With Canada, Britain, France, Portugal, Spain and Australia all recognizing the “state” of Palestine, President Donald Trump has the chance to strike a complementary blow for other oppressed nationalities yearning for their own states, too.
When Trump takes the dais at the General Assembly Tuesday, he can pick up where UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer left off and announce that the United States is recognizing Scotland as an independent nation.
After all, the English brutally conquered the Scots, suppressing their language and culture for centuries.
Trump can even note that his mother fled Scotland as a refugee, so he understands the need for an independent Scottish nation.
Won’t Canada’s Mark Carney rejoice when Trump recognizes Quebec as a separate, sovereign state? Surely those national aspirations cry out no less than the Palestinians’?
And Spanish PM Pedro Sanchez can have no objection when Trump offers full recognition to Catalonia and the Basque nation, who have struggled so long for liberty. (Any terrorist activity along the way surely can’t matter any more than Hamas’ atrocities, right?)
With his profound dedication to Palestinian nationalism, French President Emmanuel Macron must be tormented by the plight of the Corsicans suffering under the Gallic boot; Trump can help him out by recognizing the State of Corsica.
Portugal lost most of its empire by 1975. But it maintains a death grip on the Azores, which still hungers for independence: one more state for Trump to declare.
Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will surely welcome Trump’s recognition of the Murrawarri Republic, which declared independence in 2013, though Canberra has ignored the indigenous Murrawarri nation ever since.
Like Palestine, some of these new states have ill-defined borders, no experience in self-government and divided populations.
But surely that’s OK?
All these world leaders, after all, insist that it’s the symbolism that counts.