The Greenland Question

What unsettled observers about Greenland was not territorial ambition, but the possibility that the United States might no longer need to explain itself before acting. When Donald Trump suggested the United States might acquire Greenland, analysts scrambled to answer an interpretive emergency. Interests were assumed to exist and then searched for. Yet when none materialized, the action itself was declared incoherent. This response revealed more than the remark ever could. Liberal analysis operates from a straightforward premise: power is legitimate only when it can be justified. Action must be preceded, or at least followed quickly, by reasons that can be examined, weighed and approved. Where reasons cannot be supplied, the action gets treated as error, pathology or noise. Decision without justification isn't just illegitimate, it's unintelligible.

But this isn't a neutral habit of mind, it's a statement of political theology. On Ones and Tooze, the reflex appeared in its purest form. Adam Tooze and Cameron Abadi worked through the Greenland remark with exemplary seriousness, the kind of good-faith effort that makes most episodes fun listening. Here, they raised each plausible interest and dismissed it. Strategic logic didn't quite fit, domestic politics explained little, alliance management explained nothing. Even Lenin's theories on imperialism and 'premodern immaterial' motivations were raised. In the end, Tooze fell back on declaring everything as 'beyond belief' every nine minutes, while Abadi affirmed that the historical moment was 'vertigo inducing'.

In short, the conversation kept expanding rather than reaching any conclusion in a manner that was darkly amusing. The unstated verdict was clear: no interest existed that was commensurate with the action. This was taken not as a limit of explanation but as proof of irrationality. Yet the analysis missed something fundamental: the confusion itself was the message.

What analysts such as these fail to grasp was that liberalism's status had shifted in American strategic thinking. For decades, liberal norms functioned as infrastructure for American power projection. Human rights discourse opened markets. Democratic promotion facilitated capital penetration. Rule of law created predictable investment environments. Liberalism wasn't a constraint on American power but something far more valuable: a hyperscalable ideology for extending it.

This worked brilliantly until it didn't. The moment liberalism became a hindrance rather than a tool—i.e. disciplining American action rather than enabling it—the calculus changed. What analysts treated as ideological betrayal was actually something simpler and more pragmatic: instrumental adjustment. Trump didn't abandon liberalism out of conviction but because it had ceased being useful.

This is what confused the commentariat so thoroughly. They had conflated the United States with liberalism as a binding constraint. The assumption ran deep: liberal norms governed American behavior, consultation and justification were obligations rather than choices. When those norms were discarded as an inconvenience, the whole analytic framework collapsed.

But there's also a strategic logic and it runs considerably deeper than Greenland. Moscow and Beijing have played a double game for years, invoking liberal norms when those norms constrain Washington and reverting to realism when such norms become inconvenient for themselves. Sovereignty is sacred when it protects Russian action in Crimea or Chinese claims in the South China Sea and yet becomes meaningless when it stands in the way of Russian or Chinese interests elsewhere. The game worked precisely because it exploited American self-constraints.

The Greenland remark was a message to these players: we can play realism too, and win. In brief, it is escalation dominance translated into the normative realm and signals that if Moscow and Beijing want to operate in a purely realist environment—if they want to strip away liberal justification and operate on raw power calculations—the United States will meet them there, and prevail. European resistance to Trump’s Greenland gambit is loud but bounded. There are statements, emergency meetings, ritual appeals to sovereignty and international law, and so on, but it will stop short of manufacturing an alliance crisis. Greenland is not the hill Europe will bury NATO on. There will be no escalation to the point that Atlantic security is put at risk. This is a structural constraint, not a lapse of resolve. Greenland therefore functions less as a territorial dispute than as a demonstration of asymmetric freedom of action. The United States can act without reasons; Europe must respond with them. Where reasons cease to bind outcomes, Europe yields.

Meanwhile, China's realism remains encumbered by historical grievance and defensive narrative; it must justify every move through the lens of century-old humiliation and territorial restoration. Russia's realism is spectacular and destructive, capable of breaking systems it cannot replace. American realism, by contrast, operates infrastructurally. It works within an order the United States constructed and others continue to inhabit even as they resent it. The dollar system persists. The security architecture remains. The institutional frameworks endure.

When the United States adopts realist logic without abandoning its structural position, it doesn't level the playing field—it tilts it further. This is what made the Greenland remark strategically coherent even as it appeared analytically incoherent. The point wasn't Greenland. The point was demonstrating willingness to operate without liberal justification while retaining all the advantages that liberal order construction had already secured.

From Beijing, this reads very differently than it does from Brussels or Berkeley. Chinese analysts don't treat Trump's approach as irrational. They treat it as clarity. For years, they've described American power as selectively principled—invoking rules when useful, discarding them when necessary. The Greenland remark didn't reveal something new. It confirmed what was already assumed and removed the pretense that made American power partially predictable.

This is why the episode unsettled observers outside the liberal analytic class. The concern wasn't that the United States might actually annex Greenland. It almost certainly won't. The concern was that the United States might cease arguing with itself about its right to act.

For decades, American power was partially governable because it was internally divided. Legalism, alliance consultation, moral language; these created delays that others learned to exploit. Strategy could be conducted in the interval between intention and justification. Time could be bought, coalitions assembled and responses prepared. A United States that no longer requires explanation before action offers fewer such intervals. Not because it acts more frequently, but because it acts more decisively when it chooses to act. The danger isn't impulsiveness—it's decisiveness without apology.

This distinction matters considerably. Impulsiveness, ironically, can be anticipated and managed. It operates within familiar patterns and produces recognizable errors. Decision without self-justification can't be managed the same way. It moves at a different speed and offers fewer footholds for interference.

Here analysis performs its characteristic inversion. When it can't identify the interest served by a decision, it treats the decision as invalid rather than the framework as incomplete. Ignorance isn't acknowledged; instead it gets refined. Explanation proliferates precisely to avoid admitting that there may be nothing to explain—or worse, that the decision's lack of explicability might itself be strategic.

The handwringing over reputational damage followed the same confused logic. The United States, it was said, would be seen as imperial. But this anxiety presupposed a reputational baseline that no longer exists. In Chinese and Russian discourse, the United States has long been described as an empire that invokes rules when useful and abandons them when necessary. This description didn't begin with Greenland. It accumulated over Iraq, over Libya, over the slow expansion of NATO, over financial sanctions deployed with increasing casualness.

Against that background, Trump's bluntness imposed no new ideological cost. It merely collapsed the distance between behavior and description. You can't lose a virtue you haven't been assigned. There's a practical efficiency in abandoning justification, too. Hypocrisy requires maintenance. It demands constant alignment between language and action, an endless calibration of word and deed. Dispensing with it reduces friction. The United States didn't become more imperial in the eyes of its rivals; it became more legible, and legibility in this context functions as a form of deterrence.

What got exposed was not the exhaustion of American power but the enervation of the analytical habits used to interpret it. Liberalism functioned as an interface, not a constitution. When that interface began to discipline its builder, the builder pushed back—not with theory but pure assertion. This is the moment Carl Schmitt described with precision. Sovereignty reveals itself not in norms but the capacity to decide when norms don't apply. Legitimacy follows decision, it doesn't precede it.

Western analysts called the Greenland episode incoherent because it couldn't be justified within liberal frameworks. From Beijing, it appeared coherent for the opposite reason: it didn't seek justification and demonstrated that the United States remains capable of decision without requiring permission from the categories designed to domesticate power.

That capacity—not Greenland itself—is what matters. The message wasn't about territorial ambition. The message was escalation dominance in the realm of norms. If you want realism, we'll give it to you and still win.