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Is Donald Trump crazy like a fox or just crazy? It’s a question very much still debated—most bitterly, in recent months, in the context of the president’s aggressive campaign for American acquisition of Greenland from the Kingdom of Denmark.
Team “crazy like a fox” sees a consummate dealmaker with a visceral love of his country and his countrymen—a man who quite reasonably desires an additional Arctic buffer from Chinese and Russian incursion into the American-led Western hemispheric dominance that’s been buttressed by his own staggering recent operation to extract Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. Team “crazy” sees a compete and utter madman who is wasting precious time on a geopolitical nonentity and who harbors a deep, inexplicable scorn for our NATO partners in Western and Northern Europe—someone, that is, who should be impeached or have the 25th Amendmentinvoked against him.
It’s a pretty stark divide. And as for me, I’m squarely in the former camp.
The opposition to Trump’s Greenland campaign typically takes one of two forms. First, many Beltway foreign policy “experts” decry Trump’s obsession with what they blithely dismiss as a barren and worthless icebox, especially at a time when Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei slaughters tens of thousands of his own people, Russia’s Vladimir Putin continues to shell countless innocent Ukrainians, and China’s Xi Jinping gets ever closer to an all-out amphibious invasion of Taiwan. Second, many also decry Trump’s occasional bombastic spurts of rhetorical flourish and take issue with his alleged lack of proper decorum vis-à-vis our European “allies,” in particular.
Let’s take these objections one at a time.
It is true that, as a superpower, the United States has interests throughout the world. We should be cheering on the intrepid protesters in Tehran, pressuring Putin to end his destructive war in Ukraine, and reinforcing our allies in the Indo-Pacific against a possible People’s Liberation Army invasion of Taiwan. But as a matter of common sense and as this administration also laid it out in its recent National Security Strategy document, “America First” necessitates a prioritization of one’s hemispheric backyard. George Washington cautioned us in 1796 to beware of foreign entanglements, but what he actually feared was “interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe.” By contrast, the early-republic generations of American statesmen were much more comfortable flexing their muscle in our own hemisphere, as the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 makes clear. That tradition continued well into the 20th century, as well, through the Roosevelt Corollary of 1904.
Greenland fits very neatly into this puzzle. Indeed, Trump is far from the first American leader to make the connection. As Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) recalled in a 2019 New York Times op-ed, it was William Seward, Abraham Lincoln’s one-time secretary of state, who in 1867 “explored” the possibility of the United States acquiring Greenland around the same time he successfully negotiated the purchase of Alaska from Russia. (Talk about a wildly successful “icebox” purchase!). In 1946, President Harry S. Truman offered $100 million to Denmark to acquire Greenland, arguing, as the Cold War was just getting underway, that the world’s largest island was “indispensable to the safety of the United States.” The United States, lest one forget, has a very, very long history of territorial expansion via purchase. Have we forgotten about the Louisiana Purchase? Heck, in 1917 the U.S. purchased what is now known as the U.S. Virgin Islands from … Denmark.
What is the issue here, again? The objection that the United States cannot walk and chew gum at the same time, when it comes to foreign affairs, is simple preposterous. Is the contention that we will cease carrying about Tehran’s nuclear program or Beijing’s burgeoning naval hegemony in the South and East China Seas simply because we want to better secure the Arctic region from Chinese and Russian aggression—and maybe snatch up some coveted Greenlandic rare earth minerals, to boot? Please.
As for the “he’s so mean” complaint—well, where have I heard this before? Oh, yes—people have been saying this ever since Trump first ran for president back in 2016. Back then, the frequently expressed fear was that Trump’s behavior and rhetoric would alienate allies on the world stage and result in much-dreaded “democratic backsliding” here on the home front. Notably, precisely none of that has happened. We have seen some “democratic backsliding” over the past decade, but it is solely attributable to the prosecutorial excesses of Biden-era partisan Democratic lawfare and the censorious excesses of Jack Dorsey-era Big Tech oligarchs. On the contrary, Trump’s years-long politically incorrect (but delectable) ribbing of our European partners as being insufficiently protective of their civilization has inspired far more NATO countries to meet the alliance’s prescribed 2% of GDP spending on defense threshold.
More generally—and I know it’s a crazy thought—maybe, just maybe, the Art of the Deal guy knows a thing or two about what he’s doing when it comes to basic negotiation tactics of initially deliberately overshooting the mark and then settling for a reasonable compromise. He’s not going to push more Europeans toward China, as many fear, with his on-again/off-again threats of increased tariffs if the Euros continue to refuse any negotiation for Greenland. Why? Simple: Following the 12-Day War in the Middle East that saw Iran humiliated by team “Big Satan”-“Little Satan” and the spectacular recent collapse of the Maduro client state in Caracas, China looks like a horrible patron state in today’s great-power competition.
The most likely outcome of the current stand-off? The Europeans eventually come back to “daddy” Trump asking for mercy. They will be humiliated, to the extent they are not already. The Danes don’t even much care about Greenland; the kingdom subsidizes the island annually to the tune of nearly a $1 billion, and many Scandinavian Danes harbor an unfortunate racial animus toward the Inuits of Greenland.
Trump should keep on pushing hard to acquire Greenland. Let the pearl-clutchers and bedwetters cavil and moan. Let them ridicule Trump as a bully and besmirch America as a jingoistic, colonialist backwater. Who cares? Greenland becoming America’s first territorial acquisition since 1947 is decidedly in our national interest. What’s more, the president who has presided over a truly historic number of peace deals in the first year of his new term should be entitled to a reasonable deference in his choice and style of international diplomacy. Maybe, just maybe, he has some grasp on what he’s doing. On this particular issue, just get out of the way and let Trump cook.
