On January 20, 2025, President Trump issued an executive order that initiated the name changes of several landmarks and geographical features with the goal of “Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness.” The order declared that the Gulf of Mexico would be renamed the “Gulf of America,” and America’s highest peak, Denali, would be renamed to its former moniker of Mt. McKinley.

As of February 10, the name changes went into effect across the federal government, as the Board of Geographical Names confirmed the changes in the Geographical Names Information System. Google Maps has also officially updated its maps for US-based users to reflect the changes. We asked SIS professor Hansong Li to help us understand how naming landmarks works, why some names are so heavily disputed, and what geopolitical implications name changes can hold.

Renaming geographic features is not new, as the names of many landmarks, features, and even regions have been debated worldwide for centuries. Why are names so important, and why is it often a point of contention?

Naming and renaming always carry performative meanings. By denoting places, we are engaged in a language game: conceiving and communicating in a certain language and translating it to others subtly reveals the assumptions and sometimes even ethical commitments we make as we call a place by one name and not another.

First, it is a way to assert civilizational identities by selectively and symbolically valorizing certain historical heritages over others. Consider Uluṟu, a monolith sacred to the local Aṉangu—the Pitjantjatjara people in Australia. The landmark was named Ayers Rock in 1873, after then Chief Secretary of South Australia Sir Henry Ayers. Since 1993, it has been dual named, with the indigenous name often listed before the colonial name.

In the Himalayas, British surveyor and geographer George Everest himself was against using his name for the world’s highest mountain, both because he had nothing to do with it and because his name is hard to pronounce in South Asian languages. To this day, the Nepalis call it Sagarmāthā (सगरमाथा), the Chinese follow the Tibetan name Chomolungma (ཇོ་མོ་གླང་མ), and the rest of the world continues to force Mt. Everest upon Mr. Everest.

Dual naming and contested naming are also conceptual spaces where we negotiate our own relations with different historical legacies and memories. From renaming Bombay to Mumbai & Ceylon to Sri Lanka in South Asia to cleaning up Soviet-era street names in Eastern Europe and to pluralist renaming of places in post-Apartheid South Africa, these are not only internal and identitarian acts, but also international gestures of state-(re)building.

The ability to rename things is also a matter of interpretive authority and normative orthodoxy. Who has the knowledge to arbitrate what a thing is called? If you are the one to name it, you are also assumed to know it. To truly know something is a way to own it, (re)create it, or be it. Therefore, many modern nation-states rush to convince UNESCO to call something by their preferred names. Sometimes, this is to attract investment or boost tourism. But even in these cases, naming a landmark, region, or cultural practice is about collective ownership, way of life, and even being itself.

Name changes occurring inside the US, like Denali being renamed Mt. McKinley, are done through official channels like the Department of the Interior or the Geographic Names Information System database. How are name changes handled in disputed or shared territories?

Usually, the competitive naming unfolds along the fault lines of geo-jurisdictions; that is, you would see rivaling names across borders. In cases of bilateral consensus or third-party conventions, sometimes an alternative name appears jointly, or inside brackets, following the official name. But the question remains: Which one takes priority and precedence? To change the ‘Gulf of Mexico’ to the ‘Gulf of America’ internationally, the United States would have to do several things, starting with consolidating a ‘united front’ with the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) and the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN.) The US would then need to score diplomatic agreements with Mexico, Cuba, and other Mesoamerican and Caribbean countries, which is unlikely, since they are mired too deeply in trade disputes now to consider water names. Another necessary step would be to align all the geospatial datasets and navigation tools, which can be achieved within the US but would be impossible to enforce outside of US jurisdiction. Finally, the US would need to push for sweeping changes in publications, especially textbooks for use in public and private education, which is unfeasible because education is either public and decentralized or simply privatized.

It is worth considering how name changes are handled on navigation apps, especially since the war of geographic names is waged under the shadow of unevenly distributed corporate power and informational infrastructure in global capitalism. Now that Google Maps has caved to Executive Order 14172, we will, in all likelihood, see the name changes applied to US users, but not without any implication for foreign jurisdictions. At home, Google simply defers to the U.S. Board on Geographic Names (BGN), but abroad, it may add ‘Gulf of America’ as an alternative name to other Mesoamerican and Caribbean users, even if Mexico mounts a successful campaign to keep it ‘Gulf of Mexico’ for Mexican citizens. Most constituents of the imagined ‘backyard’ under the renewed Monroe Doctrine rely on the entire package: from GPS to Google Maps or Apple Maps, offered by US corporations. It is a different story for IT-autonomous jurisdictions such as Russia, with its GLONASS & Yandex Maps/2GIS, or the People’s Republic of China, which runs its own Beidou system and offers a slew of web mapping platforms that mix and match satellite data. It is no secret that China and Russia each reflect their own territorial understandings—from the Caucasus and the Himalayas to Serbia-Kosovo—on their own map apps.

