Something Is Rotten in the State of America

If it wasn't clear before - although it should have been perfectly clear - the United States as a dangerous psychopath in the White House who is poised to attack an ally of two centuries for seemingly no real reason other than to perhaps satiate his sick ego, generate yet another distraction from the Epstein files which have not been released as required, or perhaps to follow orders from Vladimir Putin.  The United States is in a crisis that ranges from masked ICE agents attacking American citizens and creating domestic violence to destroying the NATO alliance.  Sadly, one individual who surrounds himself with equally evil and unhinged sycophants is responsible for the crisis. Frighteningly, congressional Republicans who could end the nightmare continue to sit on their hands and do nothing even as the Felon's unfitness for office becomes ever more glaring.  Indeed, Nikita Khrushchev's boast that America would fall from within seems ever more accurate as the Felon destroys the nation from within both with ICE - his secret police force - and threats to invade Greenland - where treaties already allow American bases and troops without any need for conquest - and other allies.   Meanwhile, the latest polls show a majority of Americans disapprove of the Felon's policies. A long column in the New York Times looks at the foreign policy disaster:

I want you to remember the name Mark Peters. In 2009 he was on patrol in Afghanistan when he stepped on an improvised explosive device. The incident was captured on video and can be seen in a 2014 documentary series called “My War.”  The footage is horrifying. You can see the explosion, then you hear shouts of anguish and desperate calls for mine clearance so that medics can reach the wounded soldier.

Mark Peters is Danish. He lost his lower legs fighting in defense of the United States. I learned about him when I read this moving account of Danish deployments by Todd Johnson, writing for War Room, a journal of the Army War College.

Denmark answered the call after the 9/11 attacks. It deployed thousands of soldiers to Afghanistan and Iraq, and it lost more soldiers, per capita, in Afghanistan than any NATO nation aside from the United States. There is no more profound way to stand in solidarity with an ally.

“America has no permanent friends or enemies,” Henry Kissinger is often quoted as saying, “only interests.” That statement, championed by proponents of realpolitik, is true only if you emphasize the word “permanent.” Over the long sweep of time, allies can certainly become enemies, and enemies can become allies.

Consider France and England. They fought each other in a series of wars sweeping across hundreds of years. But they’ve been friends and allies for more than a century, fighting together most notably in World War I and World War II. Despite tensions, they stood watch together as NATO allies, defending Europe and the free world for the entire duration of the Cold War.

I don’t know if they are permanent friends, but they are friends — to the incalculable benefit of both nations.

The better expression, the one that accurately reflects the national interests of the United States, is that while any given friendship isn’t permanently guaranteed, our country has a permanent interest in maintaining international friendships and alliances. When we lose partners in alliances (much less the alliance itself) we are weaker and more vulnerable — no matter how much we try to bulk up our independent military and economic strength.

I am writing about all this because the Trump administration may be on the verge of the most catastrophic national security mistake of my lifetime. It is attempting to bully Denmark into surrendering Greenland, its semiautonomous territory, to the United States.

On Jan. 9, President Trump said that if America can’t acquire Greenland “the easy way” then it would resort to the “hard way.”  “We are going to do something in Greenland, whether they like it or not,” Trump said, “because if we don’t do it, Russia or China will take over Greenland, and we’re not going to have Russia or China as a neighbor.”

One would be tempted to simply make a moral argument against bullying (and possibly even attacking!) Denmark. Danes are such stalwart allies that they long ago granted America sweeping access to Greenland to bolster our own defense.

As The Times explained last week, a 1951 agreement grants the United States the ability to “construct, install, maintain and operate” military bases across Greenland, “house personnel” and “control landings, takeoffs, anchorages, moorings, movements and operation of ships, aircraft and waterborne craft.”

