The Trump Administration Goes Full Tinfoil Hat in Its Revisionist History of January 6

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, January 07, 2026

 

It would be one thing if the Trump administration were merely peddling in its spare time a self-serving revisionist history of the January 6 riot so libelous, so brazen in its contempt for established record that it would have made a Soviet propagandist blush. It’s quite another to enlist all of us in that project by committing taxpayer dollars to it, disseminating the president’s alternative version of events on digital public property.

 

The former is despicable. The latter is obscene.

 

The story the president is promoting on the White House’s official website is comprehensive. The rebuttal to it must, therefore, be similarly extensive.

 

The document goes off the rails at the outset — in the introduction, to be exact. In it, Trump’s aides hail the president’s “blanket pardons” of the January 6 convicts. Trump “ordered immediate release of those still imprisoned, ending years of harsh solitary confinement,” the White House’s account reads, “denied due process, and family separation for exercising their First Amendment rights.”

 

In fact, the majority of the January 6 convicts were found guilty of misdemeanors and sentenced only to probation. The only people that Trump could spring from prison were those who had been convicted of more serious, even violent, offenses. And there were a lot of them. As I wrote at the time:

 

Devlyn Thompson attacked a police officer with a metal baton. Robert Palmer bludgeoned another officer with a fire extinguisher, among other items of debris he could find strewn about the ransacked Capitol steps. Julian Khater shot pepper spray into the faces of three Capitol Hill police officers. David Dempsey used all these weapons and more in his frenzied attack on law enforcement. They are free today, along with those who were convicted of seditious conspiracy for the preparation and planning that culminated in that premeditated act of mass violence.

 

In addition, federal courts have rejected the claim that some of the criminal charges brought against the rioters represented a violation of their First Amendment rights. As U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly wrote in the case of the Proud Boys defendants, “There were many avenues for defendants to express their opinions about the 2020 presidential election.” Whatever the “expressive aspect” of protests might have been, “it lost whatever First Amendment protection it may have had” at the outset of the violence.

 

The introduction proceeds to blame former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the extent of the violence that this document simultaneously argues was no big deal.

 

Pelosi is supposedly undone by her own daughter’s documentary footage, which allegedly features her “repeatedly acknowledging responsibility for the catastrophic security failures,” the White House claimed. “‘We have totally failed’ and ‘I take full responsibility’ for not having the National Guard pre-deployed,” reads the speaker’s imagined confession.

 

The authors must assume that you won’t watch the video of the exchange they are describing. In it, Pelosi laments her own failure to impress upon the White House the need for more proactive measures to defend the Capitol, and she explicitly concedes that she lacks the authority to deploy the National Guard. That makes sense because no member of Congress has such authority over the U.S. armed forces. That is the province of the executive branch.

 

The timeline as established via congressional testimony is instructive. Just after 1 p.m., as the melee on the Capitol’s steps intensified, Capitol Hill Police Chief Steven Sund approached House Sergeant at Arms Paul Irving, asking him to request an emergency Guard deployment. “During a tense phone call that began 18 minutes later, a top general said that he did not like the ‘visual’ of the military guarding the Capitol and that he would recommend the Army secretary deny the request,” the New York Times reported. “Pentagon approval finally came at 3:04 p.m.” At 3:36 p.m., Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany announced that the “National Guard is on the way,” but the first troops did not arrive at the scene until about 4:17 p.m.

 

“In truth,” the introduction concluded, “it was the Democrats who staged the real insurrection by certifying a fraud-ridden election, ignoring widespread irregularities, and weaponizing federal agencies to hunt down dissenters, all while Pelosi’s own security lapses invited the chaos they later exploited to seize and consolidate power.”

 

That delusional narrative is rendered more incomprehensible by the president’s own statements on January 6 — reluctant though they almost certainly were — that his administration had pursued all legal avenues to challenge the election results. Appropriating the language that liberty-loving democracies use to describe genuine tyrannies might agitate the excitable sort, but it cannot erase the record.

 

With the introduction concluded, the White House’s January 6 page introduces a series of flash cards that delineate its timeline of key events. If you thought the introduction was crazy, you haven’t read anything yet.

 

The first several of the 15 cards establish the banality of Trump’s intentions, his emphasis on peaceful protest, and the “orderly and spirited” nature of the crowds. Their only goal was to “protest the certification of the fraudulent election.” If there is a villain in this tale, it is the Capitol Hill police.

 

“Capitol Police aggressively fire tear gas, flash bangs, and rubber munitions into crowds of peaceful protesters, injuring many and deliberately escalating tensions,” the missive read. “Video evidence shows officers inexplicably removing barricades, opening Capitol doors, and even waving attendees inside the building — actions that facilitated entry — while simultaneously deploying violent force against others,” it continued. “These inconsistent and provocative tactics turned a peaceful demonstration into chaos.”

 

So, the CHPD was, in this telling, both too trigger-happy and, also, too permissive and de-escalatory in the face of a mass of rioters. No honest broker would dare contend that the crowds did not force their way into the building — one overwhelmed checkpoint notwithstanding. (The conspiracy theory that this was the work of an “inside man” has also been debunked.)

 

The Government Accountability Office found that there were at least 174 violent assaults on police officers, including 114 Capitol Hill police and 60 Metropolitan Police Department officers. Many of those assaults you can watch for yourself. Those videos feature stomach-churning displays of reptilian brutality. To blame the police for their own assault is the sort of thing you might hear from a progressive “defund” activist, not the self-described “law and order” administration.

 

At this point, the flash cards speed right past a period of conspicuous inactivity on Donald Trump’s part, fast-forwarding to the point at which he issues a video message calling on the rioters to disperse. “He consistently promotes nonviolence despite the attack on attendees and emotions running high,” the website alleges.

 

In fact, it took quite a lot of coaxing from the president’s inner circle — allies, aides, and family members alike — to get him to make those statements. “He’s got to condemn this sh** ASAP,” Don Jr. wrote in one harried text message to then–White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. “I’m pushing it hard,” Meadows replied. “I agree.” But no remarks were made. “We need an Oval Office address,” Don Jr. texted again. “He has to lead now. It has gone too far and gotten out of hand.”

 

Trump had to take more than one swing at that initial message. “I know your pain. I know you’re hurt,” Trump said in the first, swiftly deleted address to the rioters. “We had an election stolen from us — it was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side.”

 

Moving on to the point at which rioter Ashli Babbitt was “murdered in cold blood,” the website accused Capitol Police Lieutenant Michael Byrd of acting “without warning as she climbs through a broken window toward the Speaker’s Lobby. No weapon was found on her, and she posed no threat.”

 

A Justice Department investigation of the incident cleared Byrd of acting to “willfully deprive Ms. Babbitt of a right protected by the Constitution or other law.” Indeed, “The actions of the officer in this case potentially saved members [of Congress] and staff from serious injury and possible death from a large crowd of rioters,” read an after-action report conducted by the Capitol Police’s Office of Professional Responsibility.

 

The notion that Byrd declined to warn the mob that was beating on the security glass protecting a restricted area of the Capitol in which Congress members were taking shelter is betrayed by video of the incident. While it is hard to hear the officer, it isn’t hard to hear members of the mob warning each other that he “has a gun” — not that the firearm dissuaded the attackers from ripping down the security glass and rushing through the breach like a zombie horde. Byrd fires his weapon several seconds after the protesters become aware of it, are unmoved by it, and proceed to scramble through the hole in the security door they created.

