Shake-up alert: Panama isn’t the only US ally that Trump has rattled

President-elect Donald Trump appears keen to expand on the long-standing American belief in the United States’ “manifest destiny" to dominate its part of the world. His utterances on buying up Greenland, enrolling Canada as a state and forcibly taking over the Panama Canal all suggest that the US guiding principle under Trump would be ‘Might is Right.’ This might work in the face of a few small nation-states in no position to resist, but would rile bigger powers and also weaken the alliances that have held Pax Americana in place under Washington’s watch. The US forged strategic alliances in Europe, apart from the Far and Middle East, to maintain its hegemony over what it liked to call the “free world," never mind that this world had a dozen-odd dictators, such as Iraq’s Saddam Hussain, Indonesia’s Suharto, The Philippines’ Marcos, Pakistan’s Zia ul-Haq and also Iran’s Shah Reza Pahlavi, whose 1979 overthrow in an Islamic Revolution opened a theatre of geopolitics that often seemed to rival its pre-1991 Cold War with the Soviet Union. Trump’s disposition risks pushing US allies to seek alternate security arrangements, potentially disrupting current power equations.