Trump's renewed Greenland threats are why we have no allies
And our former friends won't trust us again anytime soon.
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Depending on when you read this, Trump may be bombing Iran, claiming a peace deal is imminent, threatening to commit more war crimes against the civilian population, teasing a ground invasion, or some combination thereof.
Nothing, though, has really changed.
Nearly five months out from Trump’s unprovoked and disastrous attack, the bottom line is that he’s lost the war but still can’t bring himself to admit it. So we’re trapped in a seemingly endless cycle of vacillating between belligerence and fake peace deals while gas prices spike, bombs fall, and people die.
Off to the side of that debacle, Trump last week reiterated that he wants to seize Greenland in his sweaty short-fingered appendages.
Greenland, he blustered, “should be controlled by the United States, not Denmark.” He added, “that’s what hurt my relationship with NATO, because Greenland doesn’t help Denmark”— which is both nonsensical and a lie, inasmuch as Trump’s been attacking NATO for at least a decade.
Trump’s gaseous blather about invading Greenland seems like a minor monstrosity compared to his actual murderous bombing of, and ongoing humiliation by, Iran. But they’re part of the same phenomenon — a foreign policy driven by ego, ignorance, and inflamed colonial malice, in which the US sees no allies and really no other sentient human beings, just territory to be won and glorious carnage to commit.
The renewed threats against Greenland are serious because they signal once again how untrustworthy, erratic, selfish, and cruel US foreign policy has become. Neither allies, rivals, nor enemies can trust us. Which means everyone, definitely including us, is poorer, less secure, and less safe.
Threatening allies has costs
Trump first began braying about buying Greenland in his first term. Why he became fixated on it is a bit unclear, but the obsession seems to have started after Puerto Rican officials and the media criticized Trump for his (failed, racist) response to Hurricane Maria.
In a snit, Trump began to talk about trading Puerto Rico to Denmark for its autonomous territory Greenland. His rationale, according to former DHS Chief of Staff Miles Taylor, was that “Puerto Rico was dirty and the people were poor.”
Why does Trump want Greenland in particular? He’s floated a range of nonsensical rationales over the years, from security to mineral wealth. Recently his administration has even argued that Greenland’s fisheries could save the Red Lobster seafood chain.
All of these explanations are nonsense. Greenland is (or was) an ally and already works with us on security; it has little in the way of minerals we need. And Red Lobster’s problems have nothing to do with Greenland, for christ’s sake. The truth seems to be that Trump wants to seize Greenland because it looks enormous on maps and he thinks it is cool to put his name on big things.
Trump, then, is motivated not by security, nor by economics, but by ego, spite, and malice.
All this would be ludicrous except for the fact that the US electorate decided to make Trump the most powerful person in the world again, which means that his confused bigot whims are now the problem of every single person in the world.
First, of course, Trump’s threats are a serious danger to Greenland. Polls show that the populace overwhelming opposes US control, with 85 percent against and only 6 percent for. Greenland’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen put it as plainly as possible in January: “Greenland does not want to be owned by the United States. Greenland does not want to be governed by the United States. Greenland does not want to be part of the United States.” She added that an invasion by Trump would destroy NATO.
And indeed Trump’s threats have put massive strain on NATO, not least because NATO countries have had to spend significant time, money, and effort to dissuade Trump from actually invading. France, Norway, Sweden, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, Finland and of course Denmark all sent troops to Greenland to engage in military exercises in January. The cost was not made public, but it was undoubtedly a lot of money to spend to defend against your supposed ally. And Trump compounded the insult and expense by leveling retaliatory tariffs on all the nations involved.
This is not just a one and done problem. American untrustworthiness creates massive longterm difficulties for everyone in the world, and certainly for our onetime closest allies. Canada — which Trump has also threatened to annex — is pushing a huge $60 billion military buildup since it can no longer rely on the US not to attack it, much less to defend it.
Europe is also rearming with its biggest defense push since the end of the Cold War. This is money that could be spent on social programs, on green tech, on making a better world — now dumped into defending against, among other things, an unhinged, belligerent United States.
It’s not good when everyone hates you
Trump would insist that forcing Europe and Canada to pay more for defense is somehow in our interest. But the fact is that alienating allies and neighbors hurts us too, in a whole range of ways.
First, fighting your allies is expensive. Trump’s trade wars — which again, have been fueled in part by his efforts to bully NATO — are estimated to have cost the US some $317 billion. More, when people in foreign countries see you as a danger and enemy, they make travel plans elsewhere. Unsurprisingly, now that Trump is insulting and attacking Canadians and Europeans, US tourism has cratered. The industry dropped $16.6 billion in 2025 and is heading for another $21 billion drop in 2026.
