Trump's War On Global Socialism (Part 1) — Greenland

Dislodging Europe's Unwelcome Toehold in Fortress America

“War is politics by other means.” — Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz

Trump has declared war against the Global Socialist movement. In this two-part Deep Dive, I am going to lay out the map of what is to come as Trump sets out to build Fortress America and purge the globalist ideology from its shores.

His opening volley, even before he took office, was to declare his intention to annex Greenland and Canada. As you shall soon see as this essay progresses, these are not just peripheral distractions but are actually two of the most important cornerstones of his strategy to confront the evil belief system that is tearing Western Civilization apart.

Pour yourself a cup of tea and find a comfortable place to read — I promise this Deep Dive is going to take you into truly uncharted waters.

(If you’re reading this in your email browser, I recommend clicking on the title to switch to the Substack platform because most email programs truncate larger image-rich Substack posts.)

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One of Trump’s most unusual characteristics is his uncanny ability to smell weakness and poke his finger into the middle of it — to recognize festering undercurrents and force them to the surface.

On December 23rd, 2024, Trump poked full force with a threat to annex Canada and Greenland (and to retake the Panama Canal to dislodge Chinese interests in the canal). But what began as the appearance of a trolling joke is quickly morphing into a brand new era in geopolitics — a new Great Game playing out between two rival world views.

Many commentators immediately accused Trump of having imperial ambitions, that he wants to grab those countries’ natural resources, that this is a return to the 19th-century belief in America’s manifest destiny to expand across the whole of North America, or that he is looking for an easy “win” to bolster America’s view of itself after the humiliations suffered in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Ukraine, and more.

While there may be shallow kernels of truth to some of these explanations, a far more fruitful approach is to look at why Greenland and Canada were such weak targets worth poking in the first place, and what they represent, symbolically, in the greater philosophical war that is raging across Western Civilization.

Until now, this war has largely been limited to a political war-of-words-and-ideas. But in this next phase the gloves are coming off as words and ideas are replaced by politics-by-alternate-means. As Senator Marco Rubio (who has been tapped by Trump to serve as his Secretary of State) recently declared: “the postwar global order is not just obsolete—it is now a weapon being used against us.” This foreshadows the global game of chess that is kicking into gear with Trump’s second inauguration…

History books are full of clearly defined battle lines between different ideologies. But history books are written with the benefit of hindsight. Those who live through these events find the battle lines to be far more fuzzy because ideas gradually evolve but the terminology often lags behind.

Liberalism today is nothing like the liberalism of the post-WWII era, which would be equally unrecognizable to the classical liberalism of the Founding Fathers. Ideologies evolve, morph into other things, and take on new objectives, yet those living through these changes are often only able to recognize and fight back against evil once it has been given a name that delineates its boundaries from the belief systems that came before.

The very first clearly-articulated definition of the two sides of this philosophical war that’s raging across Western Civilization emerged back on November 2nd, 2018, at the Munk Debates. The debate pitted Steve Bannon (Trump’s chief strategist during the first eight months of his first presidency) against David Frum (George W. Bush’s former speechwriter and a leading voice in the neoconservative movement) to debate whether the future of western politics is populist or liberal (i.e. the liberalism of the post-WWII era).

Bannon rejected the entire premise of the question posed by the debate, stating bluntly in his opening monologue that the world had essentially already moved on from post-WWII liberalism. In his view, the only question was whether the future would be populist nationalism or populist socialism.

Before we dive into the geopolitics of Trump’s threat to annex Greenland and Canada, it is worth taking a brief moment to understand Bannon’s two competing visions of the future — Trump’s threats don’t make sense without understanding this philosophical divide.

The populist nationalist is essentially Trump’s “Make America Great Again” or Putin’s conservative nationalism — state-regulated capitalist nation-states unashamedly acting to defend their national interests and acting for the collective benefit of their own citizens, much as nations have always done, but with both military and corporate might harnessed to an even greater degree to defend national interests and optimize society. Individuals and businesses inside the “national fortress” are largely left in peace to pursue “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” within the confines of the nation’s sandbox as long as their activities don’t impinge on national interests, even as the largest corporations are incentivized and/or coerced to pursue objectives that the political leaders believe will serve the country as a whole (i.e. the takeover of the Panama Canal to dislodge Chinese influence on canal operations, the massive StarGate Project that is currently being launched as a corporate-government partnership in order to beat China in the AI race, or the red carpet being laid out by Trump to kick oil and gas exploration into high gear to cement America’s energy security for generations to come).

