Why Does Trump Really Want Canada?

Having grown up with a narcissistic father, I can tell you that Donald Trump will never be happy until he controls everything. He wants whatever you’ve got, and he never learned to share. 

Bad Donald! BAD Donald!

Now you’ve probably noticed Trump's efforts to steal Venezuela, Greenland and Canada from their rightful owners. This isn’t surprising, given that he's an (unlicensed) realtor first and foremost. For him, the chance to acquire gobs of real estate on the cheap makes perfect sense.

Were he trying to steal your house out from under you (which could easily come at some future date), I'd say it was just greed from his lizard brain leaking into the Oval Office. But these properties are extremely strategic. Only people much smarter than I say Trump is incapable of determining a place like Greenland has strategic value, and that it’s just some adviser whispering in his ear prompting the moves.

But stealing money? THAT is something Donald Trump understands, and the land he’s trying to swipe WOULD have tremendous economic value. This is why they’ve still got his interest.

But that’s only a small piece of the story. If you connect a few dots, you’ll see his real motives for wanting to own Venezuela, Greenland and Canada:

• Venezuela: With proven oil reserves of 303 billion barrels, Venezuela owns 17% of known global reserves. Geologists estimate another trillion barrels in unproven reserves are also present. When added to the 4% in the United States and the 17% controlled by his close friends in Saudi Arabia, Trump is now able to influence almost 40% of the global supply of oil.

• Greenland: Greenland is on his TO STEAL list both because of its location and its ability to act as a security blanket to Trump’s nightmare of not having everything valuable. The world’s biggest island has oil, natural gas, rare earth elements, graphite, copper, nickel, zinc, iron ore, uranium, and a host of other rare minerals. Oh, and did I mention the gold and platinum deposits?

You may notice this list resembles Xi Jinping's shopping list through his 13-year-old Belts and Roads Initiative. The difference, of course, is that Xi buys access to desirable commodities by investing in ports, railways, pipelines, power plants, and fiber-optic cables in the countries he's negotiating with. This compares to Trump, who pulls the movie mobster caricature cliché “Nice place you've got here. It would be a pity if anything happened to it.”

• Canada: That leaves Canada, whose Prime Minister in Davos sagely observed “If we don't have a seat at the table, we're on the menu.” Between its lakes, rivers, wetlands and groundwater, Canada holds 20% of the world’s freshwater and has more lakes than every other country in the world combined.

According to the United Nations University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health, the planet has entered an “era of global water bankruptcy.” This means that many of the world’s freshwater systems have been depleted or damaged faster than they can recover, pushing water supplies beyond sustainable limits and threatening ecosystems, food systems, and human well-being. Freshwater sources — rivers, lakes, aquifers — are being drawn down faster than they can naturally refill, and many systems are not just stressed, but are beyond recovery.

Given that agriculture, drinking water, ecosystems, energy production, and public health all depend on freshwater, and that the world’s population (8.3 billion) continues growing by about 70 million people per year, it’s obvious that Canada will be a superpower within the next couple of decades. Global scarcity of fresh water will become acute, rather than theoretical. Infrastructure will be put in place to move or ration the resource, and legal/political norms will shift to give them leverage over much of the rest of the world.

Conclusion: Between the oil, mineral wealth, and water, Trump is taking a long view to controlling the world, laying the foundation now for his children to own everything in 30 years or so. One could argue that it’s a shrewd move…if only it didn’t end with his signature call of “I’ve got mine, and the hell with the rest of you!”

See you at the ballot box!

Rob