This month during a stormy press conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate, the President-elect of the United States Donald Trump he published his the latest vision for revising the world map: “We’re going to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the American Gulf, which has a beautiful ring to it.”
He went to repeat approvingly: “It covers a large territory, the American Gulf. What a beautiful name.”
The Gulf of Mexico, which stretches along much of Mexico’s east coast and borders five southern US states, is a key international hub for shipping, fishing, oil drilling and other commercial activities. The body of water was thus baptized more than four centuries ago before the USA or Mexico existed.
Of course, unilateral renaming of the gulf by the US president would not require the approval of Mexico or any other country. They include additional map adjustments recently introduced by the new leader capture of the Panama Canalwresting control over Greenland and merger Canada.
Aside from the “beautiful ring” Trump saw in the Gulf of Mexico’s impending new name, the proposed move is consistent with his past of excessive antagonism toward Mexico, a country he has said is disproportionately made up of “rapists” and other criminals. Speaking of “nice,” Trump repeatedly demanded during his first term as president that Mexico foot the bill for “a big, beautiful wall” envisioned rising on the US-Mexico border.
Moreover, Trump viciously blames the United States’ southern neighbor for the flow of “illegal” migrants and drugs to the north — as if American demand for illicit substances and bipartisan America’s habit of destroying other countries they have nothing to do with encouraging drug trafficking and migration. Nor, certainly, the US economy reliance on undocumented and exploitable labor play any part in the equation.
Never one to miss an opportunity for repeated hypocrisy, Trump added the following warning to his announcement on the Gulf of Mexico in Mar-a-Lago: “And Mexico must stop allowing millions of people to pour into our country.” In any case, the rebranding of the bay will most certainly put the Mexicans in their place.
At the very least, the “American Gulf” project is less invasive than previous ideas that came from Trump’s brain, such as by firing missiles at Mexico for the fight against drug cartels – organizations that owe their existence to the simultaneous demand of the USA for i criminalization of drugs.
The uproar over the renaming also provides a convenient distraction from, you know, the real issues — which is exactly what Trump’s signature bombastic xenophobia is really meant to do.
Far-right US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene wasted no time heeding Trump’s call to arms. Just two days after a press conference in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, she introduced a bill that would have renamed the Gulf of Mexico in accordance with the president-elect’s wishes.
According to to the political website The Hill, the bill “would direct the chairman of the Committee on Geographic Names under the Secretary of the Interior to rename all federal documents and maps within 180 days of signing the bill.” Greene added her own compelling sales pitch: “It’s our bay. The real name is the American Gulf and that’s what the whole world should call it.”
As it turns out, this is not the first time that American politicians have proposed renaming the Gulf of Mexico. Associated Press article he recalls an episode in 2012 when a member of the Mississippi state legislature introduced a bill to designate the body of water that touches Mississippi’s beaches as “America’s Gulf” — “a move the bill’s author later called a ‘joke’.”
Meanwhile, much further down the regional timeline, the Gulf of Mexico played host to another outrageous example of imperial hubris that emerged in 1914 under the watch of Democratic US President Woodrow Wilson. The Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and Museum website has memorial day that year the “Tampico Incident”, named after the port city in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas in the Gulf of Mexico where “American warships stood just off the coast to protect American oil interests”.
The previous year, with the help of the then US ambassador to Mexico, a coup d’état was carried out against Mexican President Francisco I Madero, which led to the rule of General Victoriano Huerta. By 1914, the new American ambassador to Mexico supported opposition to Huerta, whose forces had the audacity to arrest nine American sailors while a fleet of American warships still stood innocently off the coast.
In a version of the incident published by the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and Museum, “the commander of U.S. forces in the area demanded a 21-gun salute and an apology from Huerta after the sailors were quickly released.” The Mexican government rejected these demands, “and President Wilson used the events as a reason to ask Congress for permission to invade Mexico”.
And here: “The events soon led to the occupation [the port city of] Veracruz by US forces.”
In other words, there are many reasons why people might oppose renaming the Gulf of Mexico.
And while Trump’s insistence on acting like a caricature of himself makes it easy to label him as some kind of aberration in American foreign policy, at the end of the day, it’s imperialism plain and simple—and that’s one thing you just can’t rename.
The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
