Paying the Danegeld

The lesson of the 2024 presidential election is this simple: Keep your eye on the ball.

I thought of it again on Thursday as I watched the Democratic mayor of Los Angeles turn mute when asked why her city wasn’t better prepared to fight the wildfires that have incinerated entire neighborhoods this week.

That clip has gone viral because of how uncannily it captures the public’s sense of progressive paralysis toward urban chaos. And not just the clip: This week, in the largest liberal city in America’s largest liberal state, with residents fleeing for their lives, the fire hydrants in affected areas temporarily ran dry. Once again, it appears, the price of government by leftists is dysfunction in providing the basic services most responsible for residents’ quality of life. 

That’s what did in Kamala Harris, too. When Americans were asked to choose between a liberal whose time as vice president saw high inflation and unchecked immigration and a boorish authoritarian who promised to make the trains run on time, it wasn’t much of a contest. Voters preferred a convicted felon who vowed to improve their quality of life to a prosecutor who didn’t have much to say on the subject.

Democrats have taken their eye off the ball, in other words, so much so that Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro has become an A-tier 2028 presidential prospect in part for simply fixing a collapsed bridge in a speedy manner. From fighting crime to building housing to basic road repair, it’s remarkable to the point of being newsworthy when a modern liberal officeholder moves aggressively to make his constituents’ day-to-day lives more pleasant and affordable. For all his faults, Donald Trump seems to understand that and to have capitalized.

Which is why he’s begun talking about … invading Greenland?

And not just Greenland! At a press conference on Tuesday, the president-elect wouldn’t rule out using coercion, martial or otherwise, to annex the Danish territory in the North Atlantic and to reclaim the Panama Canal. He also mused about Canada becoming the 51st state, a half-joke he’s made repeatedly on his Truth Social platform. And, for reasons known only to him, he declared that we’re overdue in renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.”

Asked last month by Meet the Press to explain the keys to his reelection, he said, “I won on the border, and I won on groceries.” That’s true. Yet there he was on Tuesday babbling inanely about what the New York Post dubbed “the Donroe doctrine.”

He’s not even president and already he’s taken his eye off the ball, it seems. Why?

Soft power.

Every commentary on Trump’s Greenland fixation includes a “to be sure” section so let’s get mine out of the way. To be sure, the United States has an important strategic interest in the island. Trump isn’t even the first president to try to acquire it.

Greenland is more attractive now than it’s ever been, in fact. Much modern technology, including defense applications, requires the use of rare earth elements and Greenlanders are rolling in the stuff. And as the Arctic ice melts from climate change, creating new access to North America by sea, the U.S. will need to worry about China and Russia encroaching on it economically or militarily from the north. A robust American presence on the island could avert a “Viking Missile Crisis” decades from now.

So I understand why Trump is interested—although, having observed him as long as I have, I’m also inclined to believe the theory that he simply doesn’t understand how Mercator maps work and has convinced himself that Greenland is as big as Africa. (It’s less than one-tenth as large.) “Look at the size of this,” he told two New York Times reporters in 2021. “It’s massive!”

What I don’t understand is why he feels moved to acquire the territory outright—and to threaten Denmark with warfare, economic or otherwise, to that end—when he could use soft power to expand American influence there instead.

After all, we’re in the catbird seat here relative to China or Russia. Denmark is a NATO ally; we already have a “space base” on the island; and by dint of our wealth and our proximity, we can do more to reward the residents for allying with us if and when they declare independence from the Danes than Moscow or Beijing can. Politico notes that we already maintain “Compacts of Free Association” with several island nations in the Pacific that “give the U.S. exclusive military access and the right to determine which other nations can base their troops” there. We could pursue the same strategic arrangement in the Atlantic.

Using soft power to achieve our interests would probably work. Unless, that is, strategic interests aren’t what’s most important to Trump about all this.

Here’s where his apologists will scoff at me for supposedly not recognizing the art of the deal. Can’t you see that he’s driving a hard bargain? they’ll say. He knows we can’t acquire Greenland, but by maximizing his initial ask he’s pressuring Denmark into making sure the island stays off limits to China and Russia. It’s four-dimensional chess.

Is it, though? Trump has been chattering about annexing Greenland since 2019, reportedly once going so far as to consider offering Puerto Rico to the Danes in a trade. When he spoke to the two Times journalists about the island, he framed his interest in it in acquisitive terms: “I’m a real estate developer. I look at a corner, I say, ‘I’ve got to get that store for the building that I’m building,’ etc. It’s not that different.” Per CNN, his allies have warned Danish diplomats recently that he’s serious about purchasing it this time.

All of which sounds less like the opening bid in a negotiation that he hopes and expects will end with security guarantees for the U.S. on the island than, well, a threat.

National greatness.

This morning my editor laughed at the absurdity of Trumpers insisting for years that we have too many problems at home to justify sending taxpayer money to Ukraine, only to turn around now and seal-clap for his fantasies about pouring untold billions into gaining influence in Greenland, Panama, and Canada.

I take his point. But is it really that absurd?

For all their complaining, I don’t think most “America Firsters” are sticklers at heart about making sure that federal spending puts Americans first. Comparatively few seem to have a problem with limitless U.S. support for Israel, for instance. They resent aid to liberal Ukraine because they feel postliberal kinship with Russia, not because they’re stricken about their tax dollars being sent abroad.

Most will be fine with or even enthusiastic about “the Donroe doctrine,” I suspect, for this reason: Broadly speaking, MAGA is a “national greatness” fantasy in which America can only regain the glory of its partly real, partly imagined past by subverting the modern liberal order. And Trump’s expansionist impulses fit right in with that.

