After years of calling for border walls and closed borders with adjacent states, one might be forgiven for thinking that Trump has high regard for national borders. He doesn’t. He has about as much respect for borders as the Israelis have for the border with Syria, or the Russians have for the border with the Donbas, or George W. Bush had for the border with Iraq.
As he put it in Tuesday’s press conference, when asked why he thought the US should annex Canada, he said: “Because Canada and the United States, that would really be something. You get rid of that artificially drawn line and you take a look at what that looks like, and it would also be much better for national security.”
Ah yes, that “artificially drawn line” that doesn’t mean much at all.
This attitude toward borders has long been a general characteristic of expansionist, imperialist, and colonialist states, as can be seen in countless empires and “spheres of influence” throughout history. For example, the State of Israel regards the “border” with the West Bank with utter contempt. Israeli “settlers”—i.e., squatters and thieves—are encouraged by the Israeli state to move onto land that is de jure within the borders of allegedly sovereign Palestinian territory. The border is only open in one direction, though. The border is functionally open for the Israelis, but is quite closed for Palestinians.
This has been true for countless other colonial situations. For example, in many cases in the nineteenth century, the British state outright subsidized British migration to African colonies. In the cape colony in the 1820s, for example, the migrants were given farms, equipment, and food. Similar policies were employed in other British colonies in the hope that a large English-speaking population would arrive and rival in number the indigenous population. It is likely the British rulers in these areas would have accepted all arriving Brits, meaning the border was essentially open. The numbers of British citizens willing to re-locate to Africa in this period turned out to be rather small, however, and this de facto open border led to only limited migration.
The Border was not open in the opposite direction, of course. No sizable portion of the African indigenous population was free to move to the United Kingdom.
Expansionist states also ignore borders to facilitate the movement of state assets such as military personnel. For example, the State of Israel, which has long ignored the Syrian border in order to occupy the Golan Heights, also recently seized more territory in southern Syria. Israelis now brag that Mount Hermon in southern Syria is “in Northern Israel.”
This is typical for any state that claims a “sphere of influence” and thus can freely ignore national borders within that sphere. This is often true in Russia’s so-called “near abroad” and it is certainly the case in the Americas where the United States claims a vast sphere of influence under the so-called Monroe Doctrine. Indeed, it’s difficult to count how many times the US has invaded Caribbean and Latin American countries such as Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Central America. The US government treats these borders as nonexistent whenever they become inconvenient for Washington.
So, it’s not at all surprising that Donald Trump would declare that the US-Canada border is merely an “artificially drawn line.” This rhetoric is often the first step in establishing a rationale for a state’s revanchist or expansionist goals. The Israelis pretend that Palestine doesn’t exist—and thus there is no border. Moscow states that eastern Ukraine is “historic Russia”—and thus there is no border.
Trump now employs similar rhetoric with his current fit of expansionism into Panama and Canada, although it is clear that Trump is unlikely to carry out anything resembling an annexation of Canada. After all, he only has two years until the GOP loses badly in the midterm election and his agenda disappears into the Washington ether. Nonetheless, the Canada-US example reminds us that border integrity is much more high-stakes for smaller and weaker states faced with a regional hegemon like Israel, the US, or Russia. It is the smaller, weaker states that rely more fully on international norms about territorial state sovereignty, denoted by borders. Sometimes the norms work, as with Canada. Often, they don’t work as with nearly any country unfortunate enough to border the State of Israel.
Originally Posted at https://mises.org/