The New Colossus

Cost-Benefit Analysis of Tropical Hyperborea, Operation Rake, and Manifest Destiny

This image is a pretty good litmus test for politics: do you regard this map with respect, or disgust?

In the past week Trump has been fantasizing a lot about land grabs. Taking back the Panama Canal, annexing Greenland and Canada, and a “soft invasion” of Mexico are on the short list. The consensus “serious” view is that this is the usual trolling and nothing to get excited about, and that’s almost certainly accurate. If there is some logic to the madness, it’s probably to deflect away from the “betrayal” of the “base” over H1-Bs (“jail is programmed” principle), or perhaps the glorious visions of continental conquest are a diversion to normalize a much more modest scheme to bribe Greenlanders away from Denmark.

That caveat out of the way, it would nonetheless be an interesting exercise to consider how each of these scenarios could go in order of realism, and rate each of them on their costs and benefits, and no less importantly, how based or cringe they would be.

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Greenland: Ulthuan of the Atlantic

Greenland is widely perceived to have substantial strategic value. It lies underneath the shortest ICBM flight path from Russia to the US, making it prime territory for hosting early warning radars. It also closes the GIUK gap that was central to surveilling passing Soviet submarines. Hence Trump’s comment that “we need Greenland for national security purposes.” It is also at this point a banality to mention that it contains a motherlode of strategic resources, especially Rare Earth Metals (REMs).

More speculatively, Greenland after global warming will become literally green - a veritable wonderland of lush deciduous forests, alpine mountains, and a giant freshwater lake at its heart (much like Ulthuan, the High Elven superpower of Warhammer Fantasy world). Now probably AI timelines make all these considerations quite irrelevant, but taking out cheap insurance policies is rarely a bad idea, and Greenland would be an incredibly valuable asset in a “business as usual” world defined by no AI discontinuities, tech stagnation, and severe global warming.

Map of post-glacial Greenland c.3000 AD.

The US has a long history of eyeing up Greenland. It directly managed its defenses in 1941-45 with the agreement of the Danish government in exile. US Secretary of State James F. Byrnes attempted to purchase it from Denmark in 1946, though his $100 million offer was refused. This followed on similar proposals mooted since the time of William H. Seward, who is most famous for the successful purchase of Alaska from the Russian Empire in 1867. Greenlanders have enjoyed home rule from Denmark since 1979, and gained the right to secede in 2009. So why not acquire this future “Tropical Hyperborea” at a discount?

In theory, this is the most practical of Trump’s proposed land grabs - and the only one that can be plausibly voluntary. For example, each Greenlander could be offered a $100,000 along with automatic US citizenship. There are 55,000 Greenlanders, so that would only total $5.5B - pocket change even just for Elon Musk (net worth: $450B). This would probably not be a good deal for Greenlanders, since they get the equivalent of more than $10,000 in subsidies per capita from Denmark annually. Nonetheless, even increasing the payout to $1M - a total of $60B - would not cause any appreciable strain to the $30T US economy. You can praise “sovereignty” and “self-determination” as much as you want, but realistically, I suspect almost everyone would opt to become a dollar millionaire if given the choice between that and making a political statement. Though in light of Trump’s, ahem, record on honoring his deals, I would recommend Greenlanders go over the Terms & Conditions with a fine-tooth comb.

So should the US go ahead with bribing the Greenlanders? The problem is that on closer consideration almost all the “benefits” crumple into insignificance.

As regards security, the US already has the massive Pituffik Space Base in north-western Greenland (previously Thule AFB); in the event it needs another facility, it is likely that Denmark would agree to it. And even so far as Russia’s rusting navy still represents a threat, the role of the GIUK gap has massively diminished with the development of much more capable space-based surveillance. Denmark and Canada are both staunch US allies and it is hard to envisage them turning a blind eye in the event that Trump’s fantasies about Chinese and Russian ships “surrounding” Greenland somehow come true.

