Image: @justinspoliticalcorner/Tumblr

Monday, July 20, 2026
By @justinspoliticalcorner/Tumblr

📝 By: Noah Berlatsky
🌐 Source: publicnotice.co

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.

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.”

Wonder why the US has no real allies at all? It’s because of threats to annex Greenland.

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Tuesday, July 21, 2026
| Content language: English |
| Filed under category: Politics |

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