One of the more dramatic differences between Donald Trump’s first and second terms is his territorial ambitions. After having said effectively nothing about this on the campaign trail in 2024, the president spent much of 2025 emphasizing his desire to annex Canada, Greenland, the Panama Canal and the Gaza Strip.
In 2026, he’s gone much further.
In recent months the Republican has begun treating Venezuela as a colony and promoting online images that have raised the specter of the South American country becoming a U.S. state. Trump has also recently boasted that the United States has “essentially taken over” Iran after publishing similar content to social media about the Middle Eastern foe also becoming a U.S. state.
This dovetailed with the American president publishing a list of what he considered U.S. territories — a list that included Micronesia and the Marshall Islands, both of which are sovereign.
Over the holiday weekend, Trump went further still, using his platform to impose an American flag over an even larger part of the planet.
Under this vision, the U.S. would include Canada, Mexico, Greenland, Iceland, Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, much of Central America, Jamaica, the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands and the rest of the Caribbean.
The image did not go unnoticed abroad. In fact, Icelandic officials summoned the U.S. ambassador to Iceland, Billy Long, for an official meeting on Monday to remind him that the Arctic nation is independent and would remain so in the future. (Long told an unfortunate “joke” about Iceland becoming an American state earlier this year, which made Trump’s online map that much more notable.)
There was related pushback from officials in Mexico and Denmark, both of which are U.S. allies.
There’s no reason to assume the White House will actually try to acquire any or all of these countries, even as Trump appears to have wandered into yet another international incident of his own making for no reason whatsoever.
As for the Republican’s apparent interest in empire, I have some bad news for Americans who voted for the GOP ticket in 2024 because they were moved by Trump’s vows of a foreign policy rooted in restraint and noninterventionism.
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