As regards resources, there’s nothing stopping US (or other) corporations mining in Greenland right now. The problem is not regulations per se - at least beyond the usual environmental ones that any functional First World nation has - but that there’s no particular advantage to doing this in Greenland. Its cold and inaccessibility just makes many projects unfeasible in principle, especially since “Rare Earth Metals” are a misnomer anyway - they are incredibly common across the world. Back in the early 2010s, I was somewhat interested in the Arctic region, and one of the books I read back then was The Future History of the Arctic by Charles Emmerson. One thing that struck me was how bullish his tone was on Greenland’s minerals production prospects, mentioning reams of multi-billion dollar exploration deals and leases being signed by companies like Cairn Energy (oil) and Quadra Mining (molybdenum). Looking up what happened to them since, the common thread is that all of these projects failed to reach the exploitation stage and the companies in question left Greenland at a loss. In retrospect, the reason for this must have been the end of the commodities supercycle in 2014 - most pronounced in oil, but with downstream effects throughout the extraction sector. Its most notable effect was to crater the fortunes of previously high-flying resource exporters; for instance, Russia’s GDP has barely grown in the past decade (which incidentally explains much of its failure at military modernization and why the Ukraine War ended up as it did). At Greenland’s more prosaic level, the primary effect of the commodities crunch was to scupper Greenlanders’ hopes of fiscal independence from Danish subsidies, which were high when the book was written in 2010. Fiscal independence was always a prerequisite of political independence, and so that too must have gotten postponed indefinitely.

Greenland resources map.

Predicting commodities prices is a fool’s errand and a surefire way to get wrecked by the markets. The only pattern is a strong tendency for most of them to decline versus other asset classes over historical timescales, and as technology continues to accelerate, we might expect that to remain the case, with EVs in particular exerting downwards pressure on oil prices. However, AI throws a spanner in the works. If bullish AGI timelines are validated, then that could stimulate a frenzy of demand for energy, certain minerals, and even glacial locations for supercluster cooling in allied and strategically secure regions. Greenland gets to keep 100% of any resource revenue under the terms of its constitutional arrangements with Denmark, the only reasonable condition being that Danish equalization transfers would go down to zero in the event the island becomes richer than the metropole. Greenland also has a legally guaranteed right to declare independence whensoever it wishes. These are important points to emphasize because not only do US territories not have such rights, but they are also obligated to share resource revenue with the federal government. Consequently, accepting an overly modest bribe today in return for joining the US will be short-selling Greenlanders’ future prospects and freedom of action. My own intuition would be that $250,000 per capita would be the bare minimum to consider any such offer but I would gun for $1M+ in negotiations.

Obviously, this also assumes that the US approach will be one of honest bribery. Trump seems to be under the strange notion that Greenland is Denmark’s to sell. That is not Denmark’s prerogative and would be illegal under Danish law. Trump has refused to “rule out” a military solution to Greenland. His son, touring Greenland with a MAGA posse, shared a video of a Greenlander with a MAGA cap avidly calling for Greenland to join the US. True to MAGA traditions, the guy turned out to be a violent drug dealer well-known in local criminal circles. But at least in this case, the most plausible scenario is the one in which Trump bribes Greenlanders fair and square since wrecking relations with Europe over an icebox strikes me as insane even if Trump does harbor serious imperial designs.

Benefits: Decidedly modest benefits in security and resources; very long-term, may become some of the world’s most valuable free estate. 3/10.

Costs: The bribery option is legal and voluntary. That said, it can hardly be viewed as a friendly action by Denmark or the EU. -1/10.

Net Benefits: 2/10.

Basedness: The US becomes the world’s 2nd largest country by land mass (suck it China! suck it Canada!) and improves its aesthetics on the world map.

Perhaps the Ancap faction of MAGA transforms it into a new frontier zone open to novel experiments in technology and governance, with network states like Praxis leading the way. (Use my referral link to get first dibs).

Or perhaps Dark MAGA uses it as an prison island to intern illegals and reeducate the libs. That would… not be ideal. But it will be based.

Overall, I’d estimate Greenland expansion would be 7/10 on the Based scale.

Reclaiming the Panama Canal

Trump says he wants to use military force to the Panama Canal on the basis that 38,000 Americans died building it and that “Chinese soldiers [are] lovingly, but illegally, operating” it. In reality, only a few hundred US citizens (out of 5,609 workers total) died during the American phase of its construction, and there is no evidence that China controls it or has a credible plan to do so.

