\n During his first term, his designs on Greenland<\/a> were considered a joke \u2014 just another brazen boast of a president who loves to shock.\n <\/p>\n \n Even last year, when Donald Trump Jr.<\/a> flew to the vast island on his father\u2019s jet with a presidential bobblehead in the cockpit and, later, when Vice President JD Vance<\/a> donned a parka for his own whistle-stop visit, there was an element of US trolling.\n <\/p>\n \n But no one\u2019s laughing anymore.\n <\/p>\n \n European leaders, who on Tuesday reaffirmed the island\u2019s sovereignty and Denmark\u2019s claims over its autonomous territory, are taking the president\u2019s threats seriously.\n <\/p>\n \n This is hardly surprising, since the administration \u2014 flush with hubris after its Venezuela win \u2014 now claims the entire Western Hemisphere as Trump\u2019s domain. And his top aide Stephen Miller warned Monday on CNN that the US was not following the \u201ciron laws\u201d of a world governed by strength, force and power<\/a>.\n <\/p>\n \n But Trump\u2019s public rationale that the US must have the icebound territory for its own national security didn\u2019t fully add up \u2014 even before the White House on Tuesday rocked jittery NATO allies by refusing to rule out military force to get it.\n <\/p>\n \n The president is spot-on that Greenland is strategically vital<\/a> and getting more so.\n <\/p>\n \n It\u2019s always been an important mid-Atlantic bridgehead. In World War II, it gave its name to the feared Greenland Air Gap ocean tract, out of range of land-based aircraft, that Nazi U-boats turned into a killing ground for Allied merchant convoys.\n <\/p>\n \n In any new major war, whoever controls Greenland would master the vital Atlantic Sea lanes. And an existing US base on the territory already plays an important role in US early-warning missile detection systems.\n <\/p>\n \n Eight decades after World War II, Greenland is becoming a hotter spot literally and geopolitically, as melting ice opens new shipping routes on the roof of the world. China and Russia understand just as well as Trump how strategically critical it could be.\n <\/p>\n \n But the flaw in Trump\u2019s argument is that there\u2019s nothing stopping him from reinforcing Greenland if he believes US national security is at risk.\n <\/p>\n \n After all, Greenland is a semi-autonomous territory of a NATO member. Its vast empty spaces could easy accommodate a new garrison, bases and thousands of military personnel. Despite offensive jokes by administration leaders that Denmark is only defending the island with dog sleds, the US has a treaty with Copenhagen that permits huge latitude for US landings and takeoffs; anchorages; harbors; living facilities; and other basing needs.\n <\/p>\n \n Greenland is also rich in yet-to-be-tapped offshore oil and gas fields, and as its tundra thaws, its rare earth mineral deposits<\/a>, which could fuel new age technologies and weapons, will become easier to mine.\n <\/p>\n \n If it\u2019s rare earths that Trump cares about, then both Danish and Greenland officials have said they are open to partnership agreements.\n <\/p>\n \n But there\u2019s no sign that Trump \u2014 who is coming to resemble 19th-century US presidents who craved new lands, wielded tariffs as weapons and dreamed of matching European empires \u2014 is looking to share. The US base on Greenland flies the Danish flag as well as the Stars and Stripes. This administration leans more towards the thinking of Miller\u2019s wife, Katie, who posted a social media picture of the entire island covered in the red, white and blue.\n <\/p>\n \n The world has changed in the last few days.\n <\/p>\n \n Trump\u2019s insistence that he was \u201crunning\u201d Venezuela and was in charge following Maduro\u2019s capture<\/a> suggests he\u2019s moved from a being a rhetorical imperialist to a practicing one.\n <\/p>\n \n An announcement Tuesday that Venezuela would turn over up to 50 million barrels of sanctioned oil<\/a> to the US to be sold \u2014 and that Trump would control the proceeds to benefit Americans and Venezuelans \u2014 further fueled concerns that he is bent on gaining plunder from sovereign states.\n <\/p>\n \n Trump\u2019s aggressive new pitch for total control of the Western Hemisphere coincides with his accelerating obsession with his physical legacy, including his plans for a huge White House ballroom<\/a> and the splashing of his name above that of an assassinated American president on the Kennedy Center in Washington<\/a>.\n <\/p>\n \n How Trump would love to go down in history alongside President Thomas Jefferson, who purchased Louisiana for 1803 for $15 million and almost doubled the size of the United States. Or one of his administration\u2019s historical heroes, President William McKinley, who annexed Hawaii in 1898. Trump would almost surely go one better and name the vast new icy American territory after himself.\n <\/p>\n \n It still seems almost unfathomable that the world is now coming to see Trump as a threat to Greenland.\n <\/p>\n \n It\u2019s not that there haven\u2019t been concerns about its security in the past. But almost everyone thought that the danger to NATO would emanate from Moscow or Beijing \u2014 not from the alliance\u2019s mightiest power.\n <\/p>\n \n For all of Trump\u2019s belligerence, there\u2019s no imminent sign that the president is planning a military venture, which would raise the unthinkable theoretical possibility of American troops raising their guns against their NATO brethren.\n <\/p>\n \n The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that Secretary of State Marco Rubio told lawmakers Trump wanted to buy Greenland, even though its leaders and Denmark have repeatedly made clear it is not for sale.\n <\/p>\n \n But these are unhinged times. No one can predict what Trump will do next. And unlike his first term, there\u2019s almost no one penning him in. It\u2019s hard to see Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth trying to talk the commander in chief out of an order to send Marines to plant a flag on Greenland.