The United States has a distinguished tradition of externalizing the interior and internalizing the exterior. The Department of Interior is never just an innocently inward-facing, mineral-collecting, park-curating body, but has played a key role in reaching deals, extracting resources, and even intervening politically, from first the Western frontiers in the ‘Manifest Destiny’ era to the 19th and 20th centuries. At the height of US-led globalism, the entire world was treated, in a sense, as the United States’s interior, a sentiment which is now tamed in an ‘America First’ backlash and replaced by a focus on the Western hemisphere: Canada, Mexico, Greenland, etc. In our present case, we literally have a territory in the former ‘Wild West’ and another in the international and intercultural waters of Mesoamerica and, via the Yucatán Channel and the Caribbean Sea, which the United States treats as a matter of internal policy.

Increasingly, policy discourses are normalizing the internalization of questions on Greenland, Mexico, and Canada. The ‘farther-away’ ‘others’ such as Asia and Africa, the Trump administration has neither time nor linguistic expertise to rename. The only exception was the renaming of ‘Asia Pacific’ as ‘Indo-Pacific’ around 2016, but that was a Japanese-Indian initiative before it was picked up and pushed by the United States.

Many bodies of water have multiple names depending on which country claims them, for example, the South Sea (China) vs the East Sea (Vietnam). How are common names (what’s used on maps and in international documents) decided in these cases?

There are several ways to decide which name to use. First, by a balance between historical conventions and geo-oceanographic perspectives: the South China Sea versus the Philippines’s West Sea or Vietnam’s East Sea; Sea of Japan versus Korea’s East Sea; and the Persian Gulf versus the Arabian Gulf. Of course, all naming disputes are subject to contestation and occasionally open to compromises. This is usually determined by bilateral and multilateral agreements or in consultation with international bodies such as the IHO & UNGEGN.

It should also be mentioned that the selective use of contested names is also a signaling mechanism. US mainstream media and government documents always use whichever name happens to be disputed by China, for example, to show our commitment to curtail its geopolitical claims. So, there, it is less about historical usage or historical conventions but a matter of serviceability and expediency in our geopolitical realignment. There are many other similar cases, such as the Falkland Islands versus Islas Malvinas.

Finally, we academics, especially in the natural sciences, name certain regions in ways that best describe the phenomenon that we study. For example, oceanographers preferred to talk about the ‘Indo-Pacific’ to reflect the continuous distribution of marine life across the Indian and Pacific Oceans. But it is not until the containment of China required heightened collaboration with India, Japan, and Australia that the term became systematically applied in geopolitics.

President Trump’s rationale for changing the names of geographic features and landmarks is to restore names that “honor American greatness.” What role does nationalism play in the naming or re-naming of landmarks?

At a time when we are not only renaming Denali ‘McKinley’ and Gulf of Mexico ‘Gulf of America,’ but also witnessing the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s campaign to change ‘India’ to ‘Bharat’, it is clear that nationalistic claims of cultural proprietorship underlies geographic renaming. Sometimes, major disputes can be resolved—for example, Macedonia versus North Macedonia—but that was a special case with some leverages absent and other pressures present.

But the Greek case tells us that nationalism sometimes seeps into the epistemic arbiters by which we organize knowledge. To see that this is true, one needs only revisit the history of name-cleansing in the history of the modern Greek nation-state: Ottoman nomenclatures were systematically removed and replaced by ancient Greek names, some of which were more accurate than others. Even today, there remain some gaps between ancient and modern Greek designations. Of course, the same is true across the border— the consolidated Turkish state also makes sure that the world continues to speak of Istanbul and İzmir rather than Constantinople and Smyrna.

While the naming debate of Denali v. McKinley taps into the right’s resistance to cultural ‘political correctness’ and a general aversion to paying tribute to Native American cosmology, the ‘Gulf of America’ is a broader gesture meant to signal the Trump administration’s commitment to American grandeur in the Western hemisphere, no matter how symbolic. At the next inter-partisan transition of power, it is possible that these changes may be reversed.

What are the potential geopolitical implications of these name changes? Have any other renaming cases caused geopolitical issues?

Geographic renaming rarely singlehandedly causes a geopolitical conflict, but rival naming does fuel diplomatic tensions and, when filtered through public education, plants the seeds of future cognitive dissonances between peoples and polities. This is something we see in South, East, and Southeast Asia. The names ‘McKinley’ or ‘Gulf of America’ may last only for a finite number of White House residencies and could only make their way into very few textbooks. After all, renaming is only one of the many instances of US unilateralism, a recurring motif across partisan lines.

As a former European diplomat once told me, the difference between the two parties’ foreign policies is that between ‘unilateralism with a smile’ and ‘unilateralism with a frown.’ The United States has set foot and planted his flags not only in the ‘Gulf of Mesoamerica & Mexico’—this would be a middle ground, just as many Southeast Asian states now refer to the ‘Indo-Asia-Pacific’ to appear neutral—but also in seas far beyond its shores which it has no chance to name or rename, with a smile or a frown.