For all their ideological differences, Trump and Xi exhibit a fundamental similarity in their approach to territorial control.
The modern world is no stranger to territorial disputes, but in the hands of two of the most dominant political figures of the 21st century, Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, such claims have become performances of nationalist bravado, spectacles of power projection that blend historical grievances with contemporary ambition.
For all their differences - ideological, temperamental, rhetorical - Donald Trump and Xi Jinping share a common instinct: the allure of territorial power. One is a populist showman, prone to brash pronouncements about making America “great again” while the other, a technocratic strongman who has embedded himself into China’s political machinery with an iron grip.
From Gaza to the South Pacific, from the Panama Canal to Taiwan, Trump and Xi have, in their own ways, articulated a vision of power that revolves around the strategic conquest (whether literal or economic) of contested space.
Trump’s obsession with borders, whether in the form of his signature wall on the U.S.-Mexico frontier, his 2019 bid to purchase Greenland from Denmark, his laying stake to Greenland in his second term and his current interest in securing American dominance in the Panama Canal, was always more than just policy. It was an expression of his belief that the United States had been outmanoeuvred in global affairs and needed to reclaim its lost stature.
Xi, too, frames his territorial ambitions as historical redress. His Belt and Road Initiative, while ostensibly an economic strategy, is a modern extension of China’s imperial reach, laying the groundwork for political control in nations from Sri Lanka to Djibouti. The South China Sea, where Beijing has built artificial islands and militarized disputed waters, is Xi’s version of a border wall - an assertion that China will not be hemmed in by international norms. In Taiwan and Tibet, his ambitions are even more explicit. These regions, in his view, are not merely adjacent territories but integral parts of China’s national identity, stolen by history and now ripe for reclamation.
Trump’s approach to the world’s hot spots was as much about disruption as it was about dominance. Nowhere was this clearer than in the Middle East, where he upended decades of U.S. policy by moving the American embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights and brokering the Abraham Accords. His current audacious claim of turning Gaza over to the US and transforming it into a ‘Riviera of the Middle East’ follows this line.
Xi’s territorial manoeuvring operates on a different timeline, one of slow, methodical encroachment, but the effect is similar. In Tibet, Beijing has carried out a decades-long campaign to erase local identity, flooding the region with Han Chinese settlers and imposing an unrelenting security apparatus. Taiwan is the ultimate prize, and China’s military posturing has made clear that Xi views its reclamation not as a hypothetical but an inevitability. The recent escalations in the Taiwan Strait, including record-breaking incursions by Chinese warplanes, suggest that Xi is willing to test international resolve just as Trump did with Gaza and the U.S.-Mexico border.
Trump’s bid to buy Greenland from Denmark was widely mocked at the time, but it was an unmistakable reflection of his worldview: America, under his leadership, would not simply play by the rules of diplomacy - it would rewrite them. The idea that a U.S. president in the 21st century could propose purchasing a massive, strategically vital landmass was audacious in its simplicity, a throwback to the territorial acquisitions of the 19th century.
Xi, by contrast, does not ask, he builds. In the South Pacific, China has pursued a strategy of economic entanglement, striking deals with island nations that leave them financially dependent on Beijing. The Solomon Islands, for instance, has shifted its diplomatic allegiance from Taiwan to China in exchange for infrastructure projects, a move emblematic of Xi’s long-term strategy.
If there is a lesson in their parallel pursuits of land, seas and resources, it is that the imperial impulse remains alive and well.
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