This isn’t Ron Paul’s vision of a bottom-up America, nor is it a return to the Founding Fathers’ vision of strictly limited government and friendly relations with all nations but entangling alliances with none — not even close. This is in the vein of the cold, hard calculations of President Thomas Jefferson purchasing Louisianna in 1803 from a bankrupt Napoleonic France to slam the door on France’s competing presence on the continent, President James Monroe’s adoption of the “Monroe Doctrine” in 1823 (which made it official US policy to aggressively prevent any outside power from gaining a strategic military toehold in the Western Hemisphere), President James Polk fighting the Mexican-American War in 1846 to remove Spain as a competing threat on the continent, or Abraham Lincoln’s refusal to allow the southern states to secede from the Union (thus triggering the U.S. Civil War) to safeguard America’s unrivalled hegemonic monopoly over the continent.

However, the populist nationalist world view certainly also contains echoes of Woodrow Wilson, FDR, JFK, and Lyndon B. Johnson who sought to “make America great” (and healthy) in their own day by harnessing the coercive power of progressive federal institutions to shape society according to their will, guided (for better or for worse) by the advice of their hand-picked scientific advisors. Nevertheless, the goals of this populist nationalist vision are decidedly not redistributionist or socialist. For that, you have to turn to the competing vision that Bannon placed on the table.

The populist socialist vision is embodied by the 2024 presidential campaign platform of Trump’s rival, Kamala Harris — mandated “equity” (a.k.a. the false promise of state-engineered equal outcomes) and state-directed joy — essentially the global, redistributionist, dictatorial socialism promoted by the World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab, the United Nations’ Mark Carney, or Justin Trudeau’s vision quest to convert Canada into the world’s first post-national state. It’s not an accident that Mark Carney, one of the architects of this emerging post-national globalist world order, is currently being positioned to replace Trudeau as Canada’s head-of-state just as Trump is sworn into office south of the border, but more on that later...

Much like in the populist nationalist vision, the populist socialist vision is also centered around a very firm government hand that watches over everything, but in this case the appetite for government intervention goes much, much further to micro-regulate every choice made by every individual member of society in the interests of “engineering” a “fairer” and more “sustainable” society. Nor is it restricted to a national focus — on the contrary, the social engineering undertaken by these global socialists is explicitly intended to subordinate national interests and undermine national sovereignty by entangling nations in a web of international treaties and international organizations like the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the International Panel on Climate Change, the World Economic Forum, among many others.

In effect, this global socialist belief system is the philosophical successor of the explicitly anti-nationalist agenda of the post-WWII rules-based liberal international era evolving to take on ever more ambitious socialist objectives with a global rather than a national focus. And so, while Steve Bannon described it as populist socialism, I think the best name to give this emerging evil a clearly defined shape is to describe it as Global Socialism.

As Peter Foster, a journalist at the National Post, explained in his June 5th, 2021 deep dive into Mark Carney’s vision for humanity (a vision that Carney fleshed out in detail in his book: Value(s): Building a Better World for All), this vision is essentially a global “technocratic dictatorship justified by climate alarmism”. Foster writes that, although Carney’s vision “draws inspiration from, among others, Marx, Engels and Lenin”, it does not seek to expropriate private property, but rather it seeks to coerce private businesses into acting as a “ ‘partner’ in reshaping the economy and society.” In other words, you get to keep your business (as long as it fits into their bigger-picture plan for society), but from now on they’ll tell you how to run it.

From DEI officers ruling over HR departments, to the “green” metrics (ESG scores) that are now used by WEF partner-banks to determine who gets funding and who doesn’t, to the ruthless sidelining of all small businesses that don’t fit into their “sustainability” agenda, this is how this technocratic socialist vision of the future plays out in practice.

