A recent Facebook post by Michael Jochum in which he describes the US as a gangster state whose actions accelerate the decline of the US empire. What Jochum views as detrimental I, as a global citizen without national affiliation, see as a silver lining: 1) “we would create a unified enemy across the Atlantic,” 2) Europe would demand the closure of every U.S. base on its soil,” 3) “The European Union, the largest market on Earth, would weaponize its power.” (the USD has been living on borrowed time for a while now), 4) “Even culture would turn its back on us”. The truth will set you free.

I agree with Jochum that the millions of US Americans who support Dear Leader will wake up when the US economy implodes. By then it will be too late. The US will have joined Germany and Italy as countries that “successfully” completed the fifth stage of fascism. At that point, it’s safe to say the decline is irreversible.

Peace, MAA

If the Trump administration follows through on its Arctic fantasy of seizing Greenland, we need to be brutally clear about what that moment actually means. This is not a “real estate deal,” not a clever bargaining ploy, not some hard-nosed negotiating tactic. It is the geopolitical equivalent of pulling the pin on a grenade in a crowded elevator and then smirking as the doors close. The instant American boots touch Greenland to steal territory from a fellow NATO member, the world as we know it fractures. The consequences will not be symbolic, temporary, or manageable, they will be total, permanent, and devastating.

The first casualty would be NATO itself. Article 5, the sacred promise that an attack on one is an attack on all becomes a cruel joke the moment the United States attacks Denmark. We would not merely “violate” the treaty; we would detonate it from the inside. Seventy-five years of European stability evaporates overnight. Instead of leading the free world, we would create a unified enemy across the Atlantic. We wouldn’t just lose allies, we would manufacture them.

The military repercussions would be immediate and humiliating. Europe would demand the closure of every U.S. base on its soil: Ramstein, Aviano, Lakenheath, gone. Our ability to project power into the Middle East, Africa, and beyond would collapse. We would be evicted from the very continent we helped liberate and defend, retreating like a chastened bully forced back to his own yard. Fortress America, isolated and friendless, would be Trump’s legacy.

Then comes the economic annihilation. The European Union, the largest market on Earth, would weaponize its power. U.S. debt could be called in. Dollar reserves could be dumped. The greenback, the backbone of our global dominance would spiral. Inflation would make post-COVID spikes look quaint. Savings, pensions, and retirement accounts would be incinerated. Corporate America would face an extinction event: Apple, Google, Tesla, McDonald’s expelled, assets seized, markets frozen. The stock exchange would not just crash, it would shut down. De-globalization would not be a theory; it would be a catastrophe.

The skies would go silent. Boeing jets grounded. U.S. airlines banned from European airspace. Transatlantic travel dead. Supply chains severed. Medicines, machinery, and technology cut off. The “indispensable nation” would become an island prison of its own making.

Even culture would turn its back on us. The Olympics. The World Cup. Global sports would treat the United States the way they treated Russia as a pariah. No Team USA. No international prestige. Just humiliation.

For individual Americans, the pain would be personal. Visa-free travel gone. Americans living in Europe suddenly vulnerable, stripped of protections, potentially deported. The blue passport transformed overnight from a key into a warning label.

And this break would not be temporary. You cannot invade a democratic ally and then apologize your way back into the club. Europe would build its own defense, its own financial systems, its own alliances, all designed to exclude us. The West would continue, but the United States would no longer belong to it.

All of this, for what? A frozen island. A few minerals we can’t even process. A vanity project masquerading as “national security.” Invading Greenland would not be strength, it would be national suicide.

Which brings us to the grotesque core of this crisis: the man behind it.

This Greenland fiasco is not strategy, not statesmanship, not even crude nationalism. It is the tantrum of a spoiled, thin-skinned autocrat who has wrapped his wounded ego in the language of empire. Trump’s insistence on “complete and total control” of Greenland, tied, like a petulant diary entry, to his failure to win the Nobel Peace Prize, is nothing more than a crybaby’s excuse for authoritarian, fascist, geopolitical takeover.