Denmark resisted Nazi occupation in World War II. It’s a founding member of NATO, and it followed through on that commitment, as noted above, fighting by our side in Afghanistan. It even fought in Iraq, a non-NATO military mission. More recently the Danish Navy deployed a frigate to the Red Sea, where it fought alongside the U.S. Navy against Houthi rebels.

In the mercenary calculus of Donald Trump, morality is meaningless — unless it’s his morality, of course, and his morality places no constraints on his will to power and his greed.

And so it’s also necessary to oppose seizing Greenland using the words that MAGA will understand. Bullying Denmark will make the United States weaker and perhaps even poorer. It’s not just wrong to turn on our friends; it’s stupid, and that stupidity is spreading across the length and breadth of American foreign policy.

The best description I’ve read of Trump’s flawed approach comes from Kori Schake, a senior fellow and director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Writing in Foreign Affairs last June, she noted that “since the end of World War II, American power has been rooted mostly in cooperation, not coercion.”

“The Trump team,” she argued, “ignores that history, takes for granted all the benefits that a cooperative approach has yielded, and cannot envision a future in which other countries opt out of the existing U.S.-led international order or construct a new one that would be antagonistic to American interests.”

The history is indeed quite clear. When NATO and the Warsaw Pact faced off against each other during the Cold War, it was a confrontation between an alliance and an empire.

The alliance was a voluntary union of liberal democracies. There was nothing voluntary about the Soviet empire. Soviet troops in Warsaw Pact nations existed not just to confront the West, but also to enforce Soviet control.

But that’s the way it works with empires. They’re almost always weaker than they appear because much of their strength is diverted into domination, into maintaining a hold over people who dislike or actually reject their rule.

Trump favors the failed Soviet approach. The Western Hemisphere is his version of the Warsaw Pact. He wants to transform it into a region that exists under American domination, where nations conduct their foreign and even domestic policies under a watchful American eye, always mindful of the awesome power of American arms.

Our historic allies, meanwhile, are treated like actual or potential enemies. Denmark is facing overt American threats, but the administration’s ominous language extends well beyond Denmark.

In an interview last year with the news outlet UnHerd, Vice President Vance raised the possibility of Britain and France becoming enemies to the United States. “France and the U.K. have nuclear weapons,” he said.

The United States is the most powerful nuclear-armed nation in the world, and it is already being “overwhelmed with very destructive moral ideas” — and one of those ideas is threatening to use that awesome might to extort (or attack) an ally.

What’s more, empires are expensive — more expensive than the United States can afford. Last week, Trump proposed a remarkable surge in military spending, to $1.5 trillion annually, an almost $600 billion increase over 2026. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has calculated that Trump’s proposal could add $5.8 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.

[A] RAND Corporation study found that the United States contributes 39 percent of the total, collective allied defense burden across the globe. If you separate yourself from allies, there is less military force available for defense, and you either have to be comfortable with the additional vulnerability or find the funds to shore up the weakness.

On Tuesday, the prime minister of Greenland, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, issued a clear and unequivocal statement rejecting the American bid to own his island. “We are now facing a geopolitical crisis,” Nielsen said. “And if we have to choose between the United States and Denmark here and now, we choose Denmark. We choose NATO. We choose the Kingdom of Denmark. We choose the E.U.”

And what was Trump’s response? “I disagree with him,” he said, “I don’t know who he is. Don’t know anything about him. But that’s going to be a big problem for him.”

Only 17 percent support acquiring Greenland, and a mere 4 percent support taking it by force. But those numbers will be cold comfort if Trump acts anyway.

It is often said that might does not make right; it is less well understood that right can make might, as Abraham Lincoln once said. Voluntary alliances of liberal democracies have proven to be the strongest military and economic forces in the world. This was true in World War I. It was true in World War II. And it was true in the Cold War.

If we break those alliances, we are smaller and weaker. If we break them for pride and power and greed, then we don’t just break an alliance; we break our own character. We diminish ourselves in every way that matters, and no amount of newly sovereign frozen ground can obscure our national shame.