Part of that is because of Trump’s horrific nativist border policies which have led to the arrest and torture of some tourists. But part of it is simply that people like Canadians — a huge part of the US tourism market — simply don’t want to spend money in a country that is actively threatening them.
Second, when you bully your allies over and over, they no longer have much incentive to help you on issues of mutual security. In fact, they have reason to believe that your security is not mutual and that they are better off when you are weaker than when you are stronger.
You can see this in Iran. After Trump blundered into the war and Iran retaliated by closing the Strait of Hormuz, very serious NYT foreign policy columnist Thomas Friedman argued that NATO should bail him out. Friedman pointed out, correctly, that for NATO “to sit on the sidelines and let Iran’s malign regime, with its poisonous ideology, take hostage the Strait of Hormuz … would keep the world’s most critical oil lifeline in a state of permanent instability.”
What Friedman doesn’t seem to consider, though, is that the US under Trump is also a malign regime with a poisonous ideology, and that, given its size and power, the US has a lot more potential for creating global instability than Iran does. Iran can threaten global oil supplies, but it can’t credibly threaten to invade Canada or fight NATO countries over Greenland.
If you are France, or the UK, or Denmark, or Germany, you have to consider what happens if you rush in to help Trump take the strait back from Iran. At best, if you succeed, you’ve empowered Trump, and what would an empowered Trump do next? It seems likely he’d invade someone else — and again, at least two of the countries on his list are NATO members.
Letting Iran open and close the strait at will is not ideal. But neither is letting Trump attack anyone in the world he wants. You can hardly blame NATO for deciding its best move is to step back and let their enemies beat the snot out of each other.
We’re no one’s ally
Trump has made it clear over the last decade, and especially in his second term, that he wants no alliances based on mutual interest and respect. He wants to be the biggest bully on earth, and force everyone to genuflect before him like he’s an uglier, more orange Vito Corleone.
In this goal he has succeeded. He has no allies. He is powerful enough that people like NATO Secretary Mark Rutte will humor him and sit placidly by as he threatens Greenland in their presence …
… but when Trump needs help — as he does in Iran — no one will provide it. He’s shown that he considers his success to be everyone else’s failure, and so everyone wants him to fail.
Hopefully at some point we have a more responsible government which does not want to invade Greenland. But even then, how can Greenland, or Canada, or France, or anyone, trust a US in which voters might choose to give the nuclear codes to a Trump, or a Vance, or a Rubio?
Republicans, in backing Trump, have shown that, in the name of marginal and imaginary political gains at home, they will honor no treaties and protect no allies abroad. It is not just Trump who is the enemy. It is his party — and unfortunately also the voters who gave that party power once, and may well do so again.
Perhaps if Democrats convincingly crush fascism and transform the US political landscape someone, somewhere, might trust us again at some point. For now, though, and for the foreseeable future, no other country is going to defend us or fight for our security. They would be fools if they did. We want to conquer Greenland. What more is there to say?
That’s it for today
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I traveled to Asia and Europe in the aftermath of Vietnam, low budget stuff where I put myself out there to be examined by the locals without the insulation of wealth. I can't recall any animosity directed at me by anyone beyond the normal give and take. Today, with a desire to repeat that experience in old age, I find myself questioning the wisdom of such travel. My hope is that this becomes less so as our country slowly recovers from the mass insanity that all to frequently descends on the USA. By then it might be too late, for me at least.
The question for experts is post Trump will the USA actually be a super power or just a big, rich country that is good at blowing things up? You could argue that the USA was the leader of the free world under Biden. Not now. For starters no one wants to follow it.
It's not entirely Trump's fault, but there has been a revolution in military affairs thanks to Putin and the Ukrainians. Events in the Persian Gult showed that when push came to shove the US was not prepared to put its ships in harm's way in the Gulf. They knew their ships could knock down a few drones but not swarms of them. There's only so many anti air missiles you can put on a warship and each costs a lot more than a drone. The Navy was the cheapest safest way of projecting power. Not any more.
Close air support is now done by drones not attack helicopters (that are sitting ducks to cheap drones) and fixed wing aircraft are not cost effective, or even effective at swatting down drones in large numbers. So the USA's military power is nowhere near as fearsome as was the case 5 years ago. Trump and his buffoon of a Secretary of Defense have done nothing to respond to this change.
But the bottom line is that as long as the Republican party fails to strongly repudiate Trump (which I can't see it ever doing) and as long as it remains a realistic chance of wining power in the not too distant future (which seems very likely) no foreign state is going to trust the USA as a reliable long term partner. My guess is the Trump will be the most consequential President in living memory. He single handedly made the USA a non-superpower.