as a tacit, if uncomfortable, acknowledgment that China was a big country with whom we wanted better ties. But we then wrote into U.S. law, which we obey over international law, a relationship with Taiwan that looks like recognition but isn’t (no one said this was all easy, people). We view with grave concern what happens when China threatens Taiwan but is that our national security at risk or is it something else? It rather depends who you ask. We have a dual policy on China in that we formally recognize China but also tacitly recognize Taiwan because we can. It doesn’t mean we want anyone else to be so selective about norms, however. Will national security, defined not by global norms but by the preferences of great powers, become the justification of “resolving” preferred territorial boundaries? We can but that may play out in ways we don’t like.

Similarly, Putin hardly masks profound bitterness that the Soviet Union, a grand empire of 15 republics coerced into a buffer zone surround the majority Russians, is gone; his actions in Ukraine along with Georgia even earlier made clear his determination to recreate that Russian-dominated empire. Resurrecting that empire might allow him to reassume a lost position as ruler of one of the great empires, measured on size and span of control. With Putin’s mind operating in a history of his own making, how could that be anything other than defending Russia’s national security interests?

I am not arguing that the President-elect sought to empower leaders in Zhongnanhai or the Kremlin to move against their perceived national security threats but do find it difficult to see them ignore what looks like a green light. The President-elect was discussing his “America First” doctrine focusing on U.S. interests as if others did not pay attention to what we do and how we speak. Sure, Danes, Canadians, and Panamamians are absorbed in his proclaimed aspirations as are states of NATO, Northeast Asia, and the Middle East because Mr. Trump states unequivocally he intends to jettison the norms of the current system to reinforce unabashedly U.S. interests.

It would, however, be naive to believe other “big countries”, entitled to defending themselves to the utmost requirement, would see this as anything other than a license to act similarly. That could be quite a dramatic turn of events. Why can’t Russia just take over the Arctic in general as a statement of protecting its national security? How about China? What about Russia taking over the Straits and Dardanelles? How about China blockading Japan and Korea when they cooperate with our efforts to isolate China on Taiwan? Isn’t that national security in the most obvious way?

Perhaps Mr. Trump did intend to send that message. His position on Taiwan prevaricates between harshly explaining to Beijing that we will support the island’s de facto leadership and alternatively demanding Taiwan pony up much more for us to do something on their behalf.

The incoming President appears less concerned about assuring Taiwan is not forced to reunify than are either his incoming National Security Advisor Congressman Waltz and Secretary of State Senator Rubio—and many other Trump voters. The overall prioritization for the new POTUS will take some time to clarify as of right now but Beijing has a habit of hearing what they like, then discarding the remainder. That will affect Zhongnanhai’s calculation on how it proceeds.

Similarly, Mr. Trump has praised Vlad the Impaler on multiple occasions, privileging the Russian’s promises to him above analyses by his intelligence agencies and even some Republican allies. The President-elect discusses resolving the Ukraine conflict but I am unaware of him commented directly on Vlad’s desired overall endstate (if you know of such remarks, please send them to all of us as that would be illuminating!).

Mr. Trump frequently earns the descriptor as “transactional”, meaning he looks at one-for-one actions rather than longer-term moves. It may be that Xi or Putin will not view his aspirations on Panama’, Canada, and Greenland as relevant to their revanchist claims but reflective of sui generis American security demands as a big country with an expansive national security appetite. What we describe as national security interests may be just big power demands in the eyes of states for whom norms do not apply. But, these three leaders considering themselves as heads of uniquely great power nations could mean a future radically different from the past eighty years—not necessarily a peaceful one, either, if domestic politics in any of the three clash with actions by one of the other countries. But we will have to see how the actions create consequences.

Any presidential news conference gets attention here and abroad because the POTUS is the POTUS. This one, it strikes me, has some major implications, however, as actions create consequences, of course.

I welcome your thoughts, rebuttals, or questions on this column. Please, please do chime in as I don’t have all the answers but am responding to what I have read about the press conference while reflecting on what we have seen as Russian and Chinese security and nationalist aspirations.

Thank you for your time today or any day. I appreciate you circulating this if you find it valuable for others. Thank you the subscribers who put their resources into supporting this column. An annual subscription is less than a dollar a week.

The clouds are out in the Chesapeake at noon but it was another water color dawn.

Be well and be safe.

Joseph Gedeon, “Trump refuses to rule out the military to take Panama and Greenland”, TheGuardian.com 7 January 2025, retrieved at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/07/trump-panama-canal-greenland

David Sanger and Michael Shear, “Trump Floats Using Force to Take Greenland and the Panama Canal”, NewYorkTimes.com, 8 January 2025, retrieved at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/07/us/politics/trump-panama-canal-greenland.html

Ian Story, “China’s Missteps in Southeast Asia: Less Charm, More Offensive”, China Brief, 10:25, 17 December 2010, retrieved at https://jamestown.org/program/chinas-missteps-in-southeast-asia-less-charm-more-offensive/