WSJ: Trump’s Greenland Gambit
“We can’t just ignore the president’s desires,” Vice President JD Vance told Americans stationed at Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland. And what is true of vice presidents is also true of your Global View columnist. Whether the topic is tariffs, territorial expansion, relations with Russia, the future of America’s alliances or the balance of power in the Middle East, understanding what President Trump really wants is the key to analyzing where American foreign policy is headed in this stormy and fateful year
Disentangling Mr. Trump’s true intentions is difficult. The blizzard of foreign and domestic initiatives unfolding around the most hyperactive White House since Franklin D. Roosevelt and the extreme unconventionality of many of the Trump administration’s policies make this administration singularly difficult to analyze. The president’s approach to politics, intuitive rather than analytical and working from intellectual and moral foundations that largely reject the mainstream consensus of the post-Cold War era, adds to the complexity of the task.
The administration’s conscious use of shock and outrage as political tools makes cool, levelheaded assessment harder still. The president’s preternatural talent for baiting his adversaries into self-defeating, over-the-top responses to his provocations is a not insignificant factor in his meteoric rise.
And so we come to Greenland and the president’s desire to, in his words, get it. Mr. Trump’s interest in the territory should not be underestimated. As an acquisition, it would give him an enduring place in the history books. As an issue, it polarizes opinion in exactly the way the president likes, driving his critics into paroxysms of ridicule and rage, while potentially moving the national debate in a direction largely favorable to him.