Emergency

I was not going to do a second newsletter today but we are approaching a state of emergency.

In a bonkers press conference today, our president-elect has made it clear that he means to get control of other nation’s sovereign territories, whether through economic or — God help us — military means.

“It might be that you'll have to do something,” Trump said in response to whether he would use military force to retake the Panama Canal or to seize Greenland. He also talked about annexing Canada, though he committed to using economic, rather than military, force to make our neighbor to the north the 51st state.

I have no idea what Trump is planning to do once he is in office, other than to remind you that the guardrails are off. Trump has learned to surround himself with yes-men who will be running the Department of Defense and the National Security Council. There are no more Jim Mattises or John Boltons around. (God help me, things are so dire that I actually wish Bolton were still in the game.)

I do know this: this is the biggest gift to Vladimir Putin that Trump could have given. Most of us looked at the Russian invasion of Ukraine with horror. Trump obviously looked at it with envy.

Wars of conquest have been on the decline since 1945, which not so coincidentally aligns with the establishment of the Pax Americana and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization that has kept the western world safe for the last eighty years.

Now here comes Trump, who has nary a bad word to say about Putin but quite a lot of trash to talk about our NATO allies. Denmark, of which Greenland is an autonomous territory, is a NATO member. The alliance was created to protect member nations from invasion by outside forces but now one of its smallest members must worry about being invaded by its most powerful.

After 9/11, when the United States invoked Article V for the first time in NATO’s history, little Denmark sent troops to Afghanistan and kept them there for almost twenty years. No one attacked Denmark on 9/11 but it took our mutual defense pact seriously. Denmark allows the United States to station a Space Force military base in Greenland.

Is this really how we reward our allies, with saber rattling and talk of territorial conquest?

Let’s be very clear: the forces of darkness are on the march. Nearly three years ago, Putin initiated the largest European land invasion since 1945. Xi Jinping is eyeing Taiwan from across the straight. The Middle East is ablaze. And the United States, the indispensable nation, is eyeing its closest allies like a hungry predator circling for prey.

What does all this have to do with the price of eggs, you might ask? Not a thing, other than that no one is talking about the price of eggs anymore, which must make Trump happy. Even he knows egg prices depend on getting the avian flu under control, which will come in time but not soon enough. Plus, microeconomics is boring, whereas competing with Putin on the world stage is exciting.

At his dacha outside Moscow, Putin is laughing at what democracy has wrought here in the United States. Even now, his mouthpieces are getting ready to point to Trump’s military threats and say that it is no different from — and actually much worse than — what Putin did in Ukraine. After all, Putin’s ostensible reason for his “special military operation” is to protect the Russian-speaking population of Eastern Ukraine and — when he is being more honest — to reconstitute the former Soviet Union, the dissolution of which he considers the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century. (The Holocaust would like a word.)

Look, Putin will say: the United States is trying to take back in Panama what once rightly belonged to it, as we are doing in Ukraine. And Greenland is even worse, since the United States is not trying to protect Americans who live there. That’s a land grab that Europe hasn’t seen for eighty years.

All day, reporters and pundits have been rolling their eyes at crazy Trump saber rattling about Greenland. It’s nothing to joke about. When a politician tells you what he is going to do, believe him. Even if Trump does not go through with the threat of military action, the damage is done. Our allies know that the United States can no longer be trusted.

The Pax Americana is over. Under Trump, we are the aggressor now. If you are a student of history, you might guess how this will end if ordinary people and sane leaders in Washington do not stand up right now to stop this dead in its tracks. God help us.