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.