 

“Three other Americans were also killed,” the White House website notes. “Rosanne Boyland, Kevin Greeson, and Benjamin Philips. Zero law enforcement officers lost their lives.”

 

Rosanne Boyland was trampled to death by the January 6 rioters. Kevin Greeson and Benjamin Philips both suffered fatal medical emergencies during the attack — emergencies to which first responders could not react with sufficient speed because of the ongoing riot. The White House appears to be implying that the lopsided body count tacitly indicts the conduct of the officers who responded to the attack. Again, they hope you’re not too interested in the details.

 

“Vice President Mike Pence, who had the opportunity to return disputed electoral slates to state legislatures for review and decertification under the United States Constitution, chooses not to exercise that power in an act of cowardice and sabotage,” the White House’s wild reinterpretation of events defamatorily continued. “Instead, Pence presides over the certification of contested electors, undermining President Trump’s efforts to address documented fraud and ending any chance to correct the election steal.”

 

Shameless does not begin to describe the effort to promulgate this long-ago discredited theory of constitutional law. As Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said in the riot’s aftermath, “Vice presidents can’t simply decide not to certify an election.” Indeed, Republican lawmakers and Republican voters alike, as shown in a late 2020 Quinnipiac poll, did not believe that Pence had the authority to invalidate the elector slates sent to Congress. They were correct at the time. That they’ve retroactively conditioned themselves into believing a more politically expedient untruth does not change that.

 

The year “2020 is considered the greatest election theft in U.S. history, with widespread fraud deliberately ignored by courts, officials, and the media,” the White House’s missive added. Again, Trump’s televised January 7 admission that his campaign “vigorously pursued every legal avenue to contest the election results” betrays the lie in the claim that the courts summarily “ignored” his appeals. One of Trump’s attorneys was disbarred for his role in the effort to deceive the courts and American elected officials. The president’s people weren’t denied a hearing. They just lost.

 

“At least five J6 defendants took their own life [sic] while facing prosecution,” the White House notes. That is tragic. But so, too, are the suicide deaths of at least four of the police officers who were traumatized by their experiences on that day. Some of their survivors explicitly attributed their suicides to the events of January 6. If we were going to count the suicides of the accused as casualties, we should be consistent and do the same for the members of law enforcement whom the president of the United States is defaming for doing their jobs.

 

The White House concludes its timeline of the events of January 6 with a nod or two to some of the online right’s favorite conspiracy theories. It notes that “the FBI had at least 26 (and likely dozens more) confidential informants and assets embedded in the January 6 crowd.” Indeed, the FBI “undertook significant efforts to identify domestic terrorism subjects,” Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz concluded after a four-year investigation. But no confidential human sources (CHS) were “authorized to enter the Capitol or a restricted area, or to otherwise break the law on Jan. 6,” the report added, “nor was any C.H.S. directed by the F.B.I. to encourage others to commit illegal acts on Jan. 6.”

 

The White House makes several other references — that’s all we can call them — to leading conspiracy theories. Among them, a nod to “figures like Mike Epps, who was caught on video repeatedly urging people to go ‘into the Capitol.’” Epps, who was sentenced to one year of probation for his role in the riot, has long protested the allegations against him. He sued Fox News over onetime host Tucker Carlson’s accusation of his involvement in a scheme to provoke violence — a suit that was dismissed on free speech grounds. Federal prosecutors have nevertheless affirmed that Epps has never been a government employee or agent, save for the four years he served in the Marine Corps.

 

The White House’s grievances with the investigations into January 6 are myriad, but they culminate in a triumphalist narrative for Trump — one that could not be more bonkers.

 

“Despite relentless Deep State efforts to imprison, bankrupt, and assassinate him — all designed to sabotage his political comeback through fabricated indictments, invasive raids, and rigged show trials — President Trump emerges triumphant.”

 

Is the White House’s official position now that the two figures who made attempts on Trump’s life — the enigmatic (and furry-adjacent) Thomas Matthew Crooks and the unstable left-of-center activist Ryan Wesley Routh — were agents of the “deep state”? Are we to disregard the evidence presented at Routh’s criminal trial, in which he was convicted, and the hours of reporting on Crooks’s background? Are we sure Israel didn’t do it?

 

This is Candace Owens–level pathological paranoia. The only thing more disturbing than the realization that the White House is not above marshaling this level of irrationality toward its own ends is the possibility that the president’s subordinates might believe it.

 

This odious document should never have been published, much less on a taxpayer-funded website. It is not archival. It is a falsification of the historical record — an attempt at mythmaking so fanciful that it bears more resemblance to Carlson’s bad-faith reimagining of one of the most thoroughly investigated riots in U.S. history. It is unhinged, divorced from anything resembling our shared reality, and a deliberate effort to radicalize the impressionable at the expense of national comity.

 

No one forced the administration to use the fifth anniversary of the January 6, 2021, Capitol Hill riot to compose and publish a fantastical multiverse version of that day’s events. Nothing else explains the White House’s unsolicited effort to rewrite history but the shame of its indelible association with the riot. At least there, the White House’s motives are understandable. There is much to be ashamed of.

Americans Can’t Believe How Rich They Are

By Idrees Kahloon

Wednesday, December 17, 2025

 

How much does an American family of four need to earn to avoid poverty? According to the Census Bureau, $32,130. But what if it were really $140,000? Late last month, the investor and Substack writer Michael Green advanced this attention-grabbing claim, which implies that a majority of Americans are living in poverty today. He argued, further, that families earning $40,000 to $100,000 were stuck in a “valley of death” because “benefits disappear faster than wages rise.” These figures have launched a thousand subsequent takes—most of them skeptical but some sympathetic. Chris Arnade, the author of the book Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America, wrote that “the core of its argument is correct” because too many people in “the ‘aspirational bottom’ are being squeezed.”

                                                              

Under modest examination, Green’s empirical claims fall apart. But they bespeak a troubling trend among the commentariat—and even some scholars—of exaggerating the extent of poverty in America. Social-justice discourse, whether about environmentalism, racism, sexism, or poverty, has a tendency to advance maximalist claims as a sign of maximal concern. The intention is usually to express solidarity with the oppressed. But collapsing the distinction between the actual poor and the lower-middle class obscures more than it helps. And talking about poverty as intractable or unfixable is a kind of demotivational speaking.

 

Green’s miscalculations start in an understandable place: his bewilderment when he realizes that the American government’s official poverty line is arbitrary. As the War on Poverty was beginning in the 1960s, the federal government needed to properly define the enemy. The task fell to Mollie Orshansky, an economist at the Social Security Administration. Orshansky estimated the cost of the minimum amount of food needed to sustain a family, then—based on original surveys showing that poor families spent one-third of their income on food—multiplied the cost by three. Today’s official poverty thresholds, which vary by household size and other factors, are the result of taking those monetary values and indexing them for inflation.