A man who cannot tolerate rejection, who cannot bear a slight, who cannot accept that the world does not revolve around him, now threatens a NATO ally, sparks a transatlantic trade war, and toys with global stability because his feelings were hurt. This is not leadership. It is toddler tyranny wearing a suit, fueled by grievance, and inflated by delusion.

His demand to seize an autonomous territory of Denmark, a democratic partner that has stood with the United States for generations, is a naked repudiation of international law and sovereignty. He questions Denmark’s “ownership” of Greenland as if borders are mere suggestions for men like him, men who believe power erases consent. He cloaks this land grab in “national security” while every serious ally and analyst knows that claim is nonsense. What he really wants is not security, but conquest; not stability, but domination; not peace, but a spectacle of submission that proves he is the center of the universe.

The fact that he is willing to risk the greatest transatlantic crisis in generations over this Arctic fever dream exposes the moral rot at the heart of his presidency.

Europe sees him clearly. Macron calls out the intimidation. Starmer condemns the coercion. Even Meloni, hardly a liberal pushes back. Our allies recognize him for what he is: a bully with tariffs instead of tanks, blackmail instead of diplomacy, and a worldview that treats friends as targets and enemies as role models. Meanwhile, Putin watches with glee as Trump shreds NATO unity and does Russia’s work for free.

But the most nauseating part of this is not just Trump, it is the cult that cheers him on. The true believers who call this madness “patriotism,” who salivate at every threat, who interpret his tantrums as genius. They are willing accomplices in a regime that enriches billionaires, crushes the vulnerable, dismantles democratic norms, and normalizes the idea that America should behave like a rogue empire rather than a republic.

This Greenland gambit is not a curiosity, it is a warning. A preview of what happens when a petulant would-be dictator is given power without restraint, surrounded by enablers, and worshipped by a movement that mistakes cruelty for courage.

If Trump gets his way, the precedent will be unmistakable: borders mean nothing, allies are disposable, and the American presidency is a weapon for personal vendettas. That is the world he is building, a world of bullies, billionaires, and broken democracies.

And anyone who still defends him is not merely misguided. They are complicit in the erosion of everything this country once claimed to stand for.

— Michael Jochum, Not Just a Drummer: Reflections on Art, Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition.

Postscript-

I cannot believe that more Americans are not taking what is happening with Trump, his war-mongering, narcissistic land grab of Greenland, with the existential seriousness it demands. This is not political theater, not some cartoonish distraction, not just “Trump being Trump.” It is a calculated step toward authoritarian expansion dressed up as national security, and the consequences of it are not abstract, they are potentially civilization-shattering.

What we are witnessing is not merely global humiliation for the United States, though it is that in spades. It is a reckless march toward geopolitical annihilation, driven by one man’s bruised ego and enabled by a cult that mistakes brutality for strength. Trump is not leading; he is lurching. He is not protecting America; he is isolating it. He is not preserving order; he is detonating it.

And still, 78 million Americans stand behind him.

When, not if, but when do they wake up? When NATO collapses? When our economy implodes? When American soldiers are sent into a needless, illegal conflict with a democratic ally? When their savings evaporate, their jobs disappear, their children are conscripted into a war they never should have fought?

How much destruction has to occur before they admit that this is not patriotism, this is not conservatism, this is not “America First,” it is fascism wrapped in a flag?

At what point does loyalty stop being an excuse for delusion? At what point does complicity become undeniable? Because right now, history is not going to remember Trump alone as the architect of this catastrophe, it will remember every single person who cheered him on while the world burned.

Bonus: Heather Cox Richardson‘s take on the same issue.

January 19, 2026 (Monday)

Late last night, Nick Schifrin of PBS NewsHour posted on social media that the staff of the U.S. National Security Council had sent to European ambassadors in Washington a message that President Donald J. Trump had already sent to Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre of Norway. The message read:

“Dear Jonas: 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. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a ‘right of ownership’ anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT”

Faisal Islam of the BBC voiced the incredulity rippling across social media in the wake of Schifrin’s post, writing: “Even by the standards of the past week, like others, I struggle to comprehend how the below letter on Greenland/Nobel might be real, although it appears to come from the account of a respected PBS journalist… this is what I meant by beyond precedent, parody and reality….” Later, Islam confirmed on live TV that the letter was real and posted on X: “Incredible… the story is actually not a parody.”

