The global policeman is becoming the global rent-seeker

When President Trump began demanding that Greenland become U.S. territory, most observers reached for familiar explanations: Chinese containment, Russian competition, or mere presidential vanity. Yet they’re missing a key part of the story. America’s increasingly aggressive foreign policy is motivated in large part by money. Specifically, it’s about a fiscal crisis so severe that the United States may be pivoting toward a new form of economic imperialism to sustain itself. Consider the numbers. The United States is predicted to run a $1.7 trillion deficit in 2026, roughly 5-6 percent of its GDP. The national debt stands at $38 trillion. Add unfunded liabilities in Social Security and Medicare, project those obligations forward, and America owes today more than the entire economic output of every nation on Earth combined. This isn’t a distant problem. In seven years, American Social Security will face such severe shortfalls that the average dual-income senior household could see an $18,000 annual cut in benefits—unless new revenue materializes from somewhere, or steep cuts are made to other public services. This is the context we must understand to make sense of Trump’s second term. Americans want more from government while paying less in taxes. For 25 years, Washington has reconciled this contradiction through massive borrowing. The Trump administration’s 2025 tax cuts—renewing 2017 cuts and extending middle-class tax relief to his core voters—have only widened the gap. Something has to give. That something, we believe, is part of what is driving a fundamental shift in American foreign policy: from global policeman to global rent seeker. Look beyond the rhetoric about Greenland’s strategic importance, and you’ll find rare earth minerals, critical mineral deposits, Arctic shipping routes, and strategic base rights—all tangible assets with economic value. Then consider Venezuela. In the past week, Trump has openly enthused about extracting long-term economic rents from the country via its energy sector, with some 30-50 million barrels of Venezuelan crude already secured for the president to sell at “market prices,” spending the proceeds at his discretion. Trump’s piratical impulses are not unpopular. Fully 59 percent of Republicans approve of ousting Maduro specifically to “take control” of Venezuela’s oil fields. More than just a coincidence, this is a pattern. The Trump administration’s tariff regime represents another piece of this puzzle. Tariffs aren’t merely about reshoring manufacturing or punishing China—they’re a revenue mechanism, a way to close the fiscal gap without the political pain of raising income taxes or cutting entitlements. Once you see this fiscal imperative underlying these policy decisions, it becomes impossible to unsee. How many other aspects of American economic and foreign policy are really about papering over the fundamental crack in Washington’s budget? Put another way, Greenland, the Panama Canal, and Venezuela aren’t random fixations of President Trump. They represent tangible “hard” assets—minerals, shipping routes, energy resources—that provide economic leverage independent of debt markets increasingly unfriendly to American profligacy. The implications are profound and disturbing. We may be witnessing the emergence of what could be called “fiscal imperialism”: territorial and resource acquisition driven not by ideological expansion or traditional security concerns, but by the desperate mathematics of an unsustainable budget. This suggests the departure of the U.S. from its traditional post-Second World War role is being driven by forces larger than Trump and his presidency. For America’s allies, particularly Canada, this shift demands a clear-eyed assessment. We’ve long benefited from American security guarantees and economic partnership. But if an increasingly aggressive American foreign policy is being formed more by its deteriorating fiscal picture than, say, a good-faith debate among allies about shared values and competing security interests, all bets are off. In short, a world where the U.S. seeks to extract resources and economic rents from friends and foes alike looks fundamentally different from one underwriting a liberal international order. The tragedy is that none of this is inevitable. America could have addressed its fiscal crisis through hard-nosed budgeting—raising revenues, reforming entitlements, and making tough choices about what services governments should and shouldn’t provide. But that requires political courage Washington has lacked for decades. It’s far easier to promise tax cuts, maintain spending, and look abroad for “resources” to bridge the gap between fact and fiction. The question facing the world is whether we’ll recognize this shift for what it is. Trump’s territorial ambitions aren’t aberrations or distractions. They’re symptoms of a deeper crisis in American political economy—one that could reshape international relations for decades. The sooner we understand that America’s fiscal house of cards is influencing its foreign policy, not merely the capriciousness of a single president, the more clear-eyed we’ll be about the necessity of assuming the heavy burdens of national sovereignty that are sure to come. This commentary draws on a Hub podcast. It was edited with the use of AI. Full program here.