Of course, even if both those claims were true it’s hard to see how they would translate into a casus belli. This brings us to the main point, which is that seizing the Panama Canal - though a minor operation in military terms - will unequivocally violate international law. It would also look particularly bad because Panama is not a dictatorship, nor does it even have a standing army. It will be viewed as overt bullying and imperialism, and that is exactly what it would be. This makes it extraordinarily less likely than bribing Greenlanders. By the same token, this is also the point at which Canada should get seriously worried.

Benefits: Military control over a strategic chokepoint that China or anyone else is not in a position to block in the first place. 1/10.

Costs: Probably Latin Americans get more serious about military integration. Central Americans will become much more hostile, but my impression is their politics are so dysfunctional it shouldn’t be that big of a deal for the US. Violation of international law. Europeans voice strong concern and distance diplomatically, but remain in NATO and don’t increase military expenditures. Many Americans traveling to Europe will start pretending to be Canadians again. -4/10.

Net Benefits: -3/10.

Basedness: Pushing around a country with no standing military on fake pretenses strikes me as unsporting and cringe. 0/10.

Operation Rake: Last Days of Canada

Trump has referred to Trudeau as “governor” of Canada and repeatedly mulled the idea of it becoming the 51st state. There are some plausible reasons for why the annexation of Canada would rebound to the benefit of Americans and Canadians alike. The population of the resultant polity will increase from 340M to 380M, and its GDP will increase from $30T to $32T. It will account for 28% of the world’s oil production, which is about the same as that of the collective OPEC. Canada hosts vast mineral reserves, freshwater that can be used to irrigate the Great Plains, and the strategic Northwest Passage. The New Colossus would become the world’s biggest country by land mass and rapidly overtake Russia to become the world’s premier military Power in the Arctic. Canadians may see faster convergence growth as its lagging GDP per capita catches up given access to America’s economies of scale and deep capital markets. They will enjoy greater freedom of speech thanks to the First Amendment, while American exposure to the Canadian healthcare system hopefully rationalizes its own healthcare debate. Finally, many American patriots view Canadian national identity as a fake one rooted in “fuck you dad” anti-Americanism and performative Wokeness. In this interpretation, Canadians may indeed be relieved to be unburdened of their irrational and psychologically taxing neuroses.

It comes off as amusingly similar to Russian nationalist conceptions about Ukraine prior to the war which are even reflected in the respective opinion polls. There is the widespread view that just incorporating Alberta - a proposal championed by more realistic American expansionists such as Nemets - will create a new Republican safe state on the basis that it votes conservative in Canadian elections. However, Canadian conservatism isn’t really Republicanism, and it seems that in the context of actual US politics, it would be a swing state at best and Colorado more realistically. But the bigger roadblock is that only 19% of Albertans support joining the US, which is not much higher than 13% for Canada as a whole. This is not a base from which you can can have a democratic referendum to validate annexation or even get a grassroots revolt off the ground (this number was ~33% in Donetsk/Lugansk oblasts in early 2014).

Perhaps you can try to get that number up - but it’s hard to see how one can get it to 50% or more, at least short of exotic scenarios like AGI opening up a 10x gap in living standards between the US and Canada by 2027 or something absurd like that. Consequently, any annexation will have to be coercive - Nemets muses that a “few hundred men of will” may suffice, presumably alluding to Strelkov’s band. But the direct translation from Ukraine would imply a collapse of the Americanophile sentiment that does exist there. In that case, there would then be no point in fantasizing about Alberta bolstering the GOP; in electoral terms, I suspect it won’t even be a Colorado (only plausible if the annexation is voluntary), but a Democratic monoculture like D.C., with extreme separatist sentiments and a shelf life that ends with the next Democratic Presidency.

So overall this seems like a no starter - at least unless Trump does something really funny and “special”.

Going from trolling to implementation isn’t going to be easy. You would need to get the Republican elites on board, and keep most of the population at least quiescent. The military also has to go along. These would all be extremely challenging tasks in the context of a society much freer than Russia’s. On the other hand, at least on X and right-wing talk shows, the response to this bait has perhaps been a bit too enthusiastic for Canadians to feel entirely comfortable. And as for the military, well, Trump did say he wants to have “Hitler’s generals”. Purges there would be an early warning sign.

War Plan Red - the War Department's 1927 contingency plan for a war against the British Empire.

And then it will be TIME to dust off War Plan Red - Operation Rake - three days to Ottawa!