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cI know the Danes pretty well. They\u2019re tough people. It wouldn\u2019t surprise me to see them put a military force there to stand in opposition to a US force,\u201d retired Adm. James Stavridis, a former NATO Supreme Commander, told CNN\u2019s Jake Tapper on Tuesday. \u201cThis is the end of NATO we\u2019re talking about. Let\u2019s avoid that.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n But reality is in the eye of the beholder. After all, on the fifth anniversary Tuesday of the assault on the Capitol by supporters trying to overturn Trump\u2019s election loss, the official White House website was transformed into a propaganda organ<\/a>. It blamed Democrats and the Capitol Police for a MAGA mob that beat up officers and desecrated the chambers of Congress.\n <\/p>\n \n Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy warned Tuesday that Trump\u2019s designs on Greenland were no joke. \u201cI certainly was among those who, 12 months ago or six months ago, dismissed his talk of taking over Greenland as an intentional distraction,\u201d Murphy told CNN\u2019s Kasie Hunt. \u201cI think now you have to really think about what\u2019s in the president\u2019s brain.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n The leaders of France, Germany Italy, Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom joined Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen in declaring Tuesday that \u201cGreenland belongs to its people.\u201d Mark Carney \u2014 the prime minister of Canada, which shares a small land border and a vast maritime boundary with Greenland \u2014 announced a high-level delegation to the country next month.\n <\/p>\n \n Carney has had his own brushes with Trump\u2019s territorial expansionism. If the president had not alienated millions of Canadians with his demands that their country become the 51st US state, conservative leader Pierre Poilievre \u2014 a MAGA-lite-style populist \u2014 probably would have won last year\u2019s election<\/a>.\n <\/p>\n \n Geo-strategic implications of any US swoop on Greenland are enormous. Frederiksen has already warned that any US attempt to take Greenland by force would immediately destroy NATO and its mutual defense guarantee, which has been the bedrock of Western security since World War II. An attempt to seize a European territory would fracture US relations with Europe.\n <\/p>\n \n Growing ill-feeling toward Trump\u2019s America would also intensify. Denmark might be weaker than the United States. But it was strong enough to send 43 of its soldiers to die in US wars in Afghanistan and another 7 in Iraq, according to icasualties.org. This is an extraordinary rate per capita in a country of 6 million people. Friends treated in such an insulting manner may not be around next time America calls.\n <\/p>\n \n But the White House is applying power because it can.\n <\/p>\n \n Europe\u2019s reliance on the United States for its defense gives Trump great leverage. It\u2019s surreal to say so, but there\u2019s no prospect that European or Danish forces could defend Greenland from US troops if it came to it. \u201cNobody is going to fight the United States over the future of Greenland,\u201d Miller said.\n <\/p>\n \n Europe\u2019s strong statement in support of Greenlanders on Tuesday came after several days of its leaders dancing on the head of a diplomatic pin as they struggled to respond to the Venezuela raid without alienating Trump. Most opted for condemning Maduro while citing the need to uphold international law, which the US trampled with its incursion.\n <\/p>\n \n The European Union\u2019s delicate position, given the continent\u2019s defense needs, was also evident last year with the bloc\u2019s decision not to wage a counter-attack with its own tariffs against Trump. No one is sure, given Trump\u2019s anti-NATO rhetoric, that he won\u2019t just quit the world\u2019s most successful military alliance.\n <\/p>\n \n This imbalance in the power dynamic between Europe and the United States gives Trump an advantage if he seeks to lure Denmark into an \u201cArt of the Deal\u201d showdown over Greenland. And it\u2019s surely not a quirk of history that he\u2019s appointed Jeff Landry, the Republican governor of Louisiana \u2014 the state that America bought \u2014 as his special envoy to Greenland<\/a>.\n <\/p>\n \n Still, a Greenland purchase might be beyond even Trump. The logistics of such a move might require acts of Congress, ratification by the European Union, and complex negotiations and treaty arrangements.\n <\/p>\n \n Then there\u2019s the question of how much it would cost, even if it\u2019s not currently for sale. And are US lawmakers really going to stump up hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, at a minimum, to buy the world\u2019s largest island when their constituents are struggling to pay for health care, housing and groceries?\n <\/p>\n \n Some American statesmen hope that Trump\u2019s bluster cools before it destroys the West.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cLet\u2019s not push this into an apocalyptic ending. We can work with the Europeans. We have for decades,\u201d Stavridis, a senior CNN analyst, said. \u201cIt simply needs to be done with diplomacy, military engagement, economics.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n But such temperance isn\u2019t in vogue in a White House that is only becoming more belligerent after its humiliation of Venezuela.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"America\u2019s next conquest might become Trumpland. President Donald Trump is looking for new acquisitions for his 21st-century empire-building…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":392590,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-392589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=392589"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392589\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/392590"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=392589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=392589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=392589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"White](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/c-gettyimages-2253879831.jpg\")
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