One of the great philosophical quotes comes from Thucydides, who said, “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” Though speaking about the Athenian annexation of the sovereign island of Melos over 2,400 years ago, his mindset rings eerily close to Trump’s recent efforts. 

The United States, like it or not, is the “strong,” and it has been for the past 150 years of geopolitics. Various leaders have flexed this muscle throughout American history, such as William McKinley in his annexation of Pacific territories in the Spanish-American War and Theodore Roosevelt’s “Big Stick” diplomacy toward the Caribbean.  

But what has largely been ignored –– as it was a century ago and is in the present –– is the responsibility that comes with wielding such power. 

 It is obviously a political advantage to create a foreign dependence on the U.S.; trade deals, overseas military bases and access to natural resources are all direct benefits of having a catalog of forcefully manufactured allies across the globe. Similar reasons have recently piqued President Trump’s interest in acquiring Greenland. 

Not only would an invasion nullify NATO and abandon the foreign U.S. security that’s been essential to European and world peace since World War II, but it would place nearly 60,000 people, most of whom are Inuit, under U.S. jurisdiction. 

Of course, those left to suffer the consequences of selective American ignorance would not be in the White House; Trump would get his rare minerals and Arctic shipping routes before even casting a second thought toward the local population of Indigenous people who have a long history of mistreatment by the U.S. government.  

Even as the threats of military action in Greenland have cooled off, Trump has quickly shifted his focus to Iran and discussed action in response to its government’s killing of protesters. But he isn’t eyeing intervention in these countries purely to support Iranian protesters or Greenlandic secessionists –– he’s acting on purely domestic motives. If the U.S. wants to play savior, it has to act selflessly; you can’t “save” other countries for your own sake.

Trump’s Greenland plan would only be the latest chronicle in what has become a national tradition of foreign recklessness, often leaving less fortunate nations worse off than before U.S. intervention. 

Looking at the history of the U.S. intervention, thousands of Panamanians were forced to grow up without parents since they were among the innocent civilians killed by U.S. forces in 1989. Undetonated explosives leftover from the Vietnam War kill farmers to this day in Cambodia, a country that’s never initiated military action against the U.S. The jury is still out on how Venezuela will respond to the absence of Nicolás Maduro, but so far, the corrupt government that he left behind is still in power and able to continue to commit extrajudicial killings.

Even to countries that the U.S. has historically supported in fostering democracy and providing humanitarian aid, the Trump administration has turned a blind eye. Eighty-three percent of all U.S. Agency for International Development programs were cut last year, impacting up to 95 million people’s healthcare access in places including Afghanistan and Sudan.

For the conservative American with a worldview unable to look past the stock market, having access to the Panama Canal and warding off Vietnamese communism are seen as invaluable achievements. But for anyone who has learned about the repercussions of American imperialism and has even an ounce of empathy, the means are not worth the end. 

The larger conversation here questions the role of “justice” in society. Those in accord with Greek Sophists such as Antiphon might argue that it’s personally advantageous for the U.S. to selfishly secure foreign commodities without any consideration of those who rely on said resources. As Plato later proved, though, having a just society supersedes any personal gain of individual injustice. 

 Or in the words of Martin Luther King Jr., “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

 It was not until World War II that global powers learned this lesson, though, leading to the formation of multi-national compacts such as the United Nations and NATO itself. These organizations, which Trump has threatened to tear apart, were founded by postwar peacekeepers to stop self-righteous actions like those taken by Trump himself in the past few weeks.  

If a country has the privilege to act imperialistically, it means they also have the responsibility to come to the aid of other nations that have been casualties of imperialism in the past. The U.S. has far too many unatoned transgressions left behind from previous egocentric operations to begin any new conflicts.