AfriPulse
Donald Trump spent the wee hours of Tuesday morning throwing a Truth Social tantrum over Greenland, the semiautonomous territory of Denmark he’s decided the United States simply must acquire—even if most Americans, Greenlanders, and our European allies seem firmly opposed to his imperial designs on the island.
In post after post, Trump raged against those allied leaders. He shared private texts, including with French president Emmanuel Macron . He posted AI slop depicting a map of the US extending not only to Greenland, but to Venezuela and Canada too. He insisted that he would not abandon his quest to control the Arctic territory: “There can be no going back,” Trump wrote.
But why is Trump so hell-bent on annexing Greenland in the first place? Blame his bullying approach to geopolitics, as well as his own personal peccadillos. Where one ends and the other begins is hard to say.
Trump and his administration have said repeatedly that they need the territory for national security purposes, and that the US must control it to protect that region from China and Russia. The real impetus, though, may be simple pride. Trump first set his sights on Greenland way back in his first term, when one of his billionaire friends—the cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder—planted the idea that he should buy the Arctic island. “I love maps,” Trump told reporters Peter Baker and Susan Glasser in 2021. “And I always said: ‘Look at the size of this. It’s massive. That should be part of the United States.’”
The idea didn’t really go anywhere in his first administration. But it has become a priority for Trump in his second term, as the president has increasingly abandoned the flimsy anti-war, anti-interventionist promises of his reelection bid in favor of an international bullying campaign. This adventurism can also be blamed for the US ouster of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, whose nation Trump says his administration will “run” for the indefinite future. The president has refused to rule out using similar means to take Greenland. “No comment,” Trump told NBC News Monday when asked if he would seize the territory by force.
The US already has a military presence in Greenland as a result of an American treaty with Denmark. Far from advancing American and global security, Trump’s escalating aggression threatens to blow up NATO and ostracize the US on the world stage.
But more recently, Trump’s Greenland push may be driven less by geopolitics than by his neurotic, quixotic quest for the Nobel Peace Prize. Trump has said he deserved to get that honor for ending eight wars, which he has not done. The actual winner of the 2025 prize, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, even presented her award to Trump while seeking his endorsement to be her country’s new president. (Trump has not offered support, but did subsequently describe Machado as a “very fine woman.”)
But Trump is still sulking about being passed over by the Nobel committee itself, which says the prize is not actually transferable. As a result, Trump is now threatening tariffs and more to get control of Greenland, despite some of his advisers not being in favor of taking the country by military force, according to CNN.
Trump’s most recent late-night posting frenzy came after he sent a letter to Jonas Gahr Støre, the prime minister of Norway, in which he linked his obsessive push for Greenland to his failure to win the Nobel Prize. “Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America,” Trump wrote. “The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland.” (Norway, it should be emphasized, does not own Greenland, nor does its government dole out the Nobel Prize.)
The letter—which might as well have been scribbled in crayon—should draw universal rebuke. But any early pushback from Republicans has been limited to a handful of elected officials, two of whom are already planning to retire rather than face reelection. “Very embarrassing conduct,” wrote outgoing GOP representative Don Bacon . Meanwhile, European leaders appear increasingly resolved to reject Trump’s premise. “We must stand up for our values,” United Kingdom prime minister Keir Starmer said at a press conference on Monday.
“Until now, we tried to appease the new president in the White House,” Belgian prime minister Bart De Wever added Tuesday at the World Economic Forum in Davos. “But now, so many red lines are being crossed.”
It’s not clear how far Trump’s attempt to acquire Greenland will go, or if his more dramatic threats are meant to scare European leaders into submission. But if this latest round of saber-rattling is meant to cow allies, it seems now to be having the opposite effect: “We do prefer respect to bullies,” Macron said at Davos Tuesday, signaling NATO’s more assertive posture toward the US. “And we do prefer rule of law to brutality.”
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Source: VanityFair | Read the Full Story…
