The United States was the only country to vote against a United Nations resolution urging schools, universities, charities and other institutions to consider replacing the traditional Mercator world map with the newer Equal Earth projection. The resolution passed the UN General Assembly this month with 164 countries in favour and just the United States opposed.
American diplomat Yarina Ferentsevitch read out Washington's justification to the assembly. She said the initiative was presented as a harmless effort to update cartographic proportions but could not be separated from a much broader and more radical ideological project behind it. Seizing on language in the resolution about "cognitive justice" and an "act of restoring memory," Ferentsevitch described such resolutions as parasites on the UN's work and the reason the institution is losing credibility. She called on other countries to reject the text. None did.
What the resolution actually does
The measure's practical effect is limited. It does not ban any kind of map, and there is no mechanism that could enforce such a ban. Instead, it proposes that schools, universities, charities and other institutions consider replacing the Mercator projection with the Equal Earth projection, a newer alternative.
The Mercator projection dates back to a 16th-century Flemish cartographer, whose name it carries. It stretches the meridians of the three-dimensional globe so they appear as parallel lines on a flat map, a feature that helped sailors of the era but comes with a major drawback: it distorts relative size. Landmasses appear to shrink the closer they are to the equator and to grow larger the further north or south they sit, meaning Africa and much of Asia and South America, often called the Global South, look far smaller than they really are, while Europe and other northern regions appear larger.
Greenland and Trump's map obsession
Greenland is depicted with particular exaggeration on Mercator maps, appearing roughly the size of Africa even though Africa is actually 14 times larger. Columnist Andreas Kluth, writing on the episode, suggested this distortion may partly explain President Donald Trump's fixation on Greenland and his threats to annex the territory from Denmark, threats that have drawn a mix of alarm and mockery from US allies.
Kluth also argued the Mercator distortion may help explain why Trump, like other European and American politicians for centuries, has shown little interest in Africa except when using it as material for political memes, leading many Africans to assume he disdains the continent.
That perception, he wrote, is part of why a presentation given by American diplomats in Brazil went viral this summer. It featured a map of Africa on which every country was mislabelled, with Nigeria and Mozambique suddenly appearing landlocked.
Renaming gulfs, lakes and straits
Where that episode made the United States look geographically careless, other moments have struck observers as openly imperialistic. Trump has repeatedly displayed maps while renaming parts of them: the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, Lake Ontario as Lake America, with New Mexico reportedly floated as a future candidate for renaming too.
This week, Trump drew the American flag onto a map depicting Cuba, Mexico, Canada, Greenland and Iceland. Reykjavik did not find it funny and summoned the US ambassador over the map. On a separate map, Trump labelled the Strait of Hormuz as "New US Territory."
Borges, Baudrillard and the power of maps
Kluth linked these episodes to a broader point about how maps shape power. He cited the Argentine writer and philosopher Jorge Luis Borges, whose short story "On Exactitude in Science" describes an empire that sought a perfectly accurate map, achieving one that coincided point by point with the territory itself. The map proved useless, and eventually covered the land until it decayed and became part of the ground it depicted.
Kluth noted that the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard offered a different reading of Borges's parable in the 1980s, one he said better describes how people relate to maps, media and reality today. Baudrillard warned that increasingly "the map precedes the territory," meaning a world leader who keeps looking at maps where certain places appear small may come to believe those places are less important, and one who colours other countries in his own colours may convince himself he dominates them.
Togo's push for a new projection
Africans have long been on the losing side of this dynamic, according to Kluth, as cartographers and politicians, mostly from the global North, effectively shrank their continent while enlarging their own. That history is what drove Togo, the sponsor of the UN resolution, to promote the Equal Earth projection, which was created in 2018 and depicts relative sizes accurately.
Speaking shortly before the General Assembly vote, Togo's Foreign Minister Robert Dussey said maps shape how people perceive the world, guiding education, feeding the imagination and influencing collective attitudes.
Kluth argued the real risk is not that powerful leaders use maps to shape how they see the world, something people have always done, but that they begin using their own worldview to shape the maps instead.
