President Donald Trump has generated a steady stream of headlines since returning to office by renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” and Lake Ontario “Lake America,” while also calling for other changes to the maps Americans use every day. At the recent GOP midterm convention, he whipped up the crowd with a recitation of cartographic modifications, including the as-yet-aspirational transformation of New Mexico to “New America.”
It’s easy to dismiss these moves as political theater, just more fodder for social media outrage or late-night comedy. But history teaches us that maps and the names, territories and landmarks they include or exclude always have political consequences, shaping identities, cultural belonging, territorial claims, education and international relations. Maps may appear to be objective and unbiased representations of the world, but they are inevitably, inherently selective.
For example, throughout history, governments have used the practice of naming territories and bodies of water to advance nationalist goals and assert territorial claims and aspirations. With Russia’s occupation and annexation of Crimea in 2014, Russian maps were remade to include Crimea as part of Russian territory to assert political authority. Trump’s effort to remake maps similarly speaks to their power to advance particular territorial visions and his expansionist “America First” agenda.
Throughout history, governments have used the practice of naming territories and bodies of water to advance nationalist goals and assert territorial claims and aspirations.
This muscular nationalist agenda can also be found in the way Trump is going about his renaming project. Traditionally, geographic name changes in the United States are reviewed by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names and, if approved, enter the Geographic Names Information System, the official database for federally recognized names. Most renaming requests start at the local level. Trump’s executive orders and proposals, by contrast, are top-down and therefore not the result of consultation and standard processes for legally renaming geographical features.
While certainly in keeping with Trump’s leadership style, this approach has its downsides. Such dictates can ignore local histories, preferences and practices. Consequently, they may produce bottom-up resistance and fail in the long term. While standard maps of the U.S. represent federal and state boundaries, they omit sovereign tribal jurisdictions; as a result, cartographers and activists produce “countermaps” to reclaim their space and history. During the colonial period, Western powers used maps to create nation-states and their borders; many of these top-down cartographic interventions continue to lead to territorial strife in regions around the world.
While executive orders can direct the federal government to use a new name, they do not affect naming preferences of foreign governments, international organizations (such as the International Hydrographic Organization or the United Nations) or localites. Also, executive orders can be legally challenged, overturned by Congress or revoked by a successor president. As a result, it is likely that a future president will revoke these orders, and the maps will be remade yet again.
In the meantime, such renaming sprees have national and international consequences. On the national level, we see that state education departments, such as Florida’s, are already updating educational materials and maps used in public schools. Other states, however, have resisted these changes. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul refused to change the name of Lake Ontario in response to Trump’s executive order, arguing that doing so would be disrespectful to the history of the region and disruptive to our binational relationship with Canada. As states adopt different approaches, students from Florida to New York and California may learn different names for the same bodies of water and territories, leading to different materials and classroom instruction.
Moreover, changing names — whether of bodies of water, territories or landmarks — can sever our sense of belonging to the place where we live. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of East and West Germany, many streets in what was then East Berlin were renamed. Some residents resisted these renaming practices and felt displaced by the new geography; they lost their sense of belonging to a city that was still theirs. But once the new names were adopted into school textbooks and government databases, East Berliners saw the identities and histories associated with their former city and state disappear into the history books.
The U.S. is not like divided Germany of the late 1980s. However, the unity of our nation is at risk when the ways we refer to our landscapes and cityscapes can be used to drive yet another wedge between us. A shared understanding of the history of our nation, the borders on our maps and the names represented on them creates a sense of belonging to a nation with a shared cultural history. Politicizing our nation’s maps and the names represented on them divides rather than unites us as Americans.
On the international level, such unilateral proclamations create diplomatic friction and complicate cross-border cooperation, particularly in the management of shared natural resources. Lake Ontario is one such shared resource, subject to numerous international agreements designed to maintain water quality and resolve water disputes. More than 9 million people, including approximately 3 million Americans and 6 million Canadians, rely on the lake for drinking water. Renaming it threatens the up-to-now highly effective environmental partnership between the U.S. and Canada, undermining the water diplomacy that supports cooperation over this vital resource.
So, as much as we may be tempted to dismiss these naming disputes as symbolic politics, history suggests otherwise. Regardless of whether Trump’s renaming efforts endure, they remind us that maps are never neutral. And they have the power to reshape our world in ways that outlast the political moments that produced them. Whether driven by an executive order or a post on Truth Social, maps have the power to make and unmake states and to strengthen or weaken our sense of belonging to a shared nation. In an era when bilateral and multilateral negotiations have never been more important, we do not want to lose our shared national history, nor can we afford to lose our long-standing international alliances over map wars.
The post Why Trump’s map wars matter appeared first on MS NOW.