International affairs journalist Anne Applebaum noted in The Atlantic the childish grammar in the message, and pointed out—again—that the Norwegian Nobel Committee is not the same thing as the Norwegian government, and neither of them is Denmark, a different country. She also noted that Trump did not, in fact, end eight wars, that Greenland has been Danish for centuries, that many “written documents” establish Danish sovereignty there, that Trump has done nothing for NATO, and that European NATO members increased defense spending out of concern over Russia’s increasing threat.

This note, she writes, “should be the last straw.” It proves that “Donald Trump now genuinely lives in a different reality, one in which neither grammar nor history nor the normal rules of human interaction now affect him. Also, he really is maniacally, unhealthily obsessive about the Nobel Prize.” Applebaum implored Republicans in Congress “to stop Trump from acting out his fantasy in Greenland and doing permanent damage to American interests.” “They owe it to the American people,” she writes, “and to the world.”

Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s doctor Jonathan Reiner agreed: “This letter, and the fact that the president directed that it be distributed to other European countries, should trigger a bipartisan congressional inquiry into presidential fitness.”

Today three top American Catholic cardinals, Blase Cupich of Chicago, Robert McElroy of Washington, D.C., and Joseph Tobin of Newark, New Jersey, issued a joint statement warning the Trump administration that its military action in Venezuela, threats against Greenland, and cuts to foreign aid risk bringing vast suffering to the world. Nicole Winfield and Giovanna Dell’Orto of the Associated Press reported that the cardinals spoke up after a meeting at the Vatican in which several fellow cardinals expressed alarm about the administration’s actions. Cupich said that when the U.S. can be portrayed as saying “‘might makes right’—that’s a troublesome development. There’s the rule of law that should be followed.”

“We are watching one of the wildest things a nation-state has ever done,” journalist Garrett Graff wrote: “A superpower is [dying by] suicide because the [Republican] Congress is too cowardly to stand up to the Mad King. This is one of the wildest moments in all of geopolitics ever.”

In just a year since his second inauguration, Trump has torn apart the work that took almost a century of struggle and painstaking negotiations from the world’s best diplomats to build. Since World War II, generations of world leaders, often led by the United States, created an international order designed to prevent future world wars. They worked out rules to defend peoples and nations from the aggressions of neighboring countries, and tried to guarantee that global trade, bolstered by freedom of the seas, would create a rising standard of living that would weaken the ability of demagogues to create loyal followings.

In August 1941, four months before the U.S. entered World War II, U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill and their advisors laid out principles for an international system that could prevent future world wars. In a document called the Atlantic Charter, they agreed that countries should not invade each other and therefore the world should work toward disarmament, and that international cooperation and trade thanks to freedom of the seas would help to knit the world together with rising prosperity and human rights.

The war killed about 36.5 million Europeans, 19 million of them civilians, and left many of those who had survived homeless or living in refugee camps. In its wake, in 1945, representatives of the 47 countries that made up the Allies in World War II, along with the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and newly liberated Denmark and Argentina, formed the United Nations as a key part of an international order based on rules on which nations agreed, rather than the idea that might makes right, which had twice in just over twenty years brought wars that involved the globe.

Four years later, many of those same nations came together to resist Soviet aggression, prevent the revival of European militarism, and guarantee international cooperation across the Atlantic Ocean. France, the U.K., Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg formed a defensive military alliance with the U.S., Canada, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland to make up the twelve original signatories to the North Atlantic Treaty. In it, the countries that made up the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) reaffirmed “their desire to live in peace with all peoples and all governments” and their determination “to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.”

They vowed that any attack on one of the signatories would be considered an attack on all, thus deterring war by promising strong retaliation. This system of collective defense has stabilized the world for 75 years. Thirty-two countries are now members, sharing intelligence, training, tactics, equipment, and agreements for use of airspace and bases. In 2024, NATO countries reaffirmed their commitment and said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had “gravely undermined global security.”

