“Al-Quds Al-Arabi”: Concerns escalated on Monday regarding the Trump administration’s plan for what is known as “Greater North America,” a geopolitical vision presented as a framework for American imperial hegemony from Greenland to Guyana, and which draws comparisons with a project promoted by some of Trump’s far-right allies and his partners in Israel .
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had revealed this plan earlier this month, telling reporters: “Trump has drawn up a new strategic map that stretches from Greenland to the ‘Gulf of America’ to the Panama Canal and the surrounding countries. In the Department of Defense, we call this map ‘Greater North America’.”
Hegseth added: “Why? Because every sovereign nation and every territory north of the equator, from Greenland to Ecuador and from Alaska to Guyana, is not part of the 'Global South'. It is our immediate security perimeter in this large neighborhood we all live in.”
In response, Graeme Garrard, a Canadian professor at Cardiff University in Wales, said on social media: “By ‘Greater North America’ he practically means ‘Greater United States.’ The United States today, and for a long time, has been a threat to the sovereignty and independence of its neighbors in the hemisphere,” according to a report published by Common Dreams.
a number of observers have compared Trump’s vision of “Greater America” to the “Greater Israel” movement, whose most radical supporters advocate for control of the territory stretching between the Nile and Euphrates rivers, including all of Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, most of Syria and Kuwait, large parts of Egypt and Iraq, and parts of Turkey.
Professor Julia Steinberger, a Swiss-American at the University of Lausanne, said via social media: “The ‘Greater North America’ proposed by Higseth should be taken very seriously as a real threat. We are currently witnessing the US and Israel pursuing a ‘Greater Israel’ through attacks and invasions in Lebanon and Iran. Higseth suggests that the next targets could be Greenland, Cuba, Canada, and Mexico.”
The idea of “Greater Israel” is linked to religious interpretations of the borders of ancient Jewish kingdoms, based on supremacist assumptions that God promised the Jews lands stretching between the Nile and the Euphrates.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes in the Gaza Strip—along with prominent right-wing figures, supports this view, amid accelerating settlement activity in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, pushing for the annexation of the remaining Palestinian territories, and plans to control—perhaps permanently—parts of Syria and Lebanon.
For nearly two centuries, American expansionism was also linked to notions of “divine selection,” as in the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, and to 19th-century plans to annex lands “from the Arctic to the tropics.” These ideas led to the United States expanding at the expense of Mexico, as well as later taking control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti. The United States also controlled the Panama Canal, which it built using the labor of thousands of workers, mostly from Barbados and the West Indies.
In 1848, a newspaper in New Orleans wrote: “One of the great laws of progress is that the weak give way to the strong, and that superior races replace inferior ones.”
178 years later, Higseth echoed these ideas when he spoke to Latin American leaders, stressing that the region must remain “Christian nations under God” and unite against what he called “radical narco-Nazism.”
Trump himself has repeatedly revived the goal of “controlling Cuba,” a goal that dates back more than 200 years, since Thomas Jefferson—the former US president—described the island as “the most important addition that could be made to our political system.”
