Hegseth Says Trump Has Vision of 'Greater North America.' Critics Alarmed by 'Greater Israel' Parallel

Alarm mounted Monday over the Trump administration's "Greater North America" plan, a geopolitical blueprint for US imperial hegemony from Greenland to Guyana that's drawing comparisons with a messianic project being pushed by President Donald Trump's far-right allies and war partners in Israel.

US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth first unveiled the plan earlier this month, telling reporters: "Trump has drawn a new strategic map, from Greenland to the Gulf of America to the Panama Canal and its surrounding countries. At the Department of War we call this strategic map the Greater North America."

"Why? Because every sovereign nation and territory north of the Equator, from Greenland to Ecuador and from Alaska to Guyana, is not part of the 'Global South,'" Hegseth added. "It is our immediate security perimeter in this great neighborhood that we all live in."

Graeme Garrard, a Canadian professor at Cardiff University in Wales, said Monday on social media in response to Hegseth's comments: "By 'Greater North America' he means 'Greater United States. The US is now and has long been a menace and threat to the sovereignty and independence of its hemispheric neighbors."

Numerous observers have compared Trump's "Greater America" with the "Greater Israel" movement, whose most zealous proponents want to conquer everything between the Nile and Euphrates rivers—that is, all of Palestine, Lebanon, and Jordan; most of Syria and Kuwait; large parts of Egypt and Iraq; and some of Turkey—for Israel.

"Hesgeth's 'Greater North America' should be taken VERY seriously as a real threat," University of Lausanne professor Julia Steinberger, who is Swiss-American, said on social media. "Right now the US and Israel are realizing 'Greater Israel' by attacking-invading Lebanon and Iran. Hegseth is saying it's Greenland, Cuba, Canada, and Mexico next."

Based on the biblical boundaries of ancient Jewish kingdoms, Greater Israel is rooted in the supremacist supposition that the Abrahamic deity figure God promised the Jews all of the lands between the Nile and Euphrates.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza—and other prominent right-wing Israelis support the Greater Israel vision and are working to make it a reality by accelerating the illegal settler colonization and ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, preparing to annex the dwindling Palestinian territories, and planning to occupy—perhaps permanently—parts of Syria and Lebanon.

For nearly two centuries, claims of divine favor have also underpinned US expansionism, most famously expressed in Manifest Destiny and mid-19th century plans to annex lands "from the Arctic to the Tropic." This notion drove the US conquest of half of Mexico, as well as later takeovers of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti. The US also took control over the Panama Canal, which it built at the cost of thousands of laborers' lives, most of them from Barbados and other West Indies isles.

"It is part of the great law of progress that the weak should give way to the strong, and that the superior should displace the inferior races," one New Orleans newspaper opined in 1848.

Nearly 178 years later, Hegseth echoed this supremacist ideology, telling Latin American leaders that the region must remain "Christian nations under God" and stand united in the face of "radical narco-communism."

Like the 19th century US imperialists, Trump has also repeatedly expressed his goal of "taking Cuba"—an objective that goes back over 200 years, when Thomas Jefferson, then a former president, called the island “the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of states."