And therein lies the rub. The post–World War II rules-based international order prevents authoritarians from grabbing land and resources that belong to other countries. But Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, for example, is eager to dismantle NATO and complete his grab of Ukraine’s eastern industrial regions.

Trump has taken the side of rising autocrats and taken aim at the rules-based international order with his insistence that the U.S. must control the Western Hemisphere. In service to that plan, he has propped up Argentina’s right-wing president Javier Milei and endorsed right-wing Honduran president Nasry Asfura, helping his election by pardoning former president Juan Orlando Hernández, a leading member of Asfura’s political party, who was serving 45 years in prison in the U.S. for drug trafficking. Trump ousted Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and seized control of much of Venezuela’s oil, the profits of which are going to an account in Qatar that Trump himself controls.

This week, Trump has launched a direct assault on the international order that has stabilized the world since 1945. He is trying to form his own “Board of Peace,” apparently to replace the United Nations. A draft charter for that institution gives Trump the presidency, the right to choose his successor, veto power over any actions, and control of the $1 billion fee permanent members are required to pay. In a letter to prospective members, Trump boasted that the Board of Peace is “the most impressive and consequential Board ever assembled,” and that “there has never been anything like it!” Those on it would, he said, “lead by example, and brilliantly invest in a secure and prosperous future for generations to come.”

The Kremlin says Putin, whose war on Ukraine has now lasted almost four years and who has been shunned from international organizations since his indictment by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, has received an invitation to that Board of Peace. So has Putin’s closest ally, President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, who Ivana Kottasová and Anna Chernova of CNN note has been called “Europe’s last dictator.” Also invited are Hungary’s prime minister and Putin ally Viktor Orbán as well as Javier Milei.

And now Trump is announcing to our allies that he has the right to seize another country.

Trump’s increasing frenzy is likely coming at least in part from increasing pressure over the fact the Department of Justice is now a full month past the date it was required by law to release all of the Epstein files. Another investigation will be in the news as well, as former special counsel Jack Smith testifies publicly later this week about Trump’s role in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Smith told the House Judiciary Committee in December that he believed a jury would have found Trump guilty on four felony counts related to his actions.

Smith knows what happened, and Trump knows that Smith knows what happened.

Trump’s fury over the Nobel Peace Prize last night was likely fueled as well by the national celebration today of an American who did receive that prize: the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. The Nobel Prize Committee awarded King the prize in 1964 for his nonviolent struggle for civil rights for the Black population in the U.S. He accepted it “with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind,” affirming what now seems like a prescient rebuke to a president sixty years later, saying that “what self-centered men have torn down men other-centered can build up.”

Trump did not acknowledge Martin Luther King Jr. Day this year.

While the walls are clearly closing in on Trump’s ability to see beyond himself, he and his loyalists are being egged on in their demand for the seizure of Greenland by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who is publicly calling for a return to a might-makes-right world. On Sean Hannity’s show on the Fox News Channel today, Miller ignored the strength of NATO in maintaining global security as he insisted only the U.S. could protect Greenland.

He also ignored the crucial fact that the rules-based international order has been instrumental in increasing U.S.—as well as global—prosperity since 1945. With his claim that “American dollars, American treasure, American blood, American ingenuity is what keeps Europe safe and the free world safe,” Miller is erasing the genius of the generations before us. It is not the U.S. that has kept the world safe and kept standards of living rising: it is our alliances and the cooperation of the strongest nations in the world, working together, to prevent wannabe dictators from dividing the world among themselves.

Miller is not an elected official. Appointed by Trump and with a reasonable expectation that Trump will pardon him for any crimes he commits, Miller is insulated both from the rule of law and, crucially, from the will of voters. The Republican congress members Applebaum called on to stop Trump are not similarly insulated.

Tonight Danish troops—the same troops who stood shoulder to shoulder with U.S. troops in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021—arrived in Greenland to defend the island from the United States of America.