 

Green argues that because families spend a smaller portion of their income on food today, the real multiplier should not be three, but 16. That gets him to a poverty line in the neighborhood of $140,000. This number fails common sense, but Green defends its soundness by calculating the basic cost of modern living, including child care, housing, and health care. He does so by pointing to data aggregated from the MIT Living Wage Calculator based on expenses in Essex County, New Jersey, which suggest that a family of four with two working members would need to earn $136,500 a year. Yet Essex County is a high-cost-of-living area whose expenses are not at all representative of the country. He later modified his estimate to $94,000 using data from Lynchburg, Virginia—a level still triple the official poverty measure. Green told me he stands by his analysis, and believes critics are attacking him to avoid addressing the rise in inequality and lack of progressivity in the tax code.

 

Many economists and sociologists who study poverty understand that the federal threshold is flawed, and seek to improve its measurement. First, the problems: The official poverty measure has accounted for very few variations in cost of living; it’s the same in rural Louisiana as it is in San Francisco. It also does not capture transfers such as the earned-income and child tax credits—probably the most important anti-poverty programs currently operating—and excludes the value of food stamps and health insurance provided through Medicaid. As a result, although the official poverty measure is a fine tool to gauge a family’s eligibility for benefits, it is a bad way to measure actual poverty once those programs have gone into effect.

 

A lot of work has been put into creating poverty measures that can capture deprivation after accounting for welfare benefits. The most important of these is the “supplemental poverty measure,” which the Census Bureau began reporting in 2011. The supplemental poverty measure includes benefit programs ignored by the official poverty measure and accounts for regional differences in cost of living, as well as necessary health- and child-care expenses. Analysis by the Columbia Center on Poverty and Social Policy found that the United States had an overall poverty rate in 2024 of 12.9 percent. The center’s calculations also show what the welfare state actually accomplishes: Without it, the poverty rate that year would have been nearly double, at 23.7 percent. And they show how much poverty has declined over the decades. The share of adults in poverty is down roughly 30 percent from 1967; for children, it is down 35 percent; and among the elderly, it is down about 60 percent.

 

But admission of progress against poverty seems to be anathema. In 2019, when Joe Biden was running for president, he claimed that “almost half” of Americans were living in poverty. His campaign cited numbers from the Poor People’s Campaign, which argued that 43 percent of Americans were poor. This statistic turned out to be a category error: Americans living below 200 percent of the poverty level are classified as “poor or low-income.” (But this standard perhaps helps explain the Biden administration’s ironclad pledge to not increase taxes on Americans making less than $400,000—as though this were the dividing line for the middle class.)

 

A cottage industry of other indexes insists that huge swaths of the country not currently classified as poor deserve that consideration. One report based on the MIT Living Wage Calculator argued that only 56 percent of full-time workers in the United States are making a living wage. The charity United Way has constructed an index called ALICE, which implies that 42 percent of American households are either in poverty or unable to afford basic necessities. There are right-coded spin-offs of the idea too: The Cost-of-Thriving Index put out by the heterodox-conservative think tank American Compass argues that to support a family of four, a full-time working man would need to work 62 weeks a year. To paraphrase Daniel Patrick Moynihan, this is a collective effort of defining poverty upward.

 

Even prominent academics are not immune to this tendency. In his best-selling 2023 book, Poverty, by America, the Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond argues that “poverty persists because some wish and will it to.” Desmond claims that there has been a “lack of progress on poverty” because the share of Americans below the official poverty level has fluctuated between 10 and 15 percent for decades. He pays less attention to the supplemental poverty measure—the one actually capable of measuring progress that’s due to government policy—which shows significant improvement.

 

The acclaimed book $2.00 a Day, by the researchers Kathryn Edin, of Princeton, and H. Luke Shaefer, of the University of Michigan, argued that millions of Americans were living on less than $2 a day—an extremely low standard of poverty that the World Bank used in reference to developing countries. The economist Bruce Meyer and his colleagues subsequently debunked this premise, finding that the reported calculation was an artifact from the underreporting of benefits such as food stamps in income surveys. Once you account for them, Meyer and his colleagues argued, more than 90 percent of such households originally labeled extremely poor turned out to be misclassified.

 

The tendency toward declinism—the idea that poverty cannot simply be bad, but rather must be getting worse—generates ineffective policy because it obscures the extent to which redistribution of money already works as intended. But its psychological appeal is worth scrutinizing. Americans are dour about an economy that is enviable to other countries. Consumer confidence today is as low as it was during the Great Recession—despite the fact that real median household income is 19 percent higher than it was in 2009 (and the S&P 500 is roughly 10 times its nadir in March that year). The culprits are the recent bout of inflation and the inaccessibility of the housing market, which have soured most Americans’ perceptions of the economy. This economic discontent propelled Donald Trump back into office in 2024; Democrats hope that the same force can push his party out of office in 2026. “There’s this past-five-year problem that gets translated into a past-50-years problem,” Scott Winship, of the American Enterprise Institute, told me. “It strengthens all of these strong nostalgia-laden claims about life being better 50 years ago.”

 

Complacency about poverty isn’t required. Though much progress has been made against child poverty, the present level is still too high. But it is remediable by, for example, expanding child tax credits at the federal and state levels and creating baby-bond programs that build wealth that is accessible upon a child reaching adulthood. These achievable goals are obscured by assertions that households with six-figure salaries are the truly disadvantaged, or that “late capitalism” inevitably requires Dickensian exploitation of the poor. It breeds fatalism among the already convinced and disbelief among the critics. Exaggerating poverty hinders, rather than hastens, its eradication.

Make Him Take It

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, January 07, 2026

 

There’s a complaint circulating in some circles on social media that ousting Nicolás Maduro will encourage Russia and China to menace antagonists in their own “spheres of influence.”

 

That’s silly. Russia is already behaving pretty menacingly toward one of its neighbors, you may have heard, and China’s navy spent the days before Maduro’s kidnapping encircling Taiwan and simulating a military blockade of the island. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping didn’t need inspiration from Donald Trump to pursue their expansionist fantasies.

 

But the complainers are onto something. On Monday night, with characteristic boorish bravado, the State Department posted an image of the president emblazoned with the words “THIS IS OUR HEMISPHERE.” Journalist Christo Grozev drew the right lesson from that: “This is OUR Hemisphere cannot be said without implying ‘That is Their Hemisphere.’"

 

The problem with asserting U.S. hegemony over Venezuela isn’t that it gives Russia an excuse to attack Ukraine or China an excuse to attack Taiwan. The problem is that it gives the president an excuse to stop trying to contain fascist imperialism by Russia and communist imperialism by China, at least in those countries’ respective near-abroads.

 

This is our hemisphere—and that is their hemisphere.

 

What the complainers are really worried about is postliberal America adopting Moscow’s and Beijing’s belief that the legitimacy of a nation’s conduct abroad doesn’t depend on complying with postwar norms of international relations. According to those norms, Crimea shouldn’t be recognized as part of Russia because it was seized by force. Under the logic of the system Trump prefers, it should. Might makes right.

 

No wonder, then, that fanatic Russian nationalists are ecstatic about America’s adventure in Venezuela despite the fact that Maduro was a Putin client, the White House wants his successor to cut economic ties with the Kremlin, and the U.S. is now chasing down Russian-flagged Venezuelan tankers on the open seas.