One thing that’s pretty obvious is that in the event this scenario does come about, the US will almost certainly no longer be a liberal democracy with meaningfully free and fair elections. Opposition from the media, from civil society, from the saner/less based elements of the national security establishment will almost certainly scupper any such majestic visions of glorious continental conquest if it were otherwise. And one way or another, Canadians would have to be disenfranchised for at least the next generation, long enough for Americanization to happen, and it's hard to see how that can happen short of the US itself going authoritarian. (Perhaps local MAGA despotisms in the Canadian states can churn out 95% votes for the GOP as per Russia’s model in occupied Ukraine, where support for annexation into Russia has collapsed from about 20% in the early 2010s to the low single digits). So I suppose it is worth mentioning that convergence to something like the military-oligarchic junta of late pre-apocalyptic America in the Fallout universe is a near prerequisite of a sustainable Canadian annexation, though if that is the goal then that’s perhaps OK.

One point in favor relative to Russia’s misadventure in Ukraine is that even if Ukraine successfully defending itself seemed highly improbable in February 2022, it can be ruled out in Canada’s case short of an act of God. The GDP differential of 10:1 is analogous to Russia/Ukraine, but that’s where the similarities end. Canada will, presumably, not have eight years to prepare. Its major cities are strung out in a thin line across the US border, instead of stretching away from it. The US military and MIC are not vaporware, as Russia’s largely turned out to be - where are the Armatas? - but the real thing. It can be blockaded, whereas Ukraine shares a border with the EU. Finally, and most importantly, Ukraine is being supplied by a NATO bloc that is 25x richer than Russia, whose members spend a meager ~0.1% of their GDP on aid to Ukraine and in so doing essentially equalize Ukrainian military spending with Russia’s. Ukraine would have lost without this aid by EOY 2022 regardless of how spirited its resistance was. But the US economy is itself the world’s richest by far. Canada will have no saviour. Frankly, the Canadians will probably realize all this quite early, and allow the Anschluss to go ahead without violent resistance. Subsequently, I do not expect serious Canadian resistance beyond occasional assassinations and firebombings - that is, what we see in the occupied Ukrainian territories, and even there most of that is organized by the SBU. Modern low fertility societies are not cut out for intensive partisan warfare.

On most “rational” benchmarks, the result will be a disaster. Regardless of how the Greenland and Panama adventures went down, this 100% guarantees the dissolution of NATO and a sundering of security ties with the EU. They will regard America’s transformation into a rogue state with extreme alarm. They will probably create a European Army and belatedly fulfill Trump’s demand to raise military spending to 5% of their GDP. The UK will hasten back to the EU. Latin America - Mexico with the most alacrity - will rush to deepen integration, and seek security guarantees from the EU and China. Indeed, the geopolitical result could be something like the Diplomatic Revolution of 1756 when traditionally warring Powers, disregarding prior disputes, suddenly turned against Prussia.

At the economic level, the US will immediately increase its population and GDP by 10%. However, the cost will be a cratering of what still remains of its global alliances system and the globalized world economic order that allows it to be so rich in the first place. The skilled immigration debate will no longer ever be relevant because such an America will no longer be a magnet for global Elite Human Capital. Millions of Canadians and liberal Americans will emigrate. To the extent the AGI takeoff hasn’t become a runaway process, it is not altogether impossible that this (and not Wokeness) is what finally does in Silicon Valley as the world’s premier tech hub. It depends on how smartly the Europeans can utilize this opportunity. My expectations are low, but who knows? Necessity is the mother of invention.

The US just before the final nuclear war with China in Fallout.

Obviously, this is basically a sci-fi scenario, and improbable in the extreme. (Though perhaps less improbable than Canada or Canadian provinces just joining the US to escape tariffs; it’s not like Russia’s pre-2014 “gas wars” on Ukraine ever earned it Ukrainian goodwill). It is an amusing thought experiment more than anything else. That said, there is one important factor that could make such events of extremely low probability much more plausible than anyone could expect. I did not mention AGI as an aside. If one seriously ponders on the concept of “anthropic shadow” - the notion that current observations are influenced by the probability of many conscious observers existing in future worlds that grow out of it - then we may expect to see incredibly improbable things start to happen in the years immediately before the Singularity, assuming that AI doom risks are so high that only a small subset of possible worlds host observers that make it past the Singularity. The world’s premier chip foundries being located at the world’s most dangerous geopolitical faultline is one such piece of evidence we may already be in a rather improbable world. Events that postpone AGI takeoff - say, a US-China War that destroys TSMC and perhaps turns nuclear, or America becoming a dictatorship that kills globalization and the technocapital machine driving takeoff, or the SF Bay Area drowning in the Pacific after a Richter 10.3 scale earthquake - could be something we may reasonably expect in such a world.

