Michael Williams, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa
March 17, 2025
In the few weeks since United States President Donald Trump returned to the White House, world leaders and commentators have struggled to make sense of his approach to foreign policy, including tariffs, alliance renegotiations and threats of territorial appropriation.
No one is sure how much is bluff or negotiating tactics, nor how much is deadly serious.
For some, Trump’s foreign policy is simply incoherent, but most try to fit his approach into the familiar choice between isolationism and internationalism.
But there’s a third possibility: Trump’s second presidency marks a contemporary twist on an older form of continentalist geopolitics with important implications for Canada and the world.
‘Great Powers’
Although it has been largely missing from foreign policy debates in the post-Second World War era, continentalist geopolitics has a long and often controversial history.
In the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, it envisioned a world divided into “great spaces,” each dominated by a different “Great Power.” According to this perspective, not all regions are equally important, and continentalist geopolitics does not require a choice between internationalism and isolationism.
Instead, continentalism recommends that Great Powers like the U.S. — with its massive financial, natural and industrial resources — concentrate on controlling territory, the regions surrounding it and the crucial transportation routes on its continental fringes.
Pressure is placed on countries whose importance is determined by their geopolitical proximity, and those that are least able to resist due to their dense connections and relative dependence on the U.S.
The objective is not just to gain specific advantages; it’s to force neighbours into even tighter economic and infrastructural connections and dependence. The obvious countries in this scenario are Canada and Mexico, and it’s therefore unsurprising that both have been the targets of Trump’s significant tariff threats and other coercive measures.
When Ontario Premier Doug Ford talks about the need for tighter continental ties through a continental AmCan arrangement, he provides exactly the desired reaction.
Pressuring neighbours
Beyond geographically contiguous states, continentalist geopolitics also focuses on areas that command key strategic passages and trade routes, especially those currently controlled by weaker powers.
For the U.S., Panama, with its canal, fits the bill. Danish-administered Greenland, with its natural resources and geographic importance in a rapidly thawing Arctic region, is another. It’s unsurprising that these countries, along with Canada, were a Trump focus in the first weeks of his second administration.
Today, continentalist geopolitics recognizes the multi-polarity and “multi-alignment” in world politics.
It’s not isolationist, but it recognizes that waning American power in an inter-connected world gives more distant states the ability to resist U.S. pressure by making deals with a wide range of other countries. In this setting, an interventionist global role is neither possible nor desirable, and the U.S. should refrain from global commitments.
As U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated in one of his first interviews after taking office:
“It’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power… that was an anomaly. It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multi-polar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet. We face that now with China and to some extent Russia.”
No commitment to global stability
The continentalist perspective does not require a complete separation from the world economic or security order. Trade, financial and technology flows can be encouraged, but their basis would be a re-industrialized and more self-sufficient core, well-insulated from economic and security threats.
Extended interests, such as European stability, could be minimized by increasing the cost burden to allies and minimizing fixed commitments. A powerful global capacity with a “light” geographic footprint is the preferred posture.
Calls for increased defence spending by NATO allies and for European responsibility in enforcing a post-war settlement in Ukraine logically follow.
The continentalist playbook is content to leave the management of distant regions to other powers, each pre-eminent in their part of the world. That means participation in international organizations is minimized.
Foreign aid should reflect American interests, with involvement depending on the costs and benefits, not any automatic commitment to global stability. Feeding the world’s most extensive development agency, USAID, “into the wood-chipper” — to quote Elon Musk — is a page taken straight from this kind of geopolitician’s handbook.
Unsavoury history
The possibility that a continentalist geopolitics underpins recent U.S. foreign policy initiatives has received too little attention in Canada.
It’s not yet clear that the actions of America’s new administration represent the rise, much less the triumph, of Trumpian geopolitics. Nor is there any guarantee that such a vision would or will succeed.
But there is enough evidence to suggest we should take the possibility seriously. Since 1945, America’s foreign policy options have resided somewhere between internationalism and isolationism. But a geopolitical vision of world politics as a diverse canvas of large territory dominated by different Great Powers have a long, if often unsavoury, history in foreign policy.
A southern neighbour pursuing a such a geopolitical approach would mark a radical transformation in world order and pose huge challenges for Canada. Canadians should at least be prepared for the possibility.
Michael Williams, Professor of International Politics, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa
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This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.