Of course, it would be utterly taboo to point out that this vision of a command economy, with its goal of centrally planning the whole of society, is eerily similar to the 20th-century vision of the corporate-government partnership that Franklin D. Roosevelt pushed onto America in the form of his “Planned Economy” and “New Deal”, that Mussolini pushed onto Italy in the form of his “Economic Fascism”, or that Hitler pushed onto Germany via the economic component of his “National Socialism”.

Hitler went as far as legislating that every company had to have a Nazi party member installed on the company’s management board to ensure that Nazi party doctrine was baked into every single decision that company management made (China’s new state-directed “capitalist” era is structured in a somewhat similar fashion, as is the push for DEI officers throughout HR departments across all Western nations). Incidentally, Hitler was a great admirer of FDR’s “Planned Economy”, going as far as telling the American ambassador: “These moral demands which the President places before every individual citizen of the United States are also the quintessence of the German state philosophy, which finds its expression in the slogan ‘The Public Welfare Transcends the Interest of the Individual.’”

But of course, this global reincarnation of socialism is totally, utterly, and completely different — and don’t you dare say otherwise (!) — because these earlier versions of the corporate-government partnership were explicitly nationalist rather than globalist in their objectives. In that earlier era, it was the communists who were on a global crusade; today it is the technocrats. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The glaringly obvious question that should immediately be asked about this technocratic Global Socialist dictatorship is, “exactly who is in charge of defining the goals of this monstrosity if the decision-making is increasingly taken out of the hands of individuals, local communities, and sovereign nation states?” And that’s the rub. Everyone and no-one.

In reality, individual ambitions and national interests don’t fade away just because everyone gets together to hold hands and preach about global “equity”. As the layers of this global technocratic framework are constructed, individual nations, corporations, well-connected influencers, activists, and all the movers, shakers, and special interest groups that find a way to get a seat within the “planning committees” that form the backbone of this opaque web of international institutions all figure out how to ruthlessly game that system to their advantage while wrapping themselves in an impenetrable shield of nebulous virtue-signalling vocabulary.

Everyone is permanently manipulating everyone else with ever more manipulative word games, even as everyone simultaneously loses the capacity to act decisively in the interests of their own citizens. In other words, nationalism and individual self-interest are alive and well within that system — just cleverly disguised — even as those who actually believe the baloney get taken to the cleaners by everyone else.

Look at how Germany is naively dismantling its own industrial capacity and losing all its big businesses to other countries because of its gullible embrace of “green energy” — it is even dismantling its entire nuclear power-generating capabilities that once formed the backbone of its energy grid and replacing them with unreliable solar arrays and wind generators (!?!) — China is no doubt rubbing its hands in glee to see one of its most important competitors in manufacturing voluntarily shoot itself in the foot. As I documented in my recent book, Plunderers of the Earth, Mussolini’s fascist regime — the quintessential national version of the government-corporate partnership — was unprecedented for its web of endless self-serving corruption… now apply that model on a global scale.

If this is the philosophical lens through which Trump and his inner circle view the philosophical war raging across Western Civilization as they set out to fortify Fortress America against the onslaught of Global Socialism, then this is the lens through which we must look at Greenland and Canada.

Let’s start by putting Greenland under the microscope. The deeper we dig into the layers of this story, the more important Greenland becomes. Greenland is the key to understanding the themes of Trump’s broader war against Global Socialism, both inside and outside of America. And Greenland’s story also provides the first clues about how Trump’s threat to annex Canada fits into the big picture and why these two seemingly benign countries do indeed represent a very serious threat to the long-term national security of Trump’s America.

Greenland — the wobbly edge of NATO’s security umbrella

Trump didn’t just announce the intention to annex Greenland. He even hinted that he would be willing to use the military to do it. One NATO country forcibly absorbing another.

But Greenland is a protectorate of the Danish kingdom. And a member state of the European Union. And a member of NATO. There should be a massive cavalry riding to the rescue, right?

Of course not. And that’s Trump’s point.

Denmark’s tiny military is a joke, every member state of the EU has systematically neglected their military spending commitments for decades, and indeed NATO itself is merely a treaty that America’s European (and Canadian) allies are abusing to get the United States to bankroll their defense so they can spend their money on social programs while sneering at America’s military culture.

Not one of these countries would, or could, lift a finger to “save Greenland” from the American superpower. [France initially made a bit of a show by threatening to send troops, but has now pulled back from that, choosing to issue a sternly worded statement instead about respecting borders and sovereignty.]

