President-elect Donald Trump said Tuesday that he would transfer to attempt to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America,” a reputation he mentioned has a “lovely ring to it.”
It’s his newest suggestion to redraw the map of the Western Hemisphere. Trump has repeatedly referred to Canada because the “51st State,” demanded that Denmark think about ceding Greenland, and referred to as for Panama to return the Panama Canal.
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Right here’s a have a look at his remark and what goes into a reputation.
Why is Trump speaking about renaming the Gulf of Mexico?
Since his first run for the White Home in 2016, Trump has repeatedly clashed with Mexico over a lot of points, together with border safety and the imposition of tariffs on imported items. He vowed then to construct a wall alongside the U.S.-Mexico border and make Mexico pay for it. The U.S. in the end constructed or refurbished about 450 miles of wall throughout his first time period.
The Gulf of Mexico is sometimes called the US’ “Third Coast” on account of its shoreline throughout 5 southeastern states. Mexicans use a Spanish model of the identical title for the gulf: “El Golfo de México.”
People and Mexicans diverge on what to name one other key physique of water, the river that varieties the border between Texas and the Mexican states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas. People name it the Rio Grande; Mexicans name it the Rio Bravo.
Can Trump change the title of the Gulf of Mexico?
Possibly, nevertheless it’s not a unilateral determination, and different international locations don’t should go alongside.
The Worldwide Hydrographic Group—of which each the US and Mexico are members—works to make sure all of the world’s seas, oceans and navigable waters are surveyed and charted uniformly, and in addition names a few of them. There are cases the place international locations seek advice from the identical physique of water or landmark by totally different names in their very own documentation.
It may be simpler when a landmark or physique of water is inside a rustic’s boundaries. In 2015, then-President Barack Obama authorised an order from the Division of Inside to rename Mount McKinley—the very best peak in North America—to Denali, a transfer that Trump has additionally mentioned he needs to reverse.
Simply after Trump’s feedback on Tuesday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia mentioned throughout an interview with podcaster Benny Johnson that she would direct her workers to draft laws to alter the title of the Gulf of Mexico, a transfer she mentioned would care for funding for brand spanking new maps and administrative coverage supplies all through the federal authorities.
How did the Gulf of Mexico get its title?
The physique of water has been depicted with that title for greater than 4 centuries, an authentic willpower believed to have been taken from a Native American metropolis of “Mexico.”
Has renaming the Gulf of Mexico come up earlier than?
Sure. In 2012, a member of the Mississippi Legislature proposed a invoice to rename parts of the gulf that contact that state’s seashores “Gulf of America,” a transfer the invoice creator later known as a “joke.” That invoice, which was referred to a committee, didn’t go.
Two years earlier, comic Stephen Colbert had joked on his present that, following the huge Deepwater Horizon oil spill within the Gulf of Mexico, it needs to be renamed “Gulf of America” as a result of, “We broke it, we purchased it.”
Are there different worldwide disputes over the names of locations?
There’s a long-running dispute over the title of the Sea of Japan amongst Japan, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, with South Korea arguing that the present title wasn’t generally used till Korea was below Japanese rule. At an Worldwide Hydrographic Group assembly in 2020, member states agreed on a plan to exchange names with numerical identifiers and develop a brand new digital normal for contemporary geographic info methods.
The Persian Gulf has been extensively recognized by that title for the reason that sixteenth century, though utilization of “Gulf” and “Arabian Gulf” is dominant in lots of international locations within the Center East. The federal government of Iran threatened to sue Google in 2012 over the corporate’s determination to not label the physique of water in any respect on its maps.
There have been different conversations about our bodies of water, together with from Trump’s 2016 opponent. In response to supplies revealed by WikiLeaks in a hack of her marketing campaign chairman’s private account, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2013 instructed an viewers that, by China’s logic that it claimed practically the whole lot of the South China Sea, then the U.S. after World Battle II might have labeled the Pacific Ocean the “American Sea.”
—Kinnard reported from Chapin, South Carolina.