 

Those nationalists have also drawn the right lesson. “The capture of Maduro demonstrates that international law no longer exists—only the law of force applies,” fascist ideologue Alexander Dugin marveled. America “demonstrated that international law means nothing to a nation that considers itself a hegemon,” added former FSB commander Igor Girkin, who spearheaded Russia’s aggression against Ukraine in 2014. “In short, they showed how a great power should act against emerging threats before they become too serious and insurmountable.”

 

Postwar norms abhorred wars of conquest, funneled disputes between nations into diplomatic channels, and made the legitimacy of military interventions contingent upon some degree of international support. The United States, by blatantly seeking to transform Venezuela into a vassal state, has tossed all of that out the window. Insofar as those norms restrained expansionist powers like Russia and China in the past, they won’t anymore.

 

Which is why, if Denmark and its European allies hope to salvage those norms, the best thing they could do in responding to Trump’s demand for Greenland is to force him to take it.

 

Forced sale.

 

Ask a Republican senator about the president seizing Greenland and you’re likely to get some variation of, “he’s not serious.” Either he’s trolling—a perfectly normal thing to do with the transatlantic alliance hanging in the balance—or he’s posturing for negotiating leverage.

 

A-a-art of the deal, they murmur, their eyes distant and glazing over.

 

It’s wishful thinking. Trump is serious about this. Sources told the New York Times that he recently “asked aides to give him an updated plan for acquiring the territory.” According to the Washington Post, that “acquisition” could involve force: “U.S. officials in recent days have presented a U.S. move against Greenland as an increasingly concrete possibility in conversations with European counterparts, said a senior European diplomat.”

 

It’s not clear what was said in those conversations, but the fact that European leaders felt obliged to issue a joint statement politely asking Trump to back off suggests it wasn’t friendly. Given the chance to publicly rule out an invasion of Greenland on Tuesday, the White House refused.

 

Enter Marco Rubio, the Tom Hagen of the administration, who assured members of Congress yesterday that the president’s goal is to purchase the island from Denmark, not seize it militarily. Of course, Rubio also assured Congress in November that Trump had no plans to invade Venezuela. And he’s repeatedly accused Maduro of leading “Cartel de los Soles,” an organization that the Justice Department now seems to concede doesn’t actually exist.

 

But I believe him in this case. Sort of.

 

Buying Greenland from Denmark would be much easier politically for the president than claiming it by force. Doing so would preserve NATO, for one thing: As long as both sides of the transaction are happy with what they’re getting, there’s no cause for any rift in the alliance. And the American people, weaned on viewing themselves as the good guys abroad despite mounting evidence to the contrary, would be far more comfortable morally with purchasing the territory than with stealing it. They elected a mafioso president, sure, but they’ll get squeamish when he starts leaving horse heads in people’s beds.

 

So Trump probably does prefer to purchase Greenland. The problem is that we all understand there’s no chance the purchase would happen freely and fairly, at arm’s length.

 

It’s not the way he operates. He doesn’t do “deals,” he does shakedowns. No sense of morality or propriety will restrain him from trying to get what he wants by coercing his negotiating partners, which is why it remains unforgivable that Americans handed him the awesome coercive powers of the federal government. (Again.) Reelecting him necessarily meant converting the U.S. military into the muscle in a gangster’s syndicate, an operation that treats threats and intimidation as standard bargaining tools even with longtime allies.

 

For a sale to be fair, the seller needs to be in a position to say no. Denmark isn’t. Don Corleone is making them an offer they can’t refuse: Either hand over Greenland and get something for it or we’ll steal it out from under you and you’ll get nothing. Your choice.

 

They should make him steal it.

 

To catch a thief.

 

That’s easy for me to say, as I’m not the one who stands to gain billions from the sale. But if Denmark and Europe are committed to protecting the postwar international order that’s kept the continent (mostly) peaceful for 80 years, there’s no alternative. Acquiescing in Trump’s charade of a “purchase” by submitting to a coerced takeover of Greenland would reward his thuggish might-makes-right tactic by granting it the patina of legitimacy of a handshake deal between friends. It would disguise a stick-up as a business transaction, an enormous favor to the president and to postliberalism.

 

Denmark wouldn’t just be selling the island, it would be selling out the principles on which the Pax Americana was based. To let Trump put a price on Greenland is to invite Putin to ask what the price is for Ukraine: Lesser powers are either entitled to sovereignty, or they aren’t.

 

If America is to be a thief, it should be forced to act the part. Make the swing voters who elected a fascist because they hoped he’d make eggs cheaper face how predatory their country has become without the contrivance of a “purchase” to soothe their conscience. It might not bother them, I admit, as one can’t overstate how depraved the American civic conscience has become. But if anything’s going to spark a new appreciation for the old norms and inflame a sense of outrage at postliberalism’s rapaciousness, an unabashed Putinist takeover of a peaceful neighbor by the United States is it.

 

I was only half-joking yesterday when I said that Nicolás Maduro should offer to endorse Trump’s 2020 “rigged election” nonsense in exchange for a pardon. There isn’t much that the president’s nemeses can do to hurt him—he won’t be impeached and his military (emphasis on his) is unstoppable—but one thing they can do is create opportunities for him to delegitimize himself. Maduro leading him around by the nose with conspiratorial claptrap would achieve that. So would Denmark refusing to sell Greenland at any price, leaving the president with no options but to give up or expose himself as the mafioso he is by seizing the island with force.

 

It could work out in the long run. If Trump moved on Greenland and Americans recoiled, tanking his job approval, the backlash might force him to reappraise the public’s fondness for the postwar liberal order and its appetite for further thievery. Watching NATO dissolve in protest of the president’s aggression against a member state would also sober up some people. Contrary to what social media chuds would have you believe, the alliance is quite popular here at home.

 

With any luck, the Greenland seizure would come to be seen as the pitiful nadir of discredited Trumpian imperialism. A new Democratic president would return the island to Denmark in 2029 as a symbol of America’s renewed commitment to NATO. It would be a total, if delayed, victory for Atlanticists.

 

But this assumes that the Danes really are in a position to refuse Trump’s demand of a forced purchase. If money were the only object I think they would be; I can absolutely believe that Europe would refuse any dollar amount rather than ratify the postliberal conceit that Greenland is in “our” hemisphere and they’re in Russia’s, with everything that implies.

 

But money isn’t the only object. The president has other leverage, and I don’t mean his military.

 

Ukraine.

 

If Denmark holds out, the White House will inevitably deliver an ultimatum: Sell the island to the United States—or we’ll cut intelligence aid to Ukraine and weapon sales to Europe for Ukraine’s defense.

 

Which is more intolerable to local powers? Losing a barely populated iceberg off America’s coast where we already have a military base? Or watching Russian savages rampage across cities like Kharkiv and Kyiv before landing on Poland’s doorstep?

 

If you don’t think the president and his team are willing to use the welfare of millions of innocent Ukrainians to extort Europe into territorial concessions, you must be new not only to this newsletter but to American politics. Hostage-taking is a favorite postliberal tactic, you know.

 

Britain’s Daily Telegraph reminded readers Tuesday that Moscow has been trying to swing an imperialist bargain with Trump involving Ukraine since his first term. According to the president’s then-adviser Fiona Hill, speaking in 2019, the Kremlin proposed an arrangement in which the U.S. would get out of Russia’s way in Ukraine and in return Russia would get out of America’s way in Venezuela. That wasn’t acceptable to hawks who staffed Trump’s first administration, but it fits perfectly with his second-term postliberal vision of great powers avoiding each other’s proverbial backyards.