Trump is done talking. You don’t talk to someone who behaves like a spoiled three-year-old and refuses to act in good faith. If you have leverage, you impose consequences.

Trump is signalling that the era in which its NATO allies can neglect their defense commitments is over. The era of the United States being a “reliable ally” is done, not because America has become unreliable, but because America is tired of its unreliable allies not pulling their weight to protect Pax Americana.

This was one of Trump’s major gripes during his first presidency. NATO member countries categorically ignored and systematically flouted his demands that they meet their NATO defense spending targets, and even openly mocked him for suggesting that they fix this. To them, it was all a great game — promising reforms that never come, issuing grandiose public statements, and making commitments they have no intention of keeping while getting what they want out of the bargain. But they’re not laughing anymore.

Their little games only work as long as their opponents buy into the post-WWII “liberal” mantra that no matter how contentious an issue, the threat of violence against an opponent is never an option, so the only honorable way to solve a disagreement is to remain at the table to talk. And then they cross their arms and refuse to talk. They’re completely ill equipped for opponents who refuse to play by those weaponized rules, leave the table, and even threaten them with a good spanking.

One of the defining characteristics of the new globalist world order is that those who buy into the Global Socialist vision have mastered the art of talking without ever saying anything of real substance while using endless deflection, insults, mockery, and misrepresentation to silence their opponents.

It comes across as stupid, but it's not. It's raw power.

By shutting down meaningful debate, issues are ultimately settled in favor of whichever party holds more power. As long as you continue to try to talk to someone who plays by these deceitful rules, you have NO power and are left begging at their feet, hoping against hope to find the right words to convince them to engage with your evidence and your arguments even as they sneer down their noses at you like some French Monarch out of 15th century. But those words don’t exist because the other side isn’t arguing in good faith.

It's an almost effortless strategy (just learn a few buzzwords while simultaneously acting meek and pompous) — no knowledge of issues required — even a complete loser with the IQ of a fencepost can use it to wriggle their way to political power. Keep it up until your opponent either gives up or loses their cool (in which case they will be universally condemned by society or even face legal consequences if they really flip out). Simple. Brutal. Effective.

And because it's so brutally effective at strongarming opponents into submission, this behaviour has spread like wildfire through all levels of society. Everyone who is “woke” plays this game and no-one does it better than our leaders — just watch a recorded session of the Canadian Parliament and you will see how this deceitful game has been tuned to a fine art.

But Trump’s not talking anymore. He’s changed the rules of the game. As president of the world’s largest superpower, he doesn’t have to play by their rules. Words can’t stop him from unfurling an American flag over Greenland. That’s a different kind of raw power. That is how you spank the arrogant three-year-olds who are running our “woke” countries.

From the expansionist Ottoman Empire that was only finally defeated during WWI, to the threat of Soviet expansion that was only halted with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the historic threats to Europe were very, very real and extremely costly to guard against in terms of both blood and treasure. Yet, under Pax Americana, Europe has conveniently leveraged the opaque globalist web of “treaties” and “international commitments” to get America to pay for Europe’s security. Until now, they have successfully managed to get America’s 330 million citizens to pay for the security of the European Union’s 450 million citizens — partially because it allowed them to spend more on social programs and partly because none of them trust Germany with a strong military after the experiences of WWII and Germany will only agree to have a weak military if its neighbors remain militarily weak too. Duping America into picking up the tab keeps everyone in Europe happy.

But if even America, Europe’s closest ally and security guarantor, also begins to express willingness to start nibbling away at Europe’s undefended territory, these exploitative word games simply won’t work anymore.

Trump’s message is clear: reform… or cease to exist. Consequences.

Another of Trump’s gripes during his first term, equally mocked by the Europeans, was that Europe was compromising its own security by making itself increasingly dependent on Russian energy to keep the lights on. How utterly stupid does an entire continent need to be to make its entire economy and industrial base, and indeed the very energy required to heat their homes in winter, utterly dependent upon their biggest historical enemy? For crying out loud, the Iron Curtain only fell 34 years ago! What do you think the not-so-secret secret destruction of the Nord Stream Pipeline under the cover of the Ukraine War was really about?

