Reviewing the week’s news, I can’t help but see some intentions emerging from the deliberately overwhelming flurry of Trump’s first few days of his second term, including his Davos address. I think his expansionist rhetoric is real – he intends to use economic, if not purely military, force to form an American protectorate across North and Central America, with Greenland added in to boot. His “jokes”, at first seemingly insane, are more than jokes.

Why am I thinking about the board game RISK? I think Greenland is in there mostly because it looks so huge up there on a Mercator projection of the world. For his ego, he wants to grab all that far northern territory, and take credit for doing it.

And Panama, it’s right next to U.S. controlled Costa Rica, so might as well grab that and secure the trade route to remove Chinese influence.

Canada is weak politically right now, and will hold out from a sovereign perspective, but would give up a lot of other concessions.

And Mexico, as a population (consumer) source would be amazing. It just needs to be brought in line for investment, and the declaration of the cartels as terrorists will allow bombing of their bases, sure to become popular with many, Mexicans included. Gaza has shown that people’s tolerance for indiscriminate loss of collateral human life is pliable if challenged relentlessly.

Coupled with withdrawal from other zones of the world stage (leaving Europe to fend for themselves, abandoning Taiwan), we might be seeing the emergence of the Orwellian world order of 1984. Oceania, Eurasia, Eastasia. Great.