OPINION: Gaza, Canada, Panama, Greenland — the price of empire

Our new administration’s foreign policies are starting to take shape. They reveal disturbing ideas and trends. They also include huge challenges.

Canada and Greenland are already part of NATO. To take them by force would require war with NATO. To keep them would require at least doubling the U.S. armed forces and spending uncounted trillions our government doesn’t have or any plans to raise. Canada and Denmark, which owns Greenland, won’t give them to our government. They want to be their own countries. And as we learned in Iraq, other countries will kill and maim our soldiers if we just invade. So where will the funds come from to go to war with NATO when the Congress is giving it all to Elon Musk and the billionaires in the U.S.?

Add to the need for troops for the Canadian and Greenland invasions, the additional troops needed to take and hold the Panama Canal since the Panamanians will fight, plus the Gaza colony, and then securing Ukraine, if Ukraine’s president bends the knee to ours. Where will the troops come from as we downsize our military, and who will pay them?

It will take a decade plus a full Army division to secure, occupy and then pacify Gaza. Clearing rubble, dismantling the unexploded bombs and burying the dead in Gaza will probably take all the resources of the Navy Seabees, the Air Force Rapid Engineer Deployable Heavy Operational Repair Squadron (Red Horse) and the Army Corps of Engineers for several years with no profit for anybody. No country will help the U.S. pay for anything on that scale. And all of this needs to take place before any Trump hotel resorts and golf courses can even be started.

Lastly, there is a proposed new project in Ukraine to take and mine about half their rare earth minerals, which seem to mostly be located in Russian-occupied Eastern and Southern Ukraine. A war to expel Russia and then a permanent occupation force will be needed. That may or may not happen still. It depends if Ukraine’s president surrenders to ours.

In World War II, the U.S. had 16 million people in its armed forces, eight times what we currently have. We also had the draft and, since we’d been attacked at Pearl Harbor, we had the will of the American people to see the war through to the end. The U.S. experience in Iraq and Afghanistan showed us that we, as a people, have little tolerance for prolonged wars of conquest and long occupations. We have even less tolerance when our killed-in-action numbers top 5,000 or more a year. But this is likely on the current path.

Then, there are all the cultural issues. Canada is a bilingual country with French as an official language. Canada has a parliamentary system. Its government is run by elected ministers, not presidential appointees, who first are elected locally in cities and towns. Bringing Canada into the U.S. will require Congress to add French as an official language. Greenland will add Danish as another official language. Panama speaks a dialect of Spanish and Gaza’s language is Arabic. Can Congress write legislation in English, Spanish, Arabic and French and make any sense? Congress has trouble with just plain American English now. How will Congress even debate in Arabic and French simultaneously with Spanish and English?

So how will the U.S. run these new colonies? They won’t be ready for statehood for decades. What they have would not contribute to the U.S. for decades. They would just be expenses to add to our national debt. We don’t even know how to reconcile their forms of government with our own. They only know parliamentary forms of government.

We need to start asking some tough questions of the current Republican Congress on how it plans to resolve some of these questions. How do Congressman Russ Fulcher and Sens. Mike Crapo and Jim Risch, all R-Idaho, plan to write legislation in four or five languages? How will they or the party raise the money to rebuild Gaza and conquer Russia, Canada, Denmark (and all of NATO), and Panama with our current sparse military?

The U.S. can ill afford to slap-dash go into full world conquest mode without allies and with an undersized military. I thought MAGA was elected to avoid war and make the country prosperous. But this foreign policy is not even close to being aligned with those aims. The U.S. is still a democratic republic, not an empire.

We need a plan if we are to be a great empire and our congressman and senators must show us the plan or change the aims of our new king — er, president.

Sherry, of Lewiston, taught school and also worked for 30 years on Idaho state insurance laws.