Why Donald Trump Wants Greenland (and Everything Else)
What some senior Trump officials once saw as the wishful thinking of a dilettante has now become a real international crisis, one that could lead – or perhaps has already led – to the effective end of the world. NATO. After this week, can anyone credibly claim to be confident that the United States, under Trump, would honor its mutual defense commitment that is the bedrock of the alliance?
It turns out that Greenland is not a punchline but a model that explains a lot about Trump’s foreign policy: It’s about a power-grabbing president who looks at territory on a map and says he wants to own it. Trump couldn’t articulate a rationale for acquiring Greenland — “from a strategic standpoint, from a geographic standpoint, from a geographic standpoint, it’s something we should have,” he told us — any more than he can explain what his plan is for Venezuela now that he’s toppled the country’s leader and seized some of its oil. Questioned by journalists from TimesOn Wednesday, on why he couldn’t settle for the terms of the existing 1951 treaty with Denmark, which grants the U.S. military almost unlimited use of Greenland territory, Trump responded: “Ownership is very important. ” He added, “because that’s what I think is psychologically necessary to be successful.” » There are no limits to his global powers, Trump said, except for one thing: “My own morals. My own mind. That’s the only thing that can stop me.”
Trump’s approach to the world is not the isolationism that many of his supporters celebrated upon his return to the White House, promising an “America First” shift from the liberal internationalism of his predecessors, but a narcissistic form of unilateralism that says loud and clear: I can do what I want, when and how I want. Unbridled power exercised for its own sake is the theme and, alongside Trump himself, his deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, is its muse. Miller’s virulent enunciation of this doctrine, in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Monday, during which he asserted America’s right to do as it pleases with Greenland, was rightly seen as an important statement of the worldview underlying this administration. “We live in a world, the real world, Jake, that is ruled by force, that is ruled by force, that is ruled by power,” Miller said. “These have been the iron laws of the world since the dawn of time. »
Including last weekend’s daring commando raid on Maduro’s compound, Trump has now ordered U.S. military attacks on seven different countries since returning to the White House: Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen. “Trump is tough on the weak but weak on the tough,” as Raphaël Glucksmann, a French member of the European Parliament, said. Wall Street Journal. Does it make the situation better or worse if, in most cases, Trump’s attention has come and gone as quickly as the missiles he has unleashed? That he dwelled on his military triumphs just long enough to make sweeping statements about the transformative, brilliant, and incredible results he achieved before quickly moving on to another concern? In the days following the Venezuela attack, Trump explicitly threatened not only Greenland but also Colombia, Iran and Mexico. For what? Because he can. Ten years into Trump’s political career and nearly a year into his second term, we can now say with certainty that the president’s signature geopolitical decision is not about withdrawing the United States from the world, but about using force to impose his will on it.
For a man who has also spent the last year proclaiming himself “President of PEACE,” this seems like an almost inconceivable turn of events. This is not the case: Trump considers these spectacular military actions to be achievements in their own right. The use of force is, for this president, less a means to achieve American national security objectives than an end in itself. Trump’s reaction to observing the attack in Venezuela in real time is worth remembering in the context of an operation that, according to the latest US estimates, killed some seventy-five people, including Maduro security agents and local residents. “I mean, I watched it, literally, like I was watching a TV show,” he marveled in an interview with Fox News on Saturday. “And if you had seen the speed, the violence.”
