Donald Trump's controversial statements this week about the US claiming territories like Greenland and the Panama Canal zone are no doubt absurd. Can Russia now claim to have been conned out of selling Alaska to the US nearly 200 years ago? Can France make a similar claim over the 1803 Louisiana Purchase? Would Mexico like to take California and Texas back?
And yet, Trump is doing more than merely pre-bargaining scene-setting here – and there is recent historical precedence for taking him a lot more seriously than we are. We’ve been here before with the US’s post-9/11 neoconservative dream and failed war on terror.
During Clinton’s second term in the White House in the 90s there was a strong view on the political right, especially in the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party, that the US was missing a trick in world affairs. The Soviet Union had collapsed, leaving just one world superpower. Surely this meant that the US had the God-given task of leading the world to a great new American century?
