From South Africa to Greenland: A Nationalist Appraisal of Trump’s Geopolitics
4 February 2025
By Dr Adi Schlebusch
Over the past weekend, President Donald Trump really shook up the geopolitical landscape by announcing an end to all aid to South Africa because the country’s communist government recently passed a law allowing government to expropriate private property without compensation. Trump also noted that “certain groups” are being oppressed by the South African government. Here I am assuming that Trump is referring to minority non-black groups in South Africa targeted by affirmative action, which are of course primarily whites, but also include Asians and mixed-race people. In South Africa, after all, affirmative action or “Black economic empowerment” as it is locally known, discriminates most vehemently against white people, but also does in fact, expressly seek to exclude people of Asian and mixed-race descent from certain sectors of the job market as well.
This being said, the expropriation act in question specifically targets white people in general and white farmers in particular. The Boer nation is one of the world’s most agrarian peoples, and the nation with the most economically successful family farms per capita on the planet. This fosters a distinctly familialist and agrarian culture among the Boer people which perfectly complements its Dutch Reformed faith. What makes the agricultural achievements of Boers particularly impressive, is the fact that they have managed to continue doing this for decades despite living under a completely antagonistic government. Naturally, of course, Boers still constitute one of the greatest threats to the globalist agenda, which underpins the South African government's attempts to expropriate Boer land.
Until now, virtually no prominent world leader has spoken up about the oppression that Boers are suffering at the hands of a black Marxist government, but Trump has now firmly placed this on the international agenda. When announcing that he is cutting all aid to South Africa, Trump noted that not only is the South African government moving to expropriate private property without compensation, but is also “doing things far worse than that.” This statement should not go unnoticed, as it may refer to the fact that South African government officials have, for decades, openly incited genocide against white people in the country.
Trump’s announcement has, of course, been met by opposition from the presidency of South Africa, but given how President Ramaphosa has insulted and shamelessly slandered Trump in particular and white Americans in general, I’m confident that no counter-signaling is going to go down well with the Trump administration. Thanks to Trump and Musk, the ANC’s international reputation has been irreparably damaged, and its supposed moral high ground in the Western world is now in tatters.
Now of course I know that both Trump and Musk are liberals. Trump, like Putin, is also an imperialist, which I consider to be thoroughly antithetical to nationalism. Greenland, for example, has no historical, ethno-cultural, or linguistic connection to the American people. It only occupied it between 1941 and 1945 to prevent it from being invaded by the Germans. Making Greenland part of the United States would be fundamentally opposed to classical Protestant political theory. As the German Lutheran philosopher Johan Gottfried Herder (1744—1803) pointed out:
The most natural state is, therefore, one nation, an extended family, with one national character ... Nothing, therefore, is more contrary to the purposes of political government than the unnatural enlargement of states, and the wild mixing of various races and nationalities under one scepter.
In theory this of course applies to Denmark as well, but at least the Danish monarchy has a longstanding historical connection with Greenland that the US cannot claim. Ultimately, of course, it is not for the US, nor for Denmark, but for the people of Greenland to freely decide how to govern themselves and what the status and affiliation of their homeland will be. As the Calvinist political theorist Lambert Daneau (1535—1595) noted:
A part of the kingdom may choose a particular king for itself or a new form of the republic, abandoning the rest of the body to which it previously adhered, whenever either the public and manifest welfare of that part wholly advises it.
The right of secession is integral to historic Protestant political theory. This principle must, of course, also be applied to the Boer people in Southern Africa today. Just over a week ago, the Pactum Institute urged the Trump administration to express support for the Boer people of South Africa. Six days later Trump did exactly that. But what needs to be emphasized here once again is that the ultimate solution to the Boer’s struggle is not equal rights within a multicultural, imperialist framework. The solution to the challenges the Boer people is facing today is full self-determination in their own homeland. This is what Boer Nationalists work for. A commitment to recognize an Afrikaner-Boer independence along with a willingness to engage in trade agreements is all that the Afrikaners ask of international allies.
One has to appreciate the tremendous work Musk and Trump are doing, not only for America but for Western Christendom in general. At the same time, the liberalism underpinning their political program cannot be overlooked. This is particularly evident in Trump’s position on Greenland, but also in his advocacy for Canada to become the 51st US state. This kind of imperialism is fundamentally opposed to Christian nationalism properly understood within the framework of subsidiarity and familialism historically advocated by the likes of Johannes Althusius (1563—1638) in his Politica. Christian nationalism advocates for smaller ethno-states, not the enlargement of globalist empires.
Nonetheless, while remaining critical of the Trump administration on an ideological level, we can and must absolutely take full advantage of the tremendous opportunities that, in God’s providence, arise from its productive actions to advance our cause to the glory of God.