 

The time is finally ripe, in other words, for the U.S. to get out of Russia’s way in Ukraine—unless, perhaps, Denmark agrees to play ball on Greenland. That’s just the sort of threat that might weaken European resistance to a deal, enough so to have left officials there scrambling for concessions that theoretically might appease the president before the ultimatum is issued.

 

“One potential scenario an EU diplomat floated would be a security-for-security package deal, under which Europe gets firmer assurances from the Trump administration for Ukraine in exchange for an expanded role for the U.S. in Greenland,” Politico reported this morning. That’s a cute idea, but as I explained yesterday, the White House doesn’t want an “expanded role” in Greenland. (The Danes have already offered that, repeatedly, in months of negotiations.) It doesn’t want more military bases or mineral rights or anything else the island has to offer.

 

It wants Greenland. Trump’s fascist conception of national greatness can’t bear being restrained by gassy notions like laws and norms from seizing a functionally undefended land mass off America’s own coast. Having to lay off an island that no one could keep us from claiming offends the right’s will-to-power worship of “strength” and ruthlessness. If you want something, you take it, and the easier it is to take it, the less excuse there is not to do so.

 

Wanting Greenland isn’t a matter of strategic or economic calculation, it’s a matter of placing a giant piece of cake in front of Eric Cartman with a warning not to eat it. He’s going to eat it.

 

So, no, security guarantees for America in Greenland aren’t going to entice the White House into security guarantees for Ukraine. Even if they did, we’re left with the question posed by military analyst Michael Kofman: If Trump now divides the world into “our hemisphere” and “their hemisphere,” with the U.S. extremely active in one and presumably not very active in the other, how much are American promises to defend Ukraine from a future Russian invasion really worth?

 

The whole point of his hemispheric argle-bargle is to give the U.S. an excuse not to restrain illiberal powers in Europe and the Far East—which, ironically, might be the best argument for Denmark to refuse to sell Greenland even if Trump does threaten to cut off Ukraine unless they agree to do so. He’s going to cut off Ukraine anyway soon enough. Why give him the satisfaction of coercing you into a forced sale before he pulls the rug out?

 

The only political force that can stop these extortion ploys and the NATO crack-up that will inevitably result is Congress, but the less said about that, the better. Trump announced Tuesday that Venezuela will be “turning over” 30 million to 50 million barrels of oil and that the proceeds of sale will be controlled by … him. (He and Maduro have a lot in common.) This morning his energy secretary declared that the U.S. will be taking over the sale of all Venezuelan crude “infinitely, going forward,” raising the question of who’ll be controlling the proceeds of those sales. Republicans in Congress have had nothing of substance to say about any of it, even though it plainly infringes on their power of the purse.

 

No one’s going to stop Trump. The only thing his victims can do is visit as much shame on Americans as possible for enabling him and hope, probably futilely, that some vestigial sense of civic conscience is stirred. If he wants Greenland, Denmark should make him take it.

The ‘Donroe’ Pretext

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, January 07, 2026

 

There’s a popular meme out there with a man staring at a mirror, pointing at himself and saying, “Get in there and make it about you.”

 

That’s not my goal here, but I figured I would acknowledge the criticism up front, because a lot of people more informed than me have already said many of the things I would say about the Maduro “kidnapping” (that’s Trump’s word). At the same time, this isn’t a story I can just ignore. That leaves me with only a couple options. One is to make light of the whole thing. I don’t want to do that.

 

But.

 

I have to say that if a team of mercenaries isn’t on its way to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn to rescue Maduro, I will feel like Hollywood has been lying to me. Nicolás Maduro is no Ramon Esperanza, the drug lord dictator of Val Verde, whose rescue operation John McClane thwarted in Die Hard 2. Esperanza was a right-wing dictator, so he’d probably have set up an immigrant detention center at Trump’s behest. And Maduro’s not exactly the MacGuffin/crime lord of the underrated film version of S.W.A.T. or Gen. Radek in Air Force One. But when you start taking even a cursory cinematic inventory, Delta Force 2: The Colombian Connection, the Sicario movies, Executive Decision, Con Air, Under Siege 2, The Rock, Invasion U.S.A., Iron Eagle II, London Has Fallen, Extraction, and the still-in-production The Muppets Take Leavenworth, I feel we’re owed the Mother of All Heist Movies with Maduro as the score.

 

Anyway, back to seriousness. The other option is to say, “I told you so.”

 

Now, I did not say this would happen, and as far as I can tell no one else did either. And it should be said, that is impressive all by itself. It’s one thing to keep the details of an operation secret, it’s another to keep the very idea of such an operation secret. Indeed, everything about the military execution of this raid should inspire admiration, patriotic or otherwise. Think about it this way: Russia basically wanted to do the same thing with Volodymyr Zelensky, and it has cost Vladimir Putin over 1 million casualties, including somewhere between 120,000 and 400,000 dead Russians over almost four years.

 

One last point on this secrecy thing: I don’t buy the argument that the administration didn’t need to notify Congress, specifically the Gang of Eight, the House and Senate party leaders plus the top Democrats and Republicans on the House and Senate Intelligence committees. Nor do I think Mike Johnson and John Thune’s claim that being notified two hours after the operation commenced was sufficient notification. “This is an operation that only required notice to Congress,” Johnson told reporters, “and not prior authorization.”

 

I guess it depends what you mean by “operation.”

 

Imagine not telling your wife that you’re taking the family savings to build a super tricked-out man cave. Foosball, Bass Ale on tap, bitchin’ sound system—the works. And then, as the plumbers are installing your state-of-the-art Japanese smart toilet, you let the missus know you’re getting the toilet with the heated turbo bidet feature. “What? I notified you. What’s the big deal?”

 

The administration sent the largest naval armada in South American history to the Caribbean months ago, and as far as I can tell, no one in Congress was informed of the administration’s actual goal. They were told publicly and in classified briefings that this was about interdicting drugs, not decapitating Venezuela’s regime and seizing its oil fields. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has tried to insist that this was all just an effort to act on an arrest warrant. To argue that all of those ships, all of those possibly illegal killings, and all of that firepower was deployed for a “law enforcement operation” is obvious nonsense. To say that Congress was properly notified about the seizure of Maduro assumes that Congress had been read in on the purpose of this massive military operation from the start.

 

And that brings me to the I-told-you-sos.

 

Last May, I wrote that “virtually the entire agenda of the second Trump administration is grounded in pretextual arguments. On almost every front, his stated arguments for why he’s doing what he’s doing, and from where he derives the authority to do it, are just BS.”

 

This is more of the same, just on a grander scale.

 

The ‘Donroe’ Doctrine

 

Consider all of this talk about the Monroe Doctrine. Trump suddenly thinks this a very important doctrine, maybe the best doctrine, at least that’s what people are saying. The National Security Strategy released in November asserted, “After years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region.” On Saturday, Trump insisted that “the Monroe Doctrine is a big deal, but we’ve superseded it by a lot, by a real lot. They now call it the ‘Donroe Doctrine.’”

