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Order Josh Hammer’s new book, Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West: HERE.
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.
Donald Trump just demonstrated what Republican Teddy Roosevelt said back in 1901: “Speak softly and carry a big stick”
Ben Franklin A democracy is two wolves and a Lamb voting what to have for Dimmer Liberty is well armed Lamb Contesting the Vote/Like a Lamb armed with AR-15. Politicians are the lowest form of Life on Earth a Liberal Democrat are lowest form of Politician General Patton
Maybe he’d seem less crazy on this and other matters, if the administration did a better job of educating and explaining to the public the motives behind these moves. And doing so in a fashion that’s dumbed down and short. The left is owning the narrative and lots of people are scratching their heads about Greenland and other issues (none-the-least of which being inflation and the horrible impact tariffs are having on the cost of goods). Trump often appears more focused on foreign policy (which is vital, for sure) but with too little focus on how American’s are struggling. Doing good things is important, but making sure the electorate understands how they’re good, make the country better and stronger, is also crucial and, in my view, there’s not enough of that happening. Meanwhile, the left finds buzzwords that are compelling and emotional and they’re crushing it on numerous fronts.
“educating and explaining to the public the motives behind these moves. ”
I suspect you’ve never played poker. You don’t explain your hand.
I love watching Trump work a room of fools that don’t even realize they’re being “worked”. I voted for this.
Mr. Hammer is from the room that is inhabited by the same Obama/Biden supporters who blindly celebrate a pupulist leader with a mantra that says “There are no second or third order consequences; therefore, thou shalt not criticize anything done by our political star”.
The GAIK Gap – unmentioned by Mr. Hammer and almost all of our President’s uncritical supporters – is indeed critical and getting more so. Trump, as best I’m aware, has yet to mention that increasingly critical strategic area that was and remains the naval equivalent of the Cold War Fulda Gap.
He has every right and should have brought this to the public attention of NATO and Denmark in particular. And demanded European countries take at least half of the responsibility for providing a defense force physically present in Greenland. The EU countries have just as much a strategic liability there as do North American countries.
However, keeping second and third order consequences in mind: our President couldn’t negotiate that without beginning by openly insulting NATO partners that just finished fighting beside us for the last 20 years in our forever wars in Afghanistan?
Without making empty insinuated threats he would invade (as though the GOP Congress would not impeach him before the Democrats could if he did so)?
Without making nakedly imperialistic demands that Greenland/Democrat surrender sovereignty of Greenland under those threats? To outside countries, it looks like what it was: an imperialistic protection racket on a national scale.
Give America what Trump demands, or your nice little territory here might suffer some sort of catastrophe that wouldn’t have happened if you’d paid up to be under our protection.
I don’t agree that this is a victory without costs.
cont’d
cont’d
Trump attempted the same tactic less than a year ago with Canada, when that country was just weeks away from their federal election that picks their prime minister for the following six years.
The deeply conservative party leader holding a massive lead in the poles, far more fiscally conservative and smaller government than Trump, was projected to take such an overwhelming victory that the coalition Marxist Trudeau/Singh government was projected to be reduced to numbers so small that Canada was expected to have a conservative majority for the next six years.
The conservative platform included reducing what ties Canada had with China, removing Trudeau’s ten years of hate speech laws, DEI, Woke, and the anti-American attitudes that began with Trudeau mimicking Obama’s presidency.
We were about to have another Reagan/Mulroney partnership with Canada..
With weeks to go, Trump told Canadians that he was considering annexing Canada by force, to make it the 51st state. Like Greenland, if he actually attempted that, the GOP would impeach him before the DNC could – Canada is split like the coastal US states, and the urban Marxist elites take most of the federal votes. Canada as a state would have the same affect on both House and Senate seats as California – a Democrat hegemony.
The result is the Liberals rushed to portray themselves as the only ones who could protect Canada from Trump’s threat to annex their country by military force. The Liberals and media banded together to tell Canadians the Conservative leader was a mini-Trump who would sell Canada to Trump if elected.
The result in the election was that the Marxist coalition came back to resume control of the Canadian government, and resume copycat Obama policies and anti-Americanism.
Trump’s response to his actions getting a Marxist coalition re-elected in Canada instead of a leader more conservative than he, was to hammer Canada with tariffs as they were apparently ripping us off. Ripping us off under the free trade agreement he had been bragging to Americans was the bestest trade deal ever made.
More followed, with the latest being telling Canadians (along with Brits) that they had never done anything for the US, and although maybe they did go to Afghanistan, they ensured they stayed well away from the fighting.
cont’d
cont’d
That’s not how you talk to Canada, the UK, etc who stepped up to fight beside us in our Gulf War and unending forever war in Afghanistan. Countries who lost hundreds of soldiers with thousands more maimed for life, fighting, bleeding and dying beside our American soldiers.
What Josh Hammer misses, with the wilful blindness of a populist extolling the accomplishments of Obama, is the 2nd and 3d order effects of the path Trump chose for both Canada and Greenland.
Our president’s new globalist/bankster Marxist Prime Minister he put in power, he now complains about signing a massive free trade deal with Communist China to transfer what trade he could from being tariff penalized trade with America.
Logically, what did Trump expect would be different from getting a Marxist elected instead of the conservative who was favored to win before Trump’s threats to Canadians?
That’s a second order consequence of Trump putting a Marxist instead of a conservative in power in Canada.
The UK that Trump also told the world “stayed away from the front”, responded to our president by pointing out the hundreds of Brit troops killed in Afghanistan and the Victoria Crosses won posthumously
Their other response at the same time was to sign a massive trade deal of their own with India, another nation that Trump has piled massive tariffs on.
Those two countries, just like Canada, are shifting as much of their trade away from being tariff-punished trade with the USA to other nations.
Central and South American countries are cutting free trade agreements with themselves and European nations, continuing that trend over the last month..
And why wouldn’t they choose that instead of adding the cost of tariffs to trade with the USA?
Logically, no country’s leader is going to voluntarily be our president’s tariff piggy bank. If he believes America’s trade with them is unfair, there is no logical argument if they take the trade he complains of to other countries instead of the USA.
These are just some of the second and third order effects that tunnel vision uncritical populist fans such as Josh Hammer either don’t see or just dismiss out of hand.
Whatever Trump ultimately gets in Greenland, including extortion style grabs of Greenland territory, ultimately he could have gotten it through other means than openly threatening Denmark and our NATO allies.
This is “Winning”??? The Charlie Sheen self-destructive version?
whether you like trump or not and most dont , only those who matter do . i love the fact that the status quo has been dumped on by a non career politician not from the ranks of the entrenched political elite toadying class . it is so entertaining to see and hear their heads exploding every time they gasp at something the don has said that doesnt fit their polite political doublespeak rule book that they adhere to .