Days after Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro was kidnapped by American forces and extradited to the United States, President Donald Trump and his lackeys have been making it clear that their aim is to control the entire Western Hemisphere — throwing out the rules-based liberal international order we established with our allies after the Second World War.
The hubris has been coming fast and furious. On Air Force One, next to a grinning and bobbing Senator Lindsey Graham, Trump doubled down on the notion that the communist failed state of Cuba would be next to fall, finding time to threaten Colombia, Mexico, and even Greenland.
This isn’t evidence of great power. But it is more than the egotistical impulse of an unchecked imperial president. It is a deliberate strategy that involves the gleeful destruction of the United States’ reputation as the leader of the free world. Russia and China couldn’t be happier: Trump is making the world great again for autocrats.
While America is busy remaking the Caribbean, it’s worth asking why Greenland has found its way into the conversation. The answer is in the Trump administration’s new favorite word: hemisphere.
The brutal realpolitik goal of the Trumpers is now to assert U.S. control of the Western Hemisphere — from Greenland down to South America. The word is suddenly on the lips of every obedient Trumper. In case you missed it, the White House put out a select transcript of the times Secretary of State Marco Rubio dutifully trotted out the word while doing the Sunday show clean-up of Trump’s apparently inaccurate declaration that we are currently in “control” of Venezuela.
It’s a fancy diplo-speak version of what Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Tuesday: “We live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength that is governed by force that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
This is the sneering repudiation of the once essentially American belief that “right makes might” that was famously articulated by Abraham Lincoln and which formed the basis of the collective security agreements rooted in international law.
The Trump team is saying clearly that they believe might makes right. It is the logic of the January 6 attack imposed on the world. And that’s why Greenland is on their to-do list. As Miller explained on CNN, “Greenland should be part of the United States. The president has been very clear about that that is the position of the U.S. government.”
This matters for more than bragging and mineral rights. Trump seizing Greenland — a protectorate of our longtime ally Denmark — would amount to an attack on a fellow NATO nation and effectively paralyze if not destroy the world’s most successful multi-lateral security organization. If you don’t believe me, listen to what the Danish prime minister told Bloomberg News: “If the U.S. chooses to attack another NATO country militarily, then everything stops, including NATO and thus the security that has been established since the end of the Second World War.”
That’s why Putin is grinning offscreen. The Trump team shares his contemptuous belief that the liberal world order is “obsolete” and they are helping him dismantle it. But of course, the rationale is based on a bigger quid pro quo — hemispheric dominance.
This is what the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy document stated, which Russia praised as being “largely consistent with our vision.” As I wrote last month for Rolling Stone:
“In this vision, the United States leans into its role as the defender of the Western Hemisphere — which helps explain Trump’s repeated, bleated interest in everything from annexing Greenland and Canada to retaking the Panama Canal, and of course the current threats to the odious Maduro regime in Venezuela. … The flipside to Trump’s regional power grabs is an uneasy might-makes-right balance-of-power peace with the other regional hegemons China and Russia. China gets to dominate Asia, with Taiwan a tempting target on Chinese president-for-life Xi’s to-do list. Russia gets eastern Ukraine and a weakened NATO, dovetailing perfectly with the musings of J.D. Vance’s right-wing Svengali Curtis Yarvin, whose stated foreign policy vision for Europe is to ’give Russia a free hand on the continent.‘”
That’s why America’s NATO allies are recognizing that they have a dangerous president and a deeply unreliable administration on their hands. America’s reputation as a beacon of freedom, equality and opportunity is in tatters because of Trump and his enablers. Secretary of State Rubio might console himself with the belief that he is playing an advanced game of dominoes that will topple the communist Cuban regime — and good riddance if that occurs. But Trump’s brisk ditching of the Nobel Peace Prize- winning opposition leader Marina Corina Machado in Venezuela should make it clear that there is no pro-democracy agenda at work here – just power, money, and ego.
Trump has no mandate from the American people for this kind of an unhinged power grab. But with the honorable exception of a few consistent conservatives like Rand Paul and Thomas Massie, current Republican members of Congress are afraid to call Trump out for selling out every Reagan-esque principle they once said they believed in.
This is a surreal, dark, and dangerous time. The Pandora’s box that has been opened will not be easily closed. The effort to seize sovereign lands in our hemisphere from the Arctic Circle to South America is insane by any objective American standard. It will empower autocrats around the world to use Trump’s example as approval for their own power grabs in their region of influence. These actions are unwise, unconstitutional, and un-American. We do not defeat dictators by acting like them.