 

I’ve searched in vain for an instance when he talked about this very important doctrine on the campaign trail. He did talk a lot about not sending troops hither and yon on adventures. I just point this out to say that the “this is what I voted for” defense beloved by his apologists has a timeline problem.

 

Here’s what I think is obviously happening: Trump wants a bunch of legacy accomplishments. It’s all derivative of a lifetime of putting his name on everything he could. He’s renamed the U.S. Institute of Peace as the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, the Kennedy Center is now the Trump Kennedy Center, etc. Oh, there’s also the new Trump-class battleship, an immigration visa called the Trump Gold Card (you can read about it at Trumpcard.gov), a prescription drug program called TrumpRX (at TrumpRX.gov), and an IRS program of Trump Accounts for newborn Americans (and it’s a pretty good idea). The U.S. Mint is considering a new dollar coin with Trump’s image on it.

 

In 1994 New Scientist magazine coined a term, “nominative determinism.” It’s a somewhat tongue-in-cheek idea that people tend to do things that fit their name. Name your daughter Candiii Honeypot, and she almost has to become a stripper. Anyone who’s watched Seinfeld knows that if your last name is Assman, you have to become a proctologist.  The serious version of the idea is that people with certain names feel subconsciously destined to live up—or down—to their name. No, I don’t think being named Jonah has driven me to be a prophetic voice.

 

But, at least in a literary sense, I think Trump is aptly named because he thinks his needs and desires should trump all other considerations. His effort to steal the 2020 election is only the most obvious example among scores of them.

 

And I think the “Donroe Doctrine” is a perfect illustration of the phenomenon. This isn’t a foreign policy crafted by prioritizing the national interest. It’s a foreign policy crafted to satisfy Trump’s self-interest. I do think that Marco Rubio has an actual theory of the national interest, and he’s trying to pursue it by selling it to Trump as a vanity play. Rubio doesn’t talk about “keeping the oil” but he knows that Trump has a long-standing obsession with the idea that conquering countries to take their oil is a brilliant idea.

 

That’s why this whole operation was pretextual. Trump said it was about the drug war because that argument worked for him. Once that pretext served its purpose, he basically admitted that the point was about oil. “Joe, the difference between Iraq and this is that Bush didn’t keep the oil. We’re going to keep the oil,” Trump reportedly told MS NOW’s Joe Scarborough.

 

Of course, there are other differences. The Iraq war involved actual regime change. Bush insisted—idealistically and arguably naively—that we would deliver democracy and freedom.  We have not effected regime change in Venezuela. We took out the boss, and Trump is happy to work with his replacement, “tsarina” Delcy Rodriguez, who promptly named Maduro’s “torture czar” as the head of security. In other words, the regime is staying put, at least for the foreseeable future. And why not? Trump has been very clear that America isn’t interested in telling other countries how to treat their own people. That was the point of his tirade in Riyadh against “interventionists … giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs. No. The gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation builders, neocons, or liberal nonprofits like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop Kabul, Baghdad, so many other cities.”

 

What’s important is “taking the oil.”

 

Which brings me to another “I told you so.” I don’t know if I was the first, but I was very early to note that Trump’s foreign policy worldview is remarkably similar to a mobster’s. He sees the world divided up into “turfs” and “territories.” Why does he treat allies with such contempt? Because they are his underbosses, and they don’t kick up enough or treat him with enough respect. Why does he show such deference to Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping? Because they’re the heads of rival families. (Nick Cataggio had an excellent extended riff on Trump’s mobster’s-eye view of the world earlier this week). This worldview explains vast swaths of Trump’s trade and industrial policies, his shakedowns of universities and law firms. Sure, sell vital chips to China, but I gotta have my taste. Crypto, I don’t know how it works, but I’m fine with it if I get a slice. Funding terrorism? We can talk about that after I get my plane.

 

The people who defend Trump’s application of the Monroe Doctrine get the causality backward. He likes the Monroe Doctrine because it ratifies his worldview. If it didn’t exist, he’d still pursue the same policy. The Monroe Doctrine, like the Alien Enemies Act, the Insurrection Act, and all of Trump’s prattling about “Article Two” are pretextual justifications for what he wants—and would try to do—even if they didn’t provide a rhetorical or legal fig leaf. He is not bound or inspired by ideas or “doctrines,” he uses ideas and doctrines as ornamentation for his will-to-power and glory.  I do not see how this is debatable given that he’s been very clear that the definition of “America first” is whatever he says it is.

 

Yet another I-told-you so: A while back I wrote that the best word for Trumpian foreign policy is “sovereigntist.” This is the idea that the nation should not be bound by any external, artificial, legal, or even possibly moral restraints on its actions in the international realm. He’s not an isolationist—he’ll eat off anyone else’s plate if he thinks he can get away with it and it satisfies his appetite.

 

Sovereigntism certainly has some eggheady intellectual exponents, but that doesn’t mean he relies on any of that. Stephen Miller, the closest thing we have to Trump’s homunculus id,  appeared on Jake Tapper’s CNN show the other night and laid out Trump’s worldview as clearly as one can: “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.” It was so pitch-perfect I’m not even sure it would be better in German.

 

Later on, Tapper asked him about using military force against Greenland. “The real question is, by what right does Denmark assert control over Greenland? What is the basis of their territorial claim? What is their basis of having Greenland as a colony of Denmark?”

 

Well, there’s an answer to this if you believe in things like treaties. But if the only thing that matters in “the real world” is strength, force, and power, Miller answered his own question. “The United States should have Greenland as part of the United States,” he told Tapper. “There's no need to even think or talk about this in the context that you're asking of a military operation. Nobody's going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.”

 

After all, Trump “has been very clear,” Miller explained. He wants Greenland, so that is the “formal position of the U.S. government.” Constitutional eunuchs in Congress, take note.

 

In other words, we can just threaten Denmark and they’ll have to cave, which appears to be the strategy.

 

When Don Vito Corleone visited Johnny Fontane’s bandleader, he made him a generous offer to buy out Fontane’s contract. When the bandleader refused, Corleone returned with a much smaller offer, and Luca Brasi. But it was “an offer he can’t refuse.”

 

That is how this administration is talking about a NATO ally, and it is disgusting and dangerous and music to Vladimir Putin’s ears. People Trumpsplaining this “strategy” by saying he won’t actually seize Greenland, he’s merely threatening to put Denmark’s brains on the Treaty of Kiel, aren’t making the high-minded defense they think they are.

 

I began by joking that I wasn’t trying to make this all about me, and I am not. But this White House, the GOP-controlled Congress, and much of the broader right seems hellbent on letting Trump make foreign policy all about him. You can call that “America First,” but that doesn’t make it true.

Don’t Follow the False Sirens of International Law

By John Yoo

Thursday, January 08, 2026

 

President Donald Trump’s critics have focused their fire on the legality of the United States’ astounding snatch-and-grab of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. But their attacks mistakenly claim a strict, formalistic authority for international rules that have never governed American actions in world affairs and would prove little obstacle to our rivals, such as China and Russia. Following these false sirens of international law would diminish American leadership, harm our allies, and lead to a more disordered, less peaceful world.