With Trump now signalling that Europe should not take America for granted and that America can no longer trust Europe to act as a reliable ally in the Western-led Pax Americana, Europe is forced not only to start footing the bill for its own defense but is also forced to reassess whether it would rather be dependent on Russia or America for its energy supplies. Pick a side, Europe — you no longer get to play both sides.

Furthermore, what the Ottoman Empire couldn’t accomplish by force is now rapidly being accomplished under the veil of globalism as Europe has opened its doors to mass migration on an unprecedented scale without any meaningful effort to assimilate those migrants into European culture. Once again, Europe drank the globalists’ Kool-Aid and is paying the price.

The difference between assimilation and colonization is whether the guests adopt the culture of the host or whether they displace (or even replace) the culture of the host. The rapidly growing number of No-Go Zones in Europe are just one of the many symbols illustrating the fact that Europe appears to have launched itself on the greatest colonization project in history by choosing to colonize itself with the peoples and belief systems of its former historic enemies. [A similar Democrat-led colonization project, equally justified by the Global Socialist vision of the future, was also underway along America’s southern border until Trump returned to office.]

The net result is that the shared culture of classical liberal values that form the backbone of the European and American partnership can no longer be relied upon to continue to run smoothly in the future. European culture is evolving in unpredictable ways. Trump is trying to correct that on American soil by returning to an immigration policy that is lawful, controlled, and requires assimilation. Europe is not. And so, as Europe’s and America’s cultures diverge, Europe’s toehold on the North American continent becomes an increasing liability because of the uncertainty about where Europe’s cultural evolution will lead.

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While Trump’s threat to annex Greenland was a shot across the bow regarding NATO spending commitments, European energy security, and European cultural continuity, there is another much deeper and more serious element to his threat.

Europe’s political leadership, more than any other place in the world, has thrown itself whole-hog into the globalist technocratic vision of government — the Global Socialist world order pushed by the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, and all the other international “feel-good” organizations that have an insatiable appetite for control… and money. Indeed, the European Union is increasingly becoming a kind of miniature model of that global socialist vision that seeks to socially engineer society down to the most minute detail.

After four years of Trump defending himself to outwit the malicious and contrived lawsuits manufactured by the global socialists inside America (a.k.a. the formerly liberal but now openly authoritarian Democratic Party), which tried every dirty trick in the book to lock him up with back-to-back sentences that would have added up to more than 190 years behind bars (at the core, his crime is that he stood up to oppose the spread of this globalist order), Trump perhaps more than anyone knows that the falsetto doublespeak of the global socialists is nothing but a thin false veneer disguising the raw brutality of every other socialist movement in history. Give a socialist even a speck of power and they invariably stop at nothing to destroy their enemies in an effort to impose their vision onto society by force.

And so, as Trump’s America opens battle against the “postwar global order that is being used as a weapon against America” (to paraphrase Marco Rubio), annexing Greenland suddenly emerges as a real national imperative, right out of the pages of the Monroe Doctrine, to ensure that a globalist-oriented socialist and increasingly authoritarian European Union can never pose a threat to America if the philosophical divide between America and Europe continues to widen. By embracing Global Socialism, Europe has ceased to be a reliable like-minded ally. And so, America is acting accordingly to build Fortress America by dislodging Europe’s toehold on the North American continent — in line with the Monroe Doctrine, harking all the way back to 1823.

This might seem a bit overblown — after all, America and Europe are best friends despite their squabbles, right?

As Henry Kissinger, the most important architect of 20th century American foreign policy, once said, “America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.”

The transatlantic “friendship” is a rather recent development in history — the first half of America’s 250-year history was quite the opposite, starting with the Revolutionary War itself. Indeed, as many other geopolitical analysts have pointed out, America’s delayed entry into WWII, the harsh terms of its lend-lease agreements to support Britain’s WWII effort (which were much harsher than the financial terms that FDR demanded of the Soviet Union to support their war effort), and even the terms of the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944 (which replaced the British Pound Sterling with the US Dollar as the world’s reserve currency) all led directly to the collapse of the British Empire — the Sun set on the British Empire soon after. America’s hand of friendship was also the kiss of death that cost Britain its empire, ensuring once and for all that America’s historic arch-nemesis would never again have the strength to be anything other than America’s friend.

