The post-second world war taboo on acquiring territory through force or by the threat of force is being unravelled by a generation of political leaders, led by expansionist threats from Donald Trump that are unprecedented for a US president.
Experts are warning that a combination of the Russian aggression against Ukraine and Trump’s comments explicitly pushing for the US to acquire Greenland, Canada, the Panama canal and Gaza is fuelling a permissive environment that threatens long-recognised borders and the international rules-based order that has existed since the end of the war.
The norm, enshrined in article 2 of the UN charter of 1945, states that “all members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state”.
While Trump’s threats have so far remained just that, the new pursuit of expansionist goals is more concretely visible elsewhere, drawing comparisons to a modern-day version of the board game Risk.
The headline of an essay in the current issue of Foreign Affairs puts it bluntly: “Conquest is back.”
In Africa, Rwanda’s autocratic president Paul Kagame’s backing for the M23 rebels in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been driven by his more vocal adherence to a “greater Rwanda” policy.
In the Middle East, Israel’s far right is pushing aggressively for formal annexation of the occupied West Bank, while its military is involved in what it now says is an open-ended presence in parts of Syria and Lebanon. On Friday, Israel’s defence minister ordered the military to “seize more ground” in Gaza and threatened to annex part of the territory unless Hamas released the remaining 59 Israeli hostages still held by the group.
China, while long insisting Taiwan is part of its territory, is increasing its pressure on Taipei, with some analysts speculating it may take advantage of the weakening on the norm of conquest to absorb Taiwan and expand its influence in the South China sea.
In Europe, what was once unthinkable, that Russia could physically threaten the Baltic and eastern states, is not just imaginable but an urgent security issue.
Overarching all of this, say experts, is a US president who is not only prepared to approve annexation elsewhere but has an imperialist outlook, which has led some, including Ivo Daalder, the former US ambassador to Nato, to declare that with “Trump in office, the rules-based order is no more”.
As analysts have noted, Trump’s policy on both trade tariffs and territorial acquisition harks back to the 19th century – the era of president William McKinley, who presided over the acquisition of Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Hawaii.
Most starkly, the outgoing Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, earlier this month accused the US president of planning to use tariffs to bring about “a total collapse of the Canadian economy because that will make it easier to annex us”.
“The idea of overtly threatening acquisition of another territory through the use of force has been off-table throughout the postwar period,” says Michael Albertus, a professor at the University of Chicago and the author of Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn’t, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies, who, like others, sees an unravelling of the postwar international order. “Since Trump’s election, that has really changed a lot.”
The current expansionist mindset of certain nations, Albertus recently wrote, is “just the opening chapter of a new global competition for territory”. And while some of this concerns Trump’s own expansionist ideas, equally significant, says Albertus, is the change in Washington’s treatment of Russia as it has tried to annex large parts of Ukraine.
“I think that risks emboldening other countries to test the waters and see if there is any pushback or not.”
A key driver, he argues, is technology, climate change and the demand for rare earth minerals, visible in Trump’s desire to acquire Greenland and in Rwanda’s moves in the DRC.
For Samir Puri, the head of the global governance and security programme at Chatham House, an academic who worked for the Foreign Office, the current rupture marks not only a reconfiguration since the second world war but also the post-cold war international order and its assumptions.
“It’s not only the post-1945 world order but post-1991 in terms of the balance of power. It is important to understand where US is at now. Trump is not an isolationist. He is somewhat imperial in his bearing, not least the fact he might reward Putin’s territorial acquisition.”
While Puri admits it is impossible to predict where this transition will lead, he is sceptical that meaningful international mechanisms can truly stop nations and leaders determined on expansion in the way that a US-led coalition came together during the first Gulf War (1990-91) to expel Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait.
It was that intervention in Kuwait, believes Puri, that created the environment for the decades that followed. “The US coalition to push Iraq out of Kuwait set the tone for a generation [of thinking about sovereign integrity] for a 35-year period.”
For many, what is most concerning is how Trump’s actions and statements are creating a permissive space, from his open scepticism towards Ukraine to his suggestion that Gaza could be taken over by the US.
“Donald Trump’s willingness to betray Ukraine and his rejection of the basic principle of territorial sovereignty is consistent with simultaneously giving Israel a green light to proceed in ways that break the law and seem likely only to fuel an endless cycle of violence,” Michael Becker, a professor of international human rights law at Trinity CollegeDublin, who previously worked at the international court of justice, recently told Al Jazeera.
Kerry Goettlich, a lecturer in international security at the University of Reading, sees the change in the US stance as most significant in its transformation from a historic “informal imperialism” that used alternative tools like coups and influence “short of annexation during the 20th century’s period of US hegemony”.
Goettlich is unsure how much Trump’s own talk of territorial expansion in Greenland or of making Canada America’s 51st state should be taken at face value and how much of it is a negotiating position.
“For much of the 20th century there was general agreement that the US would not annex and conquer territory, with some small exceptions.
“It was advertised that the US didn’t do conquest. What is clearly changing is this is first time since [the 19th century] when there is a conversation about whether the US does do conquest or not.”
And that, says Goettlich, has come in tandem with a change in previous “certainties” about America’s role in the world amid its declining power that – correctly or not – have been “taken for granted”.
“What we see with Trump is a clear change of rhetoric that doesn’t have moralism as the basis for the US role in the world, where it puts itself on a moral pedestal.”
History has its own warning for Trump as he leads the charge for territorial acquisition. Kal Raustiala noted in an essay in February for Just Security that McKinley’s expansionist policies during the Spanish-American war proved to be deeply problematic.
As Tanisha Fazal, a professor at the University of Minnesota and author of the Conquest Is Back essay, writes – echoing the arguments of over a century ago: “Conquest is fundamentally incompatible with democracy. Many tenets of the liberal international order cannot survive in the absence of the norm against territorial conquest. Perhaps that is the point.”