 

In an earlier National Review article, I addressed the domestic legal question of the constitutionality of the January 3 attack on Caracas. I argued that the Constitution’s grant of the executive power and the role of commander in chief has given presidents the initiative to use force abroad, subject to Congress’s power of the purse and impeachment. I observed that presidents have long engineered regime change in quick wars without any ex ante congressional authorization, including President Barack Obama’s overthrow of Libyan dictator Moammar Qaddafi, President Bill Clinton’s air war in Serbia, and President George H. W. Bush’s invasion of Panama and arrest of Manuel Noriega. Such interventions stretch back not just decades but centuries, to Thomas Jefferson’s dispatch of a fleet on a “training exercise” to overthrow the Barbary pirates.

 

But a war can satisfy domestic constitutional standards and still violate international law, and vice versa. Now, both domestic and international opponents of the Trump administration are pressing the claim that the United States has committed unprovoked aggression against Venezuela in defiance of all international law. We should not be surprised to hear U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres’s statement that he is “deeply concerned that rules of international law have not been respected with regard to the 3 January military action.” Or those from Russia, which had the chutzpah to decry the United States “as some kind of a supreme judge,” which claims the right “to invade any country” and to act “irrespective of notions of international law, sovereignty and nonintervention.” China chimed in that “such hegemonic acts of the U.S. seriously violate international law and Venezuela’s sovereignty.”

 

We should not expect any consistent approach from nations like Russia and China. Russia wrapped its arms around international law even as its troops continue to conduct a brutal war of aggression in Ukraine, while China called for all to abide by international law even as it practices for an invasion of the island democracy of Taiwan. Perhaps more surprising were criticism from our allies, who are even now begging for greater U.S. military involvement in Europe, and even American officials. France’s U.N. ambassador announced that the January 3 attack “runs counter to the principle of peace dispute resolution and runs counter to the principle of non-use of force.” Democratic senators found much to their liking in France. California Senator Adam Schiff labeled the attack a “brazen illegal escalation.” Former American military and diplomatic officials agreed that the Maduro operation violated fundamental rules of international law.

 

These critics present a straightforward case. Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter forbids the use of force against the “territorial integrity” and “political independence” of its members. Article 51 of the Charter provides exceptions only when nations act in their self-defense or participate in military operations approved by the U.N. Security Council. Trump critics rightly observe that the Security Council has not approved the use of force against Venezuela. They further reject any claim of self-defense based on Venezuelan support for drug cartels and the drug-trafficking that kills thousands of Americans a year. They do not see any “imminent” armed attack by Venezuela, which many international legal authorities concede would also permit the preemptive use of force in self-defense.

 

But this wooden interpretation of international law has never ruled — and should never rule — the American use of force in world affairs. The U.S. must have the ability, as a sovereign nation, to use force in its self-defense against not just imminent armed attacks but also looming threats that could mature into grave challenges to our national security. Take for example, a Democratic president’s greatest achievement during the Cold War to head off a nuclear threat. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy imposed a naval blockade of Cuba in order to prevent the Soviet Union from basing nuclear missiles just 90 miles from American shores. Neither Cuba nor Russia had engaged in an armed attack on the United States, nor did the U.N. Security Council (where Russia enjoys a veto, along with the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and China) approve the use of force. Nevertheless, leaders and scholars hailed Kennedy’s restrained — but early — use of force to prevent the Soviet deployment in Cuba from radically altering the balance of nuclear power.

 

Venezuela presents a different type of national security threat, but one that raises the same question of prevention as the Cuban Missile Crisis. According to its federal court filings in the Venezuelan deportation cases, the Trump White House believes that Venezuela is waging a covert war against the United States by using drug cartels to smuggle drugs into the United States (along with associated gang members) that kill tens of thousands of Americans a year. These attacks are part of a broader violent campaign designed to oppose American influence in the Western Hemisphere and to destabilize American society. Maduro was not only the president of Venezuela but one of the heads of one of the drug cartels. The United States can claim that international law recognizes its right to use force to stop Venezuela from inflicting such sinister harms on its people, even if they do not take the form of conventional armed units in uniform crossing our border. By requiring for an imminent armed attack, international law would handcuff the United States from acting earlier, with less force, to prevent looming from threats and irregular attacks from developing into massive harms.

 

Except for a few moments during the Obama and Biden administrations, the United States has refused to hide behind obsolete, formalistic views of the laws of war and has long embraced a pragmatic approach to the use of force. Instead of blindly following the U.N. Charter’s ban on war, the United States has acted to protect international peace and security. The U.N. Charter aims to prevent the great power wars that destroyed Europe in 1914 and 1939 but which have largely disappeared during the “long peace” of the postwar world. It seeks to outlaw the aggression practiced by Nazi Germany in Europe and Imperial Japan in Asia then, and Russia in Ukraine now. But the United States has not read international law to prevent it from promoting international peace and security by stopping civil wars, humanitarian catastrophes, rogue nations, and terrorist groups.

 

Indeed, the United States would never have adopted the U.N. Charter if it were understood to prevent the United States from taking decisive military action to prevent growing threats to its security or to regional stability. As historians have shown, the U.S. delegation to the U.N. drafting conference did not understand the charter to limit Washington’s freedom to use force. Senators, for example, raised doubts that the new treaty prohibited the very Monroe Doctrine that President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have invoked. But in a May 1945 meeting, John Foster Dulles, a U.S. delegate to the drafting of the charter and future secretary of state, explained: “At no point would the member states give up their right to use force in all circumstances.” Under his logic, the United States could still wage war to advance the United Nations’ goal of maintaining world peace and security. American State Department officials reassured senators that “there was certainly no statement in the text under which we would give up our right of independent action.” They explained that “if the Security Council fails to agree on an act, then the member state reserves the right to act for the maintenance of peace, justice, etc.”

 

Critics of the Trump administration demand that we agree to a vision of international law that has come completely free of its moorings. The purpose of the U.N. Charter’s rules was to prevent wars of aggression, not to outlaw the use of force to shore up international peace and stability. Trump has said that the United States would take oil revenues not for itself but for the reconstruction of Venezuela. It is enforcing a Monroe Doctrine which, contrary to the views of Democratic critics, allows not the United States to place whatever leader it wants in every South American country but instead seeks to keep the nations of the Western Hemisphere free from foreign influence. Here, the Trump administration is not engaged in World War II–style aggression but is instead preventing the further looting of Venezuela at the hands of Cuba, Russia, Iran, and China. The Monroe Doctrine properly seeks to keep South America from becoming a base of operations for hostile, antidemocratic powers to use to subvert our allies and threaten our own security.

 

Idolatry of the U.N. presents a clear dividing line between Republican and Democratic political leaders, who believe that parchment barriers will stop the likes of Russia, China, and Iran. President Trump can point not just to the removal of a vicious dictator like Maduro, who has oppressed his own population, looted his nation’s natural resources, and turned his country into a pawn of Cuba and Russia. He can also proudly raise up his stunning action against the Iranian nuclear program, which has helped stop an aggressive actor from destabilizing the region. Iran not only pursues nuclear weapons, which could lead to WMD proliferation and a nuclear arms race with its neighbors, but has also spent the past three decades supporting terrorism, destabilizing its neighbors, and seeking to destroy Israel.