The new transatlantic friendship has endured over the entire 20th century and into the opening decades of the 21st. But in recent years, Europe has crossed a number of red lines that forces America to take a more cautious approach towards its European “allies”. And I’m not just taking about Europe cozying up to Russian energy or welcoming China’s Belt and Road projects into Europe or losing control of its cultural integrity, all of which undermine confidence that Europe will continue to act in America’s best interests during times of trouble. No, I’m talking about something much darker still: Europe’s decision to try to manipulate and undermine America’s democracy to try to impose the Global Socialist vision onto America — something that has affected Trump most personally.

The first transgression, of course, was the fraudulent Steele Dossier (Wikipedia link), also known as the Trump-Russia dossier, compiled by a “retired” MI6 agent and ultimately funded through various channels by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee — a document that served as a sophisticated propaganda tool to try to manipulate the outcome of the 2016 election.

While the UK government was not necessarily directly involved in this first transgression (though they were aware of it in some capacity), the highest levels of the UK government were directly behind the second transgression. In 2024, the governing UK Labour party campaigned on behalf of Kamala Harris, on American soil, during the 2024 presidential campaign. This is brazen foreign interference in America’s election.

And the UK doesn’t just have any old government. Keir Starmer’s government is about as Global Socialist as it gets. His chief financial advisor is none other than Mark Carney — the UK’s former Governor of the Bank of England who also happens to be one of the chief architects of the emerging Davos- and UN-led globalist new world order. Furthermore, Carney, along with several other key Canadian Liberal-globalists, played pivotal roles in getting Keir Starmer elected, as reported by Canada’s Globe and Mail. Starmer is their puppet. Thus, the globalists specifically targeted America to thwart Trump’s presidential campaign in order to install their preferred globalist puppet into the White House.

Meanwhile, influential globalist Mark Carney is now being positioned to replace Justin Trudeau as Canada’s Prime Minister by the end of March — the puppet (Trudeau) is being shuffled aside to make way for the puppet-master (Carney) to take the reins directly — right on Trump’s northern doorstep. The philosophical war is gearing up for a more direct confrontation.

While many details of this collaborative transatlantic effort to gang up against Trump’s America remain in the shadows, it is a major diplomatic faux-pas for foreign nations governed by a hostile ideology to involve themselves in the internal politics of another country — wars have been started for less. (Of course, the irony is not lost on me that America has been routinely involving itself in the politics of other countries all over the world, but that’s a story for another day — weak countries simply don’t do that sort of thing to a superpower unless they are prepared to face harsh consequences.)

Whether the UK’s interference in the US election was designed carefully enough to survive a legal challenge is besides the question. The optics are there, and a precedent has been set — Trump cannot view Europe a trusted ally but must henceforth view it as the potential collaborator of his domestic political enemies. A fundamental trust has been broken. There’s no coming back from the fact that a radical globalist UK government has been caught interfering in an American election in order to try to inject an ideology into the White House that the current sitting President has identified as being a threat to America’s national security — if this isn’t a clear violation of the Monroe Doctrine, then what is?

Other European nations have not gone as far as the UK in interfering the US elections, or at least they weren’t as brazen as the UK. Nevertheless, the rest of Europe is equally committed to the Global Socialist cause and equally reckless about openly breaking all diplomatic norms. They are openly hostile towards Trump and his vision for America, and openly supportive of the “other” party (the Democrats), which is working 24/7 to steer America into the postwar global world order that seeks to tie America’s hands in knots on both domestic issues and on the world stage.

In other words, Europe’s political leadership has collectively committed a BIG “no-no”. The correct thing for political leaders to do when other countries elect their leaders is to smile, keep their mouths shut, and work to build constructive relationships no matter who is in charge. Instead, they are on a mission to change the world. Instead, they poked their noses into America’s business and spewed poison against Trump at every turn and, in doing so, they too violated the Monroe Doctrine.

And so, Fortress America is fortifying itself.

Trump is not breaking with America’s historic national policy but rather is dusting off America’s core doctrine, which guided the actions of most American presidents throughout America’s 250-year history. The permissive attitude of the post-WWII “rules-based” liberal international era is the aberration, not the norm. As the post-WWII era comes to a close, America is returning to business as usual, in which neither hostile nations nor ideological enemies are permitted a toehold on the continent.

