And our former friends won't trust us again anytime soon.
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| An image Trump posted on Truth Social depicts America taking over Canada, Greenland, Cuba, and Venezuela. (TS screencap) |
Nothing, though, has really changed.
Nearly five months out from Trump’s unprovoked and disastrous attack, the bottom line is that he’s lost the war but still can’t bring himself to admit it. So we’re trapped in a seemingly endless cycle of vacillating between belligerence and fake peace deals while gas prices spike, bombs fall, and people die.
Off to the side of that debacle, Trump last week reiterated
that he wants to seize Greenland in his sweaty short-fingered appendages.
Trump’s gaseous blather about invading Greenland seems like
a minor monstrosity compared to his actual murderous bombing
of, and ongoing humiliation by, Iran. But they’re part of the same phenomenon —
a foreign policy driven by ego, ignorance, and inflamed colonial malice, in
which the US sees no allies and really no other sentient human beings, just
territory to be won and glorious carnage to commit.
The renewed threats against Greenland are serious because
they signal once again how untrustworthy, erratic, selfish, and cruel US
foreign policy has become. Neither allies, rivals, nor enemies can trust us.
Which means everyone, definitely including us, is poorer, less secure, and less
safe.
Threatening allies has costs
Trump first began braying about buying Greenland in his
first term. Why he became fixated on it is a bit unclear, but the obsession
seems to have started after Puerto Rican officials and the media criticized
Trump for his (failed, racist) response to Hurricane Maria.
In a snit, Trump began to talk about trading Puerto Rico to
Denmark for its autonomous territory Greenland. His rationale, according to
former DHS Chief of Staff Miles Taylor, was that “Puerto Rico was dirty and the
people were poor.”
Why does Trump want Greenland in particular? He’s floated a
range of nonsensical rationales over the years, from security to mineral
wealth. Recently his administration has even argued that Greenland’s
fisheries could
save the Red Lobster seafood chain.
All of these explanations are nonsense. Greenland is (or was) an ally and already works with us on security; it has little in the way of minerals we need. And Red Lobster’s problems have nothing to do with Greenland, for christ’s sake. The truth seems to be that Trump wants to seize Greenland because it looks enormous on maps and he thinks it is cool to put his name on big things.
Trump, then, is motivated not by security, nor by economics,
but by ego, spite, and malice.
All this would be ludicrous except for the fact that the US electorate decided to make Trump the most powerful person in the world again, which means that his confused bigot whims are now the problem of every single person in the world.
First, of course, Trump’s threats are a serious danger to
Greenland. Polls show that the populace overwhelming opposes US
control, with 85 percent against and only 6 percent for. Greenland’s Prime
Minister Mette Frederiksen put it as plainly as possible in January: “Greenland
does not want to be owned by the United States. Greenland does not want to be
governed by the United States. Greenland does not want to be part of the United
States.” She added that an invasion by Trump would destroy NATO.
And indeed Trump’s threats have put massive strain on NATO, not least because NATO countries have had to spend significant time, money, and effort to dissuade Trump from actually invading. France, Norway, Sweden, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, Finland and of course Denmark all sent troops to Greenland to engage in military exercises in January. The cost was not made public, but it was undoubtedly a lot of money to spend to defend against your supposed ally. And Trump compounded the insult and expense by leveling retaliatory tariffs on all the nations involved.
This is not just a one and done problem. American
untrustworthiness creates massive longterm difficulties for everyone in the
world, and certainly for our onetime closest allies. Canada — which Trump has
also threatened to annex — is pushing a huge $60 billion military
buildup since it can no longer rely on the US not to attack it, much
less to defend it.
Europe is also rearming with its biggest defense push since the end of the Cold War. This is money that could be spent on social programs, on green tech, on making a better world — now dumped into defending against, among other things, an unhinged, belligerent United States.
It’s not good when everyone hates you
Trump would insist that forcing Europe and Canada to pay
more for defense is somehow in our interest. But the fact is that alienating
allies and neighbors hurts us too, in a whole range of ways.
First, fighting your allies is expensive. Trump’s trade wars
— which again, have been fueled in part by his efforts to bully NATO —
are estimated to
have cost the US some $317 billion. More, when people in foreign countries see
you as a danger and enemy, they make travel plans elsewhere. Unsurprisingly,
now that Trump is insulting and attacking Canadians and Europeans, US tourism
has cratered.
The industry dropped $16.6 billion in 2025 and is heading for another $21
billion drop in 2026.
Part of that is because of Trump’s horrific nativist border
policies which have led to
the arrest and torture of some tourists. But part of it is simply that people
like Canadians —
a huge part of the US tourism market — simply don’t want to spend money in a
country that is actively threatening them.
Second, when you bully your allies over and over, they no longer have much incentive to help you on issues of mutual security. In fact, they have reason to believe that your security is not mutual and that they are better off when you are weaker than when you are stronger.
You can see this in Iran. After Trump blundered into the war
and Iran retaliated by closing the Strait of Hormuz, very serious NYT foreign
policy columnist Thomas Friedman argued that
NATO should bail him out. Friedman pointed out, correctly, that for
NATO “to sit on the sidelines and let Iran’s malign regime, with its
poisonous ideology, take hostage the Strait of Hormuz … would keep the world’s
most critical oil lifeline in a state of permanent instability.”
What Friedman doesn’t seem to consider, though, is that the
US under Trump is also a malign regime with a poisonous
ideology, and that, given its size and power, the US has a lot more potential
for creating global instability than Iran does. Iran can threaten global oil
supplies, but it can’t credibly threaten to invade Canada or fight NATO
countries over Greenland.
If you are France, or the UK, or Denmark, or Germany, you
have to consider what happens if you rush in to help Trump take the strait back
from Iran. At best, if you succeed, you’ve empowered Trump, and what would an
empowered Trump do next? It seems likely he’d invade someone else — and again,
at least two of the countries on his list are NATO members.
Letting Iran open and close the strait at will is not ideal. But neither is letting Trump attack anyone in the world he wants. You can hardly blame NATO for deciding its best move is to step back and let their enemies beat the snot out of each other.
We’re no one’s ally
Trump has made it clear over the last decade, and especially
in his second term, that he wants no alliances based on mutual interest and
respect. He wants to be the biggest bully on earth, and force everyone to
genuflect before him like he’s an uglier, more orange Vito Corleone.
In this goal he has succeeded. He has no allies. He is
powerful enough that people like NATO Secretary Mark Rutte will humor him and
sit placidly by as he threatens Greenland in their presence …
… but when Trump needs help — as he does in Iran — no one
will provide it. He’s shown that he considers his success to be everyone else’s
failure, and so everyone wants him to fail.
Hopefully at some point we have a more responsible
government which does not want to invade Greenland. But even then, how can
Greenland, or Canada, or France, or anyone, trust a US in which voters might
choose to give the nuclear codes to a Trump, or a Vance, or a Rubio?
Republicans, in backing Trump, have shown that, in the name
of marginal and imaginary political gains at home, they will honor no treaties
and protect no allies abroad. It is not just Trump who is the enemy. It is his
party — and unfortunately also the voters who gave that party power once, and
may well do so again.
Perhaps if Democrats convincingly crush fascism and
transform the US political landscape someone, somewhere, might trust us again
at some point. For now, though, and for the foreseeable future, no other
country is going to defend us or fight for our security. They would be fools if
they did. We want to conquer Greenland. What more is there to say?
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