How to Understand Trump’s Obsession With Greenland

By Eliot A. Cohen

Monday, January 19, 2026

 

European leaders are in a dither, understandably but inexcusably, about Donald Trump’s threats to take Greenland by force, and to use tariffs to slap around anyone who objects: understandably, because no previous president would ever have acted this way; inexcusably, because a clear if unpalatable solution lies right before them.

 

If European countries were to permanently deploy, say, 5,000 soldiers armed with surface-to-air and anti-ship missiles to Greenland, keeping them there with orders to fight invading American soldiers to the last round of ammunition, Trump would not order the paratroops and the Marines to assault that frozen wasteland—too many body bags. If they were willing to put comparable economic sanctions in place—denying American companies access to Europe’s economy, still collectively the world’s third largest—he would back down from those threats as well. Such policies go against the grain of a continent that is, to use the word popularized by the British military historian Michael Howard, debellated, but that’s the world they are in.

 

The Greenland episode, disgraceful and shameful as it is, should be seen in the context of Trump’s other foreign-policy escapades—the capturing of Nicolás Maduro; the bombing of the Iranian nuclear program; the attempt to rebuild and reorient war-shattered Gaza; the on-again, off-again relationships with Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky; the tariff bazookas that get downgraded to squirt guns with China. Erratic as the president sounds, the Trumpian worldview is comprehensible and even, in some respects, predictable.

 

Trump is an ignorant man; unlike many other would-be or actual dictators, he does not read books and has difficulty writing more than a few badly spelled sentences on social media. But he does intuit certain truths, and one must give him credit for those, because he is not stupid and they animate his policy. Greenland really has been neglected by Denmark and, since after the American Civil War, has been coveted by the United States. The Iranian nuclear program was a regional and in some respects global menace, and, after a week and a half of Israel softening up, was vulnerable to a single heavy punch. Europe has long underspent on defense, and where American cajoling for decades had not worked, a few face slaps succeeded.

 

Trump’s domestic political gift is the feral instinct for weakness that characterizes most authoritarians. That instinct is shakier in international affairs, but it shapes the way in which he views the world. With an image of American industrial and military power that is rooted in the world of several generations ago, he has enormous confidence in American strength and therefore assumes that bullying is preferable to negotiation, unless you are up against someone who is as tough as you, even if less muscle-bound.

 

He knows what he hates in foreign affairs—the mealymouthed multilateralism of the Biden administration, its catering to deadbeat allies, and its weakness in fleeing Afghanistan. He likewise despises the caterwauling about liberal values and democracy and the long-term military commitments of the George W. Bush administration. Indeed, although he cannot get over Joe Biden—Trump’s insecurities and grievances about the 2020 election and the various prosecutions he has faced between then and now prohibit it—from a foreign-policy point of view, he is at least as anti–George W. Bush as he is anti-Biden. And he despises the reverence for deliberate decision making, consultation with experts, and the willingness to engage in the conventional diplomacy that characterizes both. He views talk of international leadership, much less its practice, as claptrap.

 

Above all, he has three principal instruments in foreign policy: tariffs and kindred economic sanctions, brief bombing campaigns, and commando raids. He has no tolerance for bloody battles, which is why he will not authorize an Arctic amphibious campaign that faces real opposition. If he is going to negotiate, he will use friends such as Steven Witkoff and family members such as Jared Kushner, who might have an eye for lucrative deals that will enrich the United States and privileged relatives and friends. Nothing wrong with greed-driven foreign policy, in his view.

 

For Trump, foreign policy is a game of checkers (he does not have the temperament for chess) played one move at a time. The notion of reputational damage is alien to someone whose image was long ago tarnished beyond repair by grifting, lying, bullying, and double-dealing. He surely thinks nothing of the price that Iranian demonstrators (and ultimately the United States) may pay for having promised assistance and then shrugged it off with the claim that the Iranian regime has stopped killing people. (It has not; it just now does so in a way that Trump can claim he cannot see.)

 

If Trump were a poker player, he would bluff half the time. But games may be the wrong metaphor to understand him, because unless he is up against Xi Jinping and possibly Vladimir Putin, he struggles with the idea that other people have agency. In 2015, a senior politician who knew Trump well described to me a small dinner he attended at Mar-a-Lago. Trump ordered for each guest; from his point of view, the menu and their wishes were irrelevant.

 

These last two qualities explain many of his failures thus far, with more to come. Chess players who think only a single move ahead invariably lose; states and peoples, even quite small ones, have agency. Not only that, they can read him—the only question is whether they have the guts and competence to stare him down, or the wiliness to outmaneuver him.

 

He has, for example, put Turkey and Qatar on the Board of Peace that will supposedly run Gaza—without anyone, other than the Israeli military, actually willing to take on Hamas gunmen. The Israelis are furious that two hostile countries have been placed in that position. They are likely to acquiesce formally and to undermine their efforts privately. Trump thinks he can run Venezuela by remote control, but the head of ExxonMobil recently pointed out to him that until the country has something like rule of law and reasonable security, rebuilding its oil industry is not going to be possible. He continues to threaten Canada, and Prime Minister Mark Carney flies to Beijing. Volodymyr Zelensky was supposed to bow to Trump’s wishes. Instead, the Ukrainians, with help from Europe, adroitly manipulated a supposed agreement with Russia on ending the war into a proposal that Putin will not accept.

 

Having a president conducting foreign policy who thinks in this way—who fantasizes about a fleet of battleships named after him and a dome as golden as the Oval Office spreading over North America, who believes he can rename the Gulf of Mexico and that it will stick after he has left office—is undoubtedly scary. But there is some comfort in it as well.

 

In politics, gravity still works. A man entering his ninth decade has diminishing energy and stamina, and so Trump drowses off in meetings. He has excluded all but sycophants from his inner circle, and so he hears only his version of the truth. He faces the likely loss of the House of Representatives (at least) within a year. Little cracks are visibly spreading in the unwieldy coalition that only he could create, while even populists grow uneasy at the outlandish thuggery of Kristi Noem’s masked green-shirts. Indeed, he may find himself dealing at home with bloody insurgencies of the kind he hoped to avoid abroad if he persists in allowing Stephen Miller to press for the indiscriminate roundups of immigrants, or merely people who speak Spanish or have brown skin. His successors are already jostling one another.

 

This era will leave lasting foreign-policy damage. One Trump term could look like a fluke; two will certainly convince many abroad that the United States has become unreliable and even dangerous. But this emergence of a new, more transactional, and less peaceful world is unfortunately something that Trump has only accelerated, not created. His hopefully wiser and more sober successors will call the Gulf of Mexico by its name and pry Trump’s name off the United States Institute of Peace. More important, they will need to figure out how to restore a modicum of decency, good judgment, and international leadership once he is gone; rebuilding America’s reputation, unfortunately, will be the work of a generation. Such pivots have happened before—in the 1940s and the 1980s, for example. Let’s hope they will happen again.