Does anyone realise that we’ve just been claimed? Last week, after the US seized the Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, its state department posted on X an image of a resolute-looking Donald Trump with the slogan “This is OUR Hemisphere”. Just in case we missed the point, OUR was highlighted in lurid blood-red letters. It is worth underlining that this was not a random tweet from an incel in a fetid bedroom – it was an official declaration by a superpower.
At the United Nations, the US ambassador Mike Waltz spelled it out a little more: “we’re not going to allow the Western Hemisphere to be used as a base of operation for our nation’s adversaries, and competitors, and rivals of the United States.”
All of Ireland (along with all of Iceland and Portugal) lies within the Western Hemisphere, which is defined as the half of the globe west of the Greenwich prime meridian and east of the 180th meridian. For a long time, kids in Irish schools were taught that they should take considerable pride in being “born in the same hemisphere as the United States”.
As it happens, there is also a geological basis to this designation. The northwest of Ireland is formed by the North American Plate. About a third of Ireland, roughly beyond a line from Dingle to Clogherhead, was located originally on the continent of Laurentia, which morphed in what is now most of modern North America. Trump has natural claims on us dating back at least 400 million years: God made it so.
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I’m being facetious about the geology, of course. But given Trump’s deadly serious intention to extend the American empire into the north Atlantic by seizing Greenland, we should pay attention to the reality that Ireland has indeed been claimed as a territory in which, at the very least, the US will prevent not just adversaries but commercial competitors or rivals from operating.
This may seem absurd but absurd is where we live now. The immediate aim of the official assertion of American ownership of the entire Western Hemisphere is to turn the countries of the Caribbean, Central and South America into vassal states, to restate Trump’s desire to incorporate Canada into the US and to grab Greenland. But we should not ignore the reality that, for the first time since independence, a superpower has formally affirmed its right to hegemony over Ireland.
Ireland is, moreover, one of the few countries directly named in the US National Security Strategy, the authoritative statement of the Trump administration’s view of its relationship with the rest of the world. The document is bizarre and the reference to us is typically so: “America is, understandably, sentimentally attached to the European continent – and, of course, to Britain and Ireland. The character of these countries is also strategically important because we count upon creative, capable, confident, democratic allies to establish conditions of stability and security. We want to work with aligned countries that want to restore their former greatness.”
Hence, we are being given to understand that Trump’s America retains a sentimental attachment to Ireland and is going to use its power to help us restore our former greatness. The problem being, of course, that we are quite proud of never having been great in the sense intended here – we are being lumped in with the desire of English nationalists to refurbish the allure of an empire we struggled long and hard to escape from.
More to the point, perhaps, we are to be “encouraged” to adopt the far-right agenda of renovating an imagined white Christian identity that is being destroyed by immigration and wokery. The National Security Strategy envisages Europe as being in imminent danger of “civilisational erasure” and the catastrophic decline of Irish Catholicism is Exhibit A in this apocalyptic narrative.
Thus, of course, Trumpworld’s active desire for a mini-me puppet regime here in Ireland and Steve Bannon’s declaration that “I’m spending a ton of time behind the scenes on the Irish situation to help form an Irish national party ... They’re going to have an Irish Maga, and we’re going to have an Irish Trump”. Note the “we’re” – the Americans are going to have their very own Irish governor.
So far the best plan they’ve come up with was Conor McGregor’s desultory bid for the presidency and there is a certain comfort in that idiocy. But we can’t be complacent about the reality that Bannon’s boasts are not just those of a marginal blowhard – they chime with the fully official American claim on the hemisphere in which we live.
The most uncomfortable aspect of these blatant infringements on Irish sovereignty is that, while they are absurd, they are also rooted in economic reality. Ireland is the second largest export platform for US companies in the world, after only Singapore. A huge chunk of the trade imbalance with the EU that Trump is obsessed about is Irish: in 2024, the US goods trade deficit with Ireland of $87 billion (€85.5 billion) was the largest of any EU country and represented 37 per cent of the overall deficit – an astonishing figure for a country that forms less than 2 per cent of the EU economy.
The US does therefore have a very large interest in controlling what happens in Ireland, and not just for the sentimental reasons referred to in the National Security Strategy. All that lucre flowing into the exchequer from US multinational corporations has always come with strings attached. But now the strings are suddenly becoming much tighter and more visible. That old internet meme – “all your base are belong to us” – is becoming a lot less funny and a lot more threatening.
Would we have dared to deny the US air force permission to overfly our airspace on its way to storm an oil tanker in the north Atlantic? Will we dare to really do anything to protect our children from the depredations of American social media? If not, we are beginning to get used to the feeling of being owned.