Benefits: Population, GDP growth. More resources. Arctic dominance. 5/10.

Costs: End of the US-centric alliance system, collapse of globalization and the US technocapital machine. -10/10.

Net Benefits: -5/10.

Basedness: The New Colossus becomes the world’s largest country by land area (suck it Russia!).

On a more aesthetic note, I have long viewed Fallout as the cultural product that best defines America (alongside Blood Meridian), and this is what the collective Zeitgeist seems to subconsciously hanker after. I am not sure the end results will be much to anyone’s liking - jail is programmed, after all - but in the meantime, raking those leafs will be undeniably based as fuck. 10/10

Manifest Destiny: Conquest of Mexico

There are reports that Trump and friends are debating over “how much” to invade Mexico. Regardless of the justifications - suppressing the drug cartels, in this instance - it would be obviously grossly illegal, unless done with the permission of Mexico, which as a sovereign country it is very unlikely to accede to. Nonetheless, a “soft invasion” like this would probably not be much more scandalous than occupying the Panama Canal.

But if we’re going with the Operation Rake timeline, then at this point there’s little left to lose and the US might as well go the full hog and tick off Polk’s vision too.

More than half the Mexican population is concentrated in a narrow subtropical belt in the middle of the country that includes Mexico City. (This distribution has been true for more than two millennia; the north consists of desert and arid scrublands, while the south is traditionally inhospitable jungle. But the central parts are defined by a pleasant climate, rich volcanic soils, and what used to be an extensive network of lakes that eased transport in an environment with otherwise high transport costs). There are minor population concentrations in the northern cities that emerged as manufacturing hubs to utilize cheap Mexican labor to service the American market, and tend to directly abut their American “sisters” (San Diego - Tijuana, El Paso - Ciudad Juárez, etc.).

The northern cities can be occupied within a day or two, while amphibious landings can secure the Yucatán peninsula with its beaches and Mayan ruins. Baja California in particular strikes me perhaps the most egregiously underutilized chunk of real estate on the planet. Why not unite the Californias? Baja California only has 5M people, so Americanization should be easy. Desalination programs can increase carrying capacity tenfold. These land grabs can be justified as “reparations” for dealing with the cartels should some figleaf explanation still be needed (though I doubt anyone will care by this point in the timeline).

An amusing fantasy, but an extraordinarily improbable one.

Assuming the New Colossus retains MAGA’s xenophobic character, it would perhaps be ideal to limit annexations to just the aforementioned regions and maintain a smaller Mexico as a protectorate. (Prolonged occupation of the central area might be problematic because its high population density makes it more suitable for partisan warfare, though as with Canada, I don’t expect it to be a huge issue regardless). The conventional part of the conflict will probably be even easier than Canada and nary merits commentary, even though the US/Mexico population disparity is 3:1 instead of 10:1. Historically, the Mexican-American War (1846-48) was a never-ending rollover of Mexico, and past performance is a good predictor of future performance. Mexico is a middle-income country with an average IQ of 85, so we can expect its weak military to be logistically much more challenged even than Canada and display much lower combat effectiveness. (To be sure, the US Army itself will not exactly be the cream of the crop at this point, because smart conscientious people don’t tend to participate in illegal invasions, but everything is relative in life).

Perhaps there’s some extremely small chance of successful Mexican resistance if China or the EU use the interval between Operation Rake and the invasion of Mexico to spam Mexico with drones and AA and anti-ship missiles while America’s leadership goes full Monke but in all likelihood the consolidation of the North American fortress ends without a hitch.

And then it will be time for America’s final rendezvous with imperial destiny.

Benefits: California expansion and many more beaches. 3/10.

Costs: Needs to manage millions or tens of millions of sullen Mexicans (depending on how much annexation there is). -3/10.

Net Benefits: 0/10.

Basedness: Manifest Destiny achievement complete. 7/10.