Trump versus the Gulf of Mexico

This month throughout a rambling information convention at his Mar-a-Lago property, United States President-elect Donald Trump introduced his newest imaginative and prescient for revising the map of the world: “We’re going to be altering the title of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, which has a lovely ring.”

He went on to reiterate approvingly: “That covers quite a lot of territory, the Gulf of America. What a lovely title.”

The Gulf of Mexico, which runs alongside a lot of Mexico’s jap shoreline and abuts 5 southern US states, is a key worldwide hub for transport, fishing, oil drilling and different industrial exercise. The physique of water was christened as such greater than 4 centuries in the past earlier than both the US or Mexico existed.

In fact, a unilateral renaming of the gulf by the US president wouldn’t require endorsement by Mexico or every other nation. Further cartographic changes just lately floated by the incoming chief embrace seizing the Panama Canal, wresting away management of Greenland and annexing Canada.

Other than the “lovely ring” Trump has detected within the Gulf of Mexico’s impending new title, the proposed transfer is constant along with his monitor document of overzealous antagonism of Mexico, a rustic he has mentioned is disproportionately composed of “rapists” and different criminals. And talking of “lovely”, Trump repeatedly demanded throughout his first time period as president that Mexico foot the invoice for the “huge, lovely wall” he envisioned erecting on the US-Mexico frontier.

Certainly, Trump viciously blames the US’s southern neighbour for the northbound circulation of “unlawful” migrants and medicines – as if US demand for illicit substances and the bipartisan US behavior of destroying different folks’s nations don’t have anything to do with fuelling drug trafficking and migration. Nor, certainly, does the US financial reliance on undocumented and exploitable labour play any form of position within the equation.

By no means one to move up a possibility for repetitive hypocrisy, Trump appended the next warning to his Gulf of Mexico announcement at Mar-a-Lago: “And Mexico has to cease permitting thousands and thousands of individuals to pour into our nation.” Anyway, the rebranding of the gulf will most definitely put the Mexicans of their place.

Within the very least, the “Gulf of America” challenge is much less invasive than earlier concepts which have sprung from Trump’s mind, such because the firing of missiles at Mexico to fight the drug cartels – organisations that occur to owe their very existence to the simultaneous US demand for and criminalisation of medicine.

The hullaballoo over the renaming additionally offers a handy distraction from, you already know, precise issues – which is what Trump’s signature bombastic xenophobia is supposed to do within the first place.

Far-right US Consultant Marjorie Taylor Greene, for one, wasted no time heeding Trump’s name to arms. Simply two days after the Mar-a-Lago information convention in Florida, she launched a invoice that will rename the Gulf of Mexico in accordance with the president-elect’s needs.

As per the political web site The Hill, the invoice “would direct the chair of the Board on Geographic Names beneath the secretary of the Inside to rename all federal paperwork and maps inside 180 days of being signed into legislation”. Greene added her personal convincing gross sales pitch: “It’s our gulf. The rightful title is the Gulf of America, and it’s what the complete world ought to discuss with it as.”

Because it seems, this isn’t the primary time that US politicians have urged renaming the Gulf of Mexico. An Related Press article recollects an episode in 2012 when a member of the legislature of the state of Mississippi put forth a invoice to assign the title “Gulf of America” to parts of the physique of water touching Mississippi seashores – “a transfer the invoice creator later known as a ‘joke’”.

In the meantime, fairly a bit additional again on the regional timeline, the Gulf of Mexico performed host to a different egregious instance of imperial hubris that transpired in 1914 on the watch of Democratic US President Woodrow Wilson. The web site of the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and Museum has memorialised that yr’s “Incident at Tampico”, named for the port metropolis within the Mexican state of Tamaulipas on the Gulf of Mexico the place “American warships had been sitting simply off the coast to guard American oil pursuits.”

The earlier yr, a coup towards Mexican President Francisco I Madero had taken place with help from the then-US ambassador to Mexico, producing the reign of Normal Victoriano Huerta. By 1914, the brand new US ambassador to Mexico was backing the opposition to Huerta, whose forces had the audacity to detain 9 US sailors whereas the fleet of American warships continued to take a seat innocently off the coast.

Within the model of the incident supplied by the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and Museum, “the commander of US forces within the space demanded a 21-gun salute and an apology from Huerta after the sailors had been rapidly launched”. The Mexican authorities rejected these calls for, “and President Wilson used the occasions as a cause to request permission from Congress for an armed invasion of Mexico”.

And voila: “Occasions quickly led to the occupation of [the port city of] Veracruz by US forces.”

In different phrases, there are many causes people is likely to be against renaming the Gulf of Mexico.

And whereas Trump’s insistence on behaving like a caricature of himself makes it simpler to forged him as some form of aberration in US overseas coverage, on the finish of the day, it’s imperialism plain and easy – and that’s one factor you simply can’t rename.

The views expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.