And that brings us to the last portion of Greenland’s part in this game of 4D chess. A good defense is often to play a strong offense. The best way to prevent a war is to prevent the enemy from building up the momentum to start one.

The European Union was born as a treaty to bind Europe’s sovereign states together in as a stable economic union. The core purpose of that union was that it was supposed to prevent any one nation emerging as a military threat capable of dominating the whole continent. In effect, it was meant to put a lid on Germany’s and France’s military adventurism, such as Napoleon’s rampage across the continent, WWI, and Hitler’s effort to capture the whole continent during WWII.

Indeed, the main reason behind America’s entries into both WWI and WWII, despite the fact that there was no direct threat to Fortress America, was to prevent any single national entity from gaining control over the whole continent and thus emerging as a rival superpower to America. But as the European Union evolves beyond a trade union into an ever more cohesive and top-down centrally-controlled entity, in which member nations are increasingly downgraded to the status of provinces, America’s historic nightmare of Europe being dominated by a single rival continental superpower is once again rearing its ugly head.

The very alliance (the E.U.) that America once promoted as a solution to dismantle European military adventurism is now itself becoming a threat, not least by dragging America into Europe’s military adventures (i.e. the UK and France were largely responsible for dragging NATO (and the US) into Libya’s civil war in 2011, which led to Gaddafi’s assassination, despite America’s initial declaration that it wanted to stay out of it), but also because of the off-chance that a re-empowered Europe united under a single centralized umbrella might evolve to become hostile in its own right at some point in the future, especially if it ever joins forces (militarily or philosophically) with an ascendent Russia or China.

As I explained above, by threatening to seize Greenland, this forces the European Union to dramatically boost their military spending in order to meet their national military commitments and rebuild their own national armies. But, in a true 4-D chess move, by forcing them to rebuild their national armies, this will invariably re-kindle historic mistrusts between European nations and begin to reverse their enthusiasm for further centralization, instead tipping the balance back in favor of returning to the limited treaty that America imagined when it promoted uniting Europe under a free trade agreement (specifically the European Coal and Steel Community that was the precursor of the European Union).

In the American mind, the E.U. was not meant to evolve into a single centrally-controlled entity dominating the entire continent. But for many Europeans (especially in Germany and France), that’s exactly what they are trying to do with the European technocratic experiment — with each likely imagining that they, and not the others, will be the ones to emerge as the top dog running the whole European show.

But just in case a remilitarized Europe does manage to keep their European Union from falling apart, or in case Europe ditches national armies and builds a single centralized military instead, the European toehold on the American continent (Greenland) has to be severed long before the Europeans are strong enough to offer any form of meaningful resistance (the little French island of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon off the coast of Newfoundland should also take note… once Trump notices that they exist, they’re probably going to get annexed too). The Monroe Doctrine would have it no other way.

Military planning and statecraft aren’t just about meeting the immediate challenges facing a country. They are also about identifying emerging new trends and hypothetical future risks, however small or unlikely, that could potentially pose a future risk to the nation… and beginning to build a plan for how to counter those risks decades before those risks mature into real danger. The key to avoiding future bloodshed is to act early to steer events away from the point where real blood and real treasure must be spent on defending national interests.

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” — Sun Tzu, The Art of War (this happens to be one of Trump’s favorite books and was inspiration for the title of his own book, the Art of the Deal).

And so, a combination of rising tensions with Russia and China at a time when Europe isn’t taking its military commitments seriously, Europe’s increasing entanglement with those two rival powers, European centralization, Europe’s embrace of the global socialist ideology, and Europe’s open hostility and meddling in America’s politics has forced America to dust off the Monroe Doctrine to reassess its vulnerabilities in the context of these evolving realities.

Whether by instinct or by design, Trump poked his finger into a festering truth — from America’s perspective, the revived Monroe Doctrine dictates that Greenland must be folded into the American Empire to fortify itself against an increasingly hostile world.

Whether it happens in a day, a year, or a decade, the die has been cast.

And that brings us to Canada, which will be the subject of Part 2 of this essay...