 

Wrapping ourselves in a straitjacket of international institutions and laws would limit American freedom of action in a dangerous world and subordinate our sovereignty to the whims of “the international community.” This not only paralyzes American initiative, but it also tethers our national interest to a failed experiment. As the United Nations enters its eighth decade, it suffers from a crisis of ineffectiveness and corruption. Instead of its own troops and weapons, the U.N. must rely on the goodwill of its members. And even the possibility of decision, without the reality of troops, is remote because of the power of the five permanent members of the Security Council — the U.S., the U.K., France, Russia, and China — to veto any intervention. China and Russia are authoritarian regimes that generally oppose any intervention into what they consider “internal” affairs, especially the repression of political and economic freedoms. Nations like the U.S. and its allies that accept the higher responsibility for maintaining peace and advancing free-market democracy become lawbreakers. The U.N. serves as a defense bar for dictators.

 

Critics of the Trump administration fear more than trust American power. They hope to reassure the inchoate international community by submerging our national interests into an international law only taken seriously by the Western democracies. They hope that the U.N. and other international institutions can help tame America into an ordinary nation that is no different than the other great powers. But the United States still carries the burden of maintaining international peace and stability, and must have the speed, flexibility, and decisiveness to prevent looming threats. Bind down the United States with utopian visions of international law, and both the United States and the world will suffer for it.

The U.S. Military Command Plan Needs a Reboot

By Seth Cropsey

Thursday, January 08, 2026

 

The capture of Nicolás Maduro and his wife was a highly successful operation in which all branches of the U.S. military participated. Compared to a major conflict, however, its scale was small. Similar precision would be demanded in a European, Middle Eastern, or Indo-Pacific conflict — or more likely, some combination of them. Today’s U.S. military structure — in which operations in those three regions are commanded by different U.S. senior officers and staffs — would find it difficult to replicate the unity that was an important key to the success of Operation Absolute Resolve.

 

Soon, the Trump Pentagon is set to announce a major structural overhaul in the way the U.S. commands its forces abroad. Most will fixate on troop numbers in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. While these matter, they are fundamentally secondary considerations: This Pentagon is capable of making the bold choices that are needed to prepare the U.S. military for large-scale conventional combat. The Defense Department should follow this move with a concerted organizational effort to streamline command-and-control systems and accelerate realistic training and Eurasian-wide wargaming.

 

The United States fields the only truly global military in the world. Each administration expresses American interests differently, as its strategic concept demands: This administration, for instance, has focused more directly on Asia and the Western Hemisphere, albeit while still recognizing Europe’s fundamental importance in its National Security Strategy. U.S. military force posture, in principle at least, should follow these shifts. However, the U.S. must maintain a military that can fight a large-scale war in several different contexts, since even non-existential American interests may demand the use of military force.

 

The physical trappings of American military power — the U.S. Navy’s carrier strike groups that field more combat power than national air forces, the U.S. Air Force’s stealth fighters and strategic bombers, the Army’s rapidly deployable brigade combat teams, the Special Operations Forces that can infiltrate and execute against almost any target, the full nuclear triad — are what typically come to mind when U.S. military reach is considered. Yet these are only the muscles that generate power.  What coordinates them is a global command-and-control system that can lead combined-arms and joint forces on any continent.

 

This system is rooted in the Unified Command Plan, a schema for global military operations last revised in the late Cold War. As it stands, the Unified Command Plan splits the world into six regions — Europe and Russia, the Middle East, the Indo-Pacific, Africa, South America, North America — creating standing high-level military staffs for each area termed “Combatant Commands.” Each staff is headed by a Combatant Commander, a four-star flag or general officer, who acts as a supreme military commander-cum-proconsul. These Combatant Commands generate military plans and operational requirements, which are passed back to the Joint Staff and military Services, who then use these requirements to allocate strategic and operational resources. Alongside these Regional Commands, several Functional Commands exist, namely for Transportation and Special Operations Forces. The idea behind the system is to provide a direct chain of command for the president as commander in chief, ensuring a strategically responsive, civilian-controlled military. His orders, transmitted to and often refined by the Secretary of Defense, reach the Combatant Commanders, who then execute military operations worldwide.

 

Some sort of Unified Command Plan is necessary given American interests and the realities of American power. But it is not at all clear whether its geographical structure enables or inhibits strategy, military planning, or operational employment. Indeed, the current Unified Command Plan, with its neat regional divisions, is a mechanism for managing crises. It creates a commander for each region responsible for regional operations. It does not encourage strategic linkages between regions, a prerequisite for creative force employment that maximizes U.S. assets and new operational concepts.

 

This creativity is crucial for the current strategic situation and the coiled skein of hostile states that is tightening. China may pose the greatest threat to American strategic interests, in light of its economic power and military buildup. But it is actively sustaining Russia’s war effort in Ukraine while also providing Iran with invaluable economic support. Similarly, Russia shares military technology with North Korea and China in return for additional assistance. The broader implication is that, while the U.S. does not face a hostile alliance, it does face an axis of largely aligned, loosely coordinating powers. This means the U.S. should be prepared for a number of contingencies, including those in western Eurasia.

 

The result is that the Trump administration’s proposed reorganization, combining European Command, African Command, and Central Command, should be commended. This has little to do with what military analysts call force posture, the division and placement of military assets in different regions, although the Trump administration is likely to reduce force presence in Europe and the Middle East to reorient toward deterring China.

 

However, unifying Europe, the Middle East, and Africa under a single command actually ensures significantly greater strategic flexibility, particularly against Russia and Iran. Russia explicitly integrates the Mediterranean, Levantine coast, and North Africa into its strategy against Europe, hoping to use intelligence capabilities, mercenaries, and hard power to undermine U.S. interests in western Eurasia. Until last year, Iran also maintained a major Levantine Basin presence. Both powers have exploited the division of U.S. strategic attention and command between Europe and the Middle East and Africa. China also benefits through its economic and intelligence infiltration into the Middle East and North Africa, which also builds leverage over Europe. Additionally, it is reasonable to anticipate Russia capitalizing on a confrontation in Asia, driving forward its European ambitions and hoping to split U.S. attention and resources.  Integrating EUCOM, CENTCOM, and AFRICOM creates a more effective institutional mechanism for command-and-control in such a Eurasian-wide war.

 

But the Trump Pentagon must not stop with command-and-control reorganization. It should take two additional steps to bolster U.S. command-and-control for a Eurasian conflict.

 

First, the Pentagon should bolster coordinated, Eurasian-wide strategic planning beyond the Unified Command Plan. This involves empowering the Services to take a greater role in strategy-making, a role to which they are suited by virtue of their history and professional expertise. This would help trim the Joint Staff of its bloat as it returns officers serving on it to their military service where their warfare skills can be honed and applied to developing strategy.

 

Second, the Pentagon should accelerate global wargaming and training that breaks down the operational and strategic barriers between regions and commands, encouraging commanders to think flexibly about the military problems the U.S. faces. Global wargaming has not occurred regularly since the late Cold War. The U.S. faces a Cold War-style threat — it must therefore plan for a general war.

 

The eight decades since World War II ended have been the longest period of global peace. Regional fractures of that relative stability — in Ukraine and the Middle East — combined with the pace, scale, and ambition of China’s armament are the clearest reminder that peace, however prolonged, is neither assured nor permanent. The current administration’s plan to restructure its command plan to meet the foreseeable demands of a Eurasian-wide conflict acknowledges this and deserves support.