Expansionism has always been associated with national greatness, so much so that I’m strapped to think of a successful nationalist regime with the means to do so that hasn’t eventually sought to grow its borders. The idea of growth as evidence of greatness is especially strong in the U.S., a country that built a continental empire through land acquisitions like the Louisiana Purchase and policies like “manifest destiny.” To a voter who’s eager to make America great again but not particularly clear on what that means, acquiring Greenland probably sounds like a no-brainer. An America that’s gobbling up land is necessarily becoming greater, right?

Frankly, Trump is unfortunate to live in a country that’s never lost meaningful territory in a war, as irredentism is famously a preoccupation of nationalists. If the U.S. had lost the Aleutian Islands or whatever to Japan during World War II, regaining them would have been an intense MAGA obsession since the earliest days in 2015, I suspect. That’s probably the best way to understand his interest in retaking the Panama Canal: It’s the closest thing America has to a “lost empire” that he can reclaim to scratch his irredentist itch. (Besides “taking the oil” in countries where U.S. troops have fought, I mean.)

And so, if Trump were to plop $500 billion in cash into Denmark’s lap for Greenland, most of his fans likely won’t fret too much that that’s $500 billion that could have gone to fighting the opioid epidemic. They signed up for national greatness, not for getting rid of fentanyl, and that’s what Trump will have given them.

Nothing captures the hollowness of the “national greatness” fantasy better than the pitiful “Gulf of America” name change he proposed on Tuesday, which plays like lowbrow left-wing satire of right-wing populist priorities. No one was asking for it, but already it’s become a cause celebre among higher-profile MAGA lowlifes in Congress because it elegantly synthesizes the core elements of the fantasy—chauvinism, dominance, and needless affront to conventions of the modern liberal order.

It’s almost as stupid as the White House officially designating Canada and Mexico as “America north” and “America south,” which I assume is coming at some point during the next four idiotic years.

Might makes right.

The manner in which Trump follows through on his “national greatness” fantasy is important to his supporters too.

Sure, he could approach the governments of Denmark and Greenland in a spirit of friendship, treating them as the allies they are and offering them carrots to grant the U.S. more influence over the island. But that’s how liberals, champions of the so-called rules-based international order, conduct foreign policy. It’s not ruthless so it doesn’t demonstrate “strength.”

The point of Trumpism is to overturn that rules-based order, which logically means resorting to tactics to get one’s way that liberals wouldn’t condone. Trump’s approach to Greenland is decidedly postliberal (and pre-liberal): We’re an immensely powerful country, the island is plainly in our “sphere of influence,” so we’re going to take it one way or another. Denmark can agree to a “deal” under duress, or it can refuse and accept some serious penalty, but it will suffer in some form for not bending to America’s will.

That’s the way Russia does business, coincidentally. No wonder that the Russian government is watching all of this play out and finding encouragement in Trump’s approach. “If words are being said about the need to take into account the opinion of the people” of Greenland, said Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, “then perhaps we need to remember the opinion of the people of the four new regions of the Russian Federation [in Ukraine] and we need to show the same respect for the opinion of these people.”

Makes sense. If Trump can muscle the Danes into coughing up Greenland, there’s no logical reason that Russia shouldn’t muscle Ukraine into coughing up the Donbas or that China shouldn’t muscle Taipei into coughing up Taiwan. Bullying isn’t the way the liberal order does international business but it is, emphatically, the way postliberals do. From now on, great powers make their own rules—not just with America’s approval but with its participation.

And so, at heart, I don’t believe Trump’s Greenland fascination is ultimately driven by U.S. strategic interests. If he were keen to keep the Chinese and Russians off the island, he would have approached the matter differently—reaching out to Denmark privately, for starters, instead of humiliating the country publicly and all but daring it to defy him. And if the nationalist right were sincerely keen to undermine China’s and Russia’s international ambitions, they’d be more enthusiastic about assisting Ukraine and Taiwan. Nothing that will happen in Greenland will reduce enemy imperialism as much as taking a million or so casualties on the battlefield will.

Nostalgic notions of “greatness,” reptilian impulses toward intimidation, contempt for liberal norms: The Greenland overture is an expression of postliberal instinct and a statement of postliberal priorities to mark the beginning of Trump’s second term. He’s signaling that if he wants something, he has the military and economic muscle to take it, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. (Well, almost nothing.) He won’t be shamed out of it by disapproving liberals. The U.S. doesn’t do “shame” anymore.

It’s not that different from his approach to losing the 2020 election. In both cases, success or failure probably boils down to whether he could/can find enough deputies to abet his scheme. This time, maybe he can: “One of his highest priorities has been to make sure his incoming administration is free of officials whose professionalism or loyalty to the Constitution would put them at risk of violating their loyalty to Trump,” Jonathan Chait noted of why his interest in Greenland might have more teeth than it did during his first term.

He hasn’t “taken his eye off the ball.” This is the ball. This is nationalism. This is what Americans voted for.

Resistance.

I hope the Danes refuse to pay the Danegeld.

“Danegeld,” for those who don’t know, was money paid to the Vikings by weak powers to prevent them from laying waste to their country. It was the Middle Ages equivalent of a protection racket; in time, “paying the Danegeld” became shorthand for appeasing a belligerent enemy instead of resisting him. A thousand years later, Denmark is now on the other side of the transaction. 

For liberalism’s sake, they should resist Trump’s attempt to make them an offer they can’t refuse. They don’t have many weapons, but they do have a few: An America suddenly cut off from Ozempic and Wegovy, for instance, is an America that might come to regard Trump’s Greenland folly as more trouble than it’s worth. And if the European Union joined a trade war between the U.S. and Denmark on the Danes’ side, that might concentrate Americans’ minds further.
Shakedowns are for Vikings and mafiosi. Banditry should not be rewarded. If the United States will no longer enforce the liberal order’s taboo against great-power aggression, Europe should.