Why is no one stopping him? In grabbing at Greenland, President Donald Trump is endangering America, enfeebling the West, and imperiling the world. And all for what?
Is there a military rationale? On the contrary, for defense purposes, the United States has controlled Greenland for 85 years. The issue is not whether America gets to keep Greenland; it’s whether America gets to keep its allies.
Is there some ulterior game involving minerals? Again, no. Any U.S. mining company is more than welcome — the Danes, until a few days ago, wanted the largest possible U.S. presence — but the extraction costs have proved too high.
Is it, then, about domestic politics? Hardly. Trump, who was elected to halt overseas adventurism, has picked perhaps the only issue where his base will not follow him. A Quinnipiac University poll showed opposition to the use of force in Greenland running at 86% to 9%, while another by Ipsos had those figures as 71% and 4%, 4% coincidentally being the “lizardman constant,” the proportion of respondents in any poll who give insincere responses. In Greenland itself, hostility to U.S. annexation is polling at 86% to 6%. If neither Americans nor Greenlanders want the takeover, what is the president playing at?
I hate to write this, but we must acknowledge the possibility that he aims to please Russian President Vladimir Putin, the only public figure about whom he has never been impolite.
Who, after all, gains most from the crisis and the consequent wreckage of NATO? Who, come to that, has gained most from the chaos of U.S. tariff policy? Who has gained most from the volte-face on Ukraine? As writer Bill Buckley used to say of certain American leftists, “They may not be on the Kremlin payroll, but, if they were, what would they be doing differently?”
Perhaps we should just listen to Trump. I don’t mean his stream-of-consciousness babble to the effect that the U.S. needs Greenland “because we don’t want Russia as a neighbor”. The president is presumably aware that Greenland is 1700 miles away from U.S. territory, whereas Russia is 55 miles away.
No, I mean listen to how he describes his own motivations. Asked why ownership was so important, given the existing U.S. presence, he replied, “Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success.”
When a different journalist asked, “Psychologically important to you or to the United States?” he was stunningly frank. “Psychologically important for me. Now, maybe another president would feel differently, but so far I’ve been right about everything.”
As always, the sophists and apologists are rushing forward with explanations that the president himself has not deployed. Alongside various bogus strategic justifications is the familiar line that he doesn’t really mean it. It’s all just a way of strengthening his hand in advance of some grand bargain. Seriously, not literally, and so forth.
Except that he obviously does mean it. Throughout his life, Trump has displayed a pathological inability to accept defeat. Whenever anything goes against him — a business deal, a round of golf, a TV awards ceremony — he alleges wrongdoing and acts as if he had won. In all three of his election bids, he declared before the first ballot had been cast that the only way he could lose was through fraud. Unsurprisingly, in 2020, some of his supporters took him both seriously and literally.
Even if Trump were now to back down graciously, a great deal of damage has been done. The plausibility of NATO’s mutual defense clause has been shot to pieces. Europeans are urgently diversifying their procurement away from the U.S. The readiness of Western allies to accept U.S. hegemony is in collapse.
DAN HANNAN: TRUMP’S CALIGULAN GRAB FOR GREENLAND
We all know, though, that backing down graciously is not in Trump’s repertoire. Suppose he were simply to issue a presidential decree declaring Greenland to be American territory. The Danes would respond, at the very least, by closing Greenland to further U.S. military incursions, and probably by ordering the expulsion of the 150 American soldiers currently there. These are precisely the situations in which accidents happen and people get shot. Even if the worst does not happen, the fact that other NATO states are diverting troops to Greenland while Russia advances in Ukraine is a huge victory for the Kremlin.
The worst of it is the effect that Trump has on those around him. Senior officials and members of Congress, people with distinguished careers, are reduced to repeating his talking points and posting babyish memes. The U.S. is now more hostile to Denmark than to Russia. It’s not just that the supposed grown-ups are failing to temper the president’s behavior; they’re encouraging it. Shame on them.
