What if Trump were to rule like Putin?

By Marc Champion

Donald Trump has refused to rule out using force to acquire Greenland from Denmark or the Panama Canal from Panama. Don’t rule out that he might just mean it.

The mere thought that America would extort or go to war with a close NATO ally to illegally change their sovereign borders seems ridiculous. Presumably, it is. Yet the threats also sound familiar. As the president-elect and some of his team members warm up for the White House, they’re speaking and behaving more like President Vladimir Putin’s Russia by the day.

So, what if that really is how Trump plans to rule in his second and final term? He has, after all, expressed admiration for Putin on multiple occasions and is already trying to organize a bilateral summit. The Kremlin says it’s willing.

In clear, recent echoes of Kremlin behavior, Trump has talked about making not just Greenland and the Panama Canal part of the US, but also Canada. He’s also talked about renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America (“it’s ours,” he said; “nashi,” as Russian nationalists say).

At the same time, Trump’s current sidekick and future administration team member Elon Musk has become more openly engaged in trying to undermine — and, according to the Financial Times, unseat — a foreign leader, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, than any Russian troll farm.

Putinism has at least three defining characteristics. The first is a profound disdain for democratic constraints, facts and social liberalism, in favor of personal oligarchy, manipulation and anti-"wokery." The result is a Russian political economy in which Putin dispenses power, truth and wealth as though they were his personal patrimony. Loyalty is the number one qualification for favor, with cash and fear the two-part glue that holds the system together.

The second characteristic is a mafia-style mindset, in which all relationships are approached as questions of allegiance or ownership — whether within Russia or with other countries. Friendship and trust may be the words Putin uses to describe these ties, but they invariably are either transactional or coercive.

The final ingredient in this very crude schematic of Putinism is a conviction that after a brief 30- to 40-year diversion, the world is returning to its natural Darwinian order. Here, great powers dominate the regions around them as spheres of influence or, preferably, possessions. Weaker neighbors submit or suffer punishment. Great leaders, such as Putin’s heroes Peter and Catherine the Great, make history by expanding their country’s zone of control.

Trump and Putin are vastly different personalities from unrecognisably disparate backgrounds. The former is a brash, undisciplined showman from legacy money, the latter, a street kid from Soviet-era Leningrad, who trained in judo and spent his formative career as a KGB agent. Despite all that, their outlooks have much in common.

Trump, too, is dismissive of democratic constraints, enough so that in 2020 he tried to overturn an election result to stay in power. He values loyalty in staff above all other attributes, with close family best of all, and he’s famously transactional. Like Putin, he is a nationalist, who sees liberals and multilateral institutions — whether in the US, Europe or elsewhere — as the enemy.

But above all, Trump seems to share Putin’s view that the US-led international order that emerged from the Cold War is dead. As a new one gets built, it’s up to each great power to impose itself in its “near abroad,” to use the Russian term, as best it can. For Putin that has meant demanding and, if necessary, enforcing obedience from the likes of Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. For Trump, that seems — for now — to mean coercing Canada, Greenland, Mexico and Panama.

There’s no evidence of a grand conspiracy or collusion with the Kremlin here. Being a fellow nationalist, it’s as likely Trump will clash as strike up a bromance with Putin. I can only guess at how he will go about fulfilling his pledge to end the war in Ukraine (his timeline just slipped from 24 hours to six months) or to deal with Iran’s nuclear program. Nor do I know how long Musk will remain in the president-elect’s orbit, or whether the world’s richest “oligarch” even bothered to run his campaign against Starmer past his future boss.

But it’s clear that Trump, like Putin, has a nose for weakness in whomever sits across the negotiating table from him. And compared to the US, Canada, Europe and Panama are weak. Denmark couldn’t conceivably defend Greenland from a US military takeover. Even if it had the troops and equipment necessary, it lacks capabilities to transport and support them. The US has imposed itself on Panama before and no doubt could do so again.

I doubt that today Trump has the slightest intention of using the US military, knowing the economic damage he can inflict on allies to get his way, without having to resort to force. That kind of coercion is straight out of Putin’s playbook, too. Perhaps the best lesson Trump could learn from the Kremlin is to take a long, hard look at how all those trade and energy offensives worked out for Russia’s strongman. It certainly isn’t what he planned or hoped for at the start.