The Moon Is the Weakest Claim

In July 2025, the administration signed an executive order opening the deep seabed to American mining, on the reasoning that the United States never signed the Law of the Sea treaty and so owes the International Seabed Authority nothing. The Metals Company filed the first application to mine international waters almost immediately ^[1][2]. Its chief executive was unbothered by the legal objections.

I see those threats as nothing but wing-flapping. — Gerard Barron

That is the play at its most potent: a claim, a permit, and extraction, with no sovereign able to step between them. Apply the same move to a lake shared with another country and it stalls. The president renamed Lake Ontario "Lake America" in June 2025, and again in September 2026 alongside 50% tariffs on $20 billion of Canadian goods ^[3][4]. Google and Apple Maps adopted the name. But Canada's prime minister and New York's governor — the state on whose shore the lake sits — refused to recognize it ^[4]. There is no permit to issue for a lake, and the other sovereign simply said no. Where the claim runs into a state that answers with force, it provokes violence without establishing control. In July 2026 the president asserted US ownership of the Strait of Hormuz. Iran responded with cruise-missile and drone attacks that killed and wounded seafarers; the US answered with seven-hour airstrikes, and shipping still dwindled as vessels avoided the routes ^[5]. In January 2026, the administration formalized the pattern within the hemisphere as the Donroe Doctrine — a national security strategy built on Western dominance, 50% tariffs on Canada, Greenland acquisition as a priority, and deterrence in the Strait of Hormuz ^[6]. The framing was meant to be permanent.

Under our new national security strategy, American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again. — Donald Trump

The doctrine never mentioned the Moon. But eight months later the same move was extended beyond the hemisphere, when the president declared "the moon is ours" ^[7]. The audacity of that claim hides how little it does. The lunar programs it appears to authorize were already underway. SpaceX had pivoted from Mars to a proposed "Moonbase Alpha," and Blue Origin shuttered its space-tourism business to focus on a lunar lander, both racing China's planned 2030 astronaut landing ^[8]. Interlune holds a Department of Energy contract to deliver three liters of helium-3 from the Moon in 2029 ^[9]. NASA's Moon Base program had already invited India's space agency aboard ^[10]. The claim is branding, not a driver — there is no lunar permit for it to trigger, and no sovereign on the Moon to provoke. The least glamorous claim is the one that actually became extraction. The seabed, where the US can issue a license and no one can say no, is where naming turned into mining. The Moon, the most audacious naming, is the weakest version of the play — because the play's power has nothing to do with how far-fetched the territory sounds, and everything to do with whether the US can issue a permit and whether anyone with jurisdiction can refuse.