Soldiers from the Royal Danish Army participate part in live-fire training after their arrival in Greenland on Sunday. The Danish military is working to intensify its activities in and around Greenland, in close cooperation with its NATO allies, amid threats by U.S. President Trump to take control of the island. Photo by Danish Defense Command/UPI | License Photo
Given the events of this month regarding the U.S. intervention in Venezuela to seize Nikolas Maduro and his wife on Jan. 3 and Donald Trump’s seeming determination to acquire or buy Greenland, the world has been turned upside down.
For those familiar with Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, Alice descended through her looking glass into Wonderland. There, the Red Queen administered justice, noting that “sentence precedes verdict.”
The Wonderland reality is that Jan. 3 may prove to be an inflection point as consequential as the Dec. 7, 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor or Sept. 11, 2001, Al-Qaeda’s destruction of New York’s Twin Towers. Why? Three forces, two old and one new make this case.
The first force is the failure of governments to govern, whether democracies or autocracies, from America to Zimbabwe, and provide the public with the services and standards of living that are demanded and required.
Second, as societies have become more technologically advanced and dependent, all have become far more vulnerable to all forms of disruption — whether acts of man or of nature.
Third is the deus ex machina, personified in the 47th president of the United States, Donald Trump.
Trump has unbalanced the divisions and separation of power that were critical propositions of the U.S. political system. He is now the most powerful president in U.S. history, and Congress and the judiciary have become little more than rubber stamps in approving or ignoring his actions.
As his Chief of Staff Susie Wiles told the Atlantic magazine, there is “nothing that he thinks he can’t do.”
Trump has shattered the foundations of the global economic system by imposing tariffs and ending U.S. reliance on free and open trade. Trump likewise has broken the international security system with his America First policies. What’s happening in Venezuela and what might happen in Greenland are examples of his disruptive actions.
Much of what Trump intends is central to the U.S. National Security Strategy. Trump has declared that the top priority is homeland defense. That has made the Western Hemisphere the mainstay, thus ending 80 years of U.S. focus on international security, with Europe and Asia as priority regions. And it is no accident that the name Trump appears 23 times in 29 pages of the strategy.
Trump has also declared that his views are now a corollary of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine. President James Monroe set his doctrine on preventing external European powers from colonizing the region and was thus anti-imperialist. Ironically, Trump’s incursion into Venezuela, like the Red Queen, reverses that anti-imperialistic aim.
Trump’s stand on Greenland has disrupted and could disintegrate the NATO alliance in place since 1949. Repeatedly demanding that he wants to purchase Greenland violates every principle from common sense to any sort of rationality.
The 1951 U.S.-Denmark Treaty gives the United States full military access to Greenland, where American forces have been stationed. Even if Trump is out to gain control of whatever rare earth mineral that may or may not exist in Greenland, a treaty seems infinitely better than a military intervention.
Trump so far has threatened placing 10% tariffs starting Feb. 1 on eight NATO allies who oppose this demand and have deployed a handful of military forces to Greenland as a block and signal to prevent U.S. attack. It would seem inconceivable that for the second time in history — Sept.12, 2001, was the first when NATO invoked Article 5 and went to war in Afghanistan — Article 5 could be at play. Article 5 states that “an attack on one shall be considered an attack on all.”
Thus, if one NATO ally attacked another, would Article 5 mean that NATO would be at war with itself? This, too, is worthy of being in Wonderland and incredulous. Yet, that is where we are.
The least dangerous case would be if Trump accepts a treaty that expands U.S. military access to Greenland from the 1951 agreement and puts into place some mechanism to exploit whatever rare earth resources that may be present.
But will that be acceptable to the 57,000 Greenlanders, virtually all of whom do not want to become part of America nor mortgage their country to an outsider? The answer seems self-evident.
How one person could concurrently undo that basis for governing in his country while completely disrupting both the global economic and security orders seems impossible. But that is what is occurring. And that is why Jan. 3 is a tectonic date.
Harlan Ullman is senior adviser at Washington’s Atlantic Council, chairman of a private company and principal author of the doctrine of shock and awe. His next book, co-written with Field Marshal The Lord David Richards, former U.K. chief of defense and due out next year, is Who Thinks Best Wins: How Decisive Strategic Thinking Will Prevent Global Chaos. The writer can be reached on X @harlankullman.
