Many observers — especially in Europe — see Donald Trump’s recent behavior as proof that he is irrational, reckless, or simply out of his mind. Threatening Denmark over Greenland, insulting allies, ranting about the Nobel Peace Prize, imposing tariffs on friendly states, and openly speaking in terms of ownership and control all appear, at first glance, as the actions of a man unfit for office.
After the dramatic events in Venezuela, and now his renewed insistence that the United States must have Greenland, it is easy — even understandable — for casual observers to dismiss his actions as incoherent or impulsive. Headlines talk about tariffs, military options, and diplomatic fractures with close allies. But that surface picture misses the deeper logic.
In January 2026, Trump announced punitive tariffs on eight European countries — including Denmark, France, and Germany — demanding Denmark agree to sell Greenland to the United States or face steep duties on European exports. (The Guardian) European leaders reacted with alarm. Denmark, Greenland, and their allies have reaffirmed that Greenland is not for sale and insisted on sovereignty and self-determination. (Reuters) Thousands in Greenland and Denmark have taken to the streets to protest unilateral U.S. claims. (AP News)
What makes the move truly extraordinary is that Denmark is not an adversary, nor a neutral state, but a NATO ally. Greenland is not contested territory; it is administered by a country that has fought alongside the United States, hosted U.S. military infrastructure for decades, and is formally bound to Washington through the Atlantic alliance.
Seen in that light, Trump’s posture is not merely provocative — it is a deliberate transgression against an ally.
In conventional diplomatic logic, allies are not coerced, threatened with tariffs, or subjected to public ultimatums over sovereign territory. Such actions violate the unspoken rules of alliance politics. That Trump is willing to cross this line tells us something essential: he does not treat alliances as sacred relationships, but as conditional arrangements subject to renegotiation when they cease to serve U.S. interests.
Trump may be crude, abrasive, and often vulgar. But vulgarity alone does not explain the pattern.
And there is a pattern.
The Geopolitical Narrative: A Convenient Public Story
To understand why Trump is escalating toward what many see as an unprecedented foreign policy gambit, we have to look past standard geopolitical explanations — the same ones journalists and analysts recycle daily — and instead examine the structural incentives that actually drive political decisions at the highest levels of power.
On the surface, the mainstream explanation is straightforward and familiar:
- Greenland occupies a strategically vital position in the Arctic.
- The Arctic is becoming more important due to climate change, melting ice, and new shipping routes.
- Russia and China are framed as potential competitors for influence in the region.
None of these statements are false. They form the standard vocabulary through which contemporary power politics is explained to the public. They are also the arguments Trump himself invokes when challenged — language designed to sound strategic, defensive, and rational.
But these explanations collapse under minimal scrutiny.
- They do not require sovereignty.
- They do not require annexation.
- They do not require tariffs.
- And they certainly do not require threatening a treaty ally.
The United States already enjoys extensive military access to Greenland through long-standing agreements with Denmark. American bases have operated there for decades. Washington already has radar installations, strategic reach, and logistical presence. Russia does not control Greenland. China’s involvement in the Arctic has been limited to scientific research, infrastructure proposals, and investment interests — not territorial occupation or military dominance.
In other words, if geopolitics were the real reason, access and cooperation would be sufficient.
- Security does not require ownership.
- Influence does not require coercion.
- Deterrence does not require humiliating an ally.
So why is Trump demanding sovereignty?
Access vs. Sovereignty: The Real Distinction
There are two possible motives behind Trump’s demand. The first is openly discussed and publicly defensible. The second is far more covert — and far more consequential.
The distinction between them rests on a point most commentary either ignores or treats superficially: access is not sovereignty.
Access is permission. It consists of bases, cooperation agreements, treaties, and shared infrastructure — arrangements that are conditional, revocable, and subject to political change, parliamentary oversight, and alliance discipline.
Sovereignty, by contrast, is control. It is ultimate authority over land, resources, law, and future direction. Sovereignty is not renegotiated every election cycle. It does not depend on allied goodwill. It removes constraints rather than managing them.
A country operating through access is always limited by the terms of that access.
A country exercising sovereignty is not.
This distinction matters because the United States already has access to Greenland. If access were the objective, escalation would be unnecessary.
Trump, however, is not asking for expanded cooperation. He is demanding ownership — or at least the rhetoric of ownership — over Greenland itself. That is not a tactical adjustment; it is a structural demand.
The reaction to it is revealing. Defenders of Danish sovereignty, Greenlandic autonomy, and even NATO unity mobilized immediately and forcefully. This response would make little sense if the issue were merely access. It makes perfect sense if the issue is control.
Once sovereignty enters the discussion, geostrategy ceases to be the point. The real question becomes whether shared interests still exist at all — and what NATO is meant to be when power must suddenly be exercised over allies without permission.
That question leads directly to Ukraine.
Ukraine, Europe, and the Limits of Alliance Politics
In mid-August 2025, Trump met with Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, in what was widely reported as an attempt to negotiate an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine. The meeting did not produce a ceasefire, but Trump publicly pressed Ukraine’s leadership to consider territorial concessions in exchange for peace.
Whether or not the full details of that meeting are public, a clear pattern has emerged. Trump has repeatedly signaled that he does not want the United States permanently entangled in Ukraine. From his perspective, the conflict consumes American political capital, attention, and resources while offering no immediate strategic or economic return.
Europe, however, is invested in Ukraine in a fundamentally different way.
Beyond security concerns, European governments, financial institutions, and political elites have embedded Ukraine into long-term expectations of reconstruction, institutional integration, debt servicing, land ownership, and geopolitical alignment. These expectations are not abstract or symbolic: they are written into balance sheets, investment positions, defense procurement pipelines, political careers, and continental narratives. Banks, funds, contractors, and intermediaries have positioned themselves around a future Ukraine anchored to Western institutions, such that a settlement perceived as a loss — or even as a compromise — would trigger not just strategic embarrassment, but material write-downs, invalidated expectations, and the political collapse of much of Europe’s governing elite — along with the risk of genuine accountability for having misled the public in the service of war.
In this context, European resistance to U.S. pressure over Ukraine appears less as principled alliance cohesion and more as the defense of commitments that cannot be unwound without admitting failure — and accepting serious responsibility.
Trump’s frustration follows naturally. He faces an alliance he cannot compel, partners he cannot control, and a war he wants to exit but cannot without European compliance.
Access, persuasion, and alliance rhetoric have failed.
But failure alone does not explain the timing. What matters is that Trump appears to have concluded, in recent months, that European leaders are not merely reluctant but structurally incapable of disengaging from Ukraine. Formal alignment with Washington persists, yet decision-making is constrained by financial exposure, political commitments, and institutional inertia Trump cannot override. Once that realization sets in, access and alliance mechanisms cease to be tools of influence — and sovereignty becomes the alternative.
This is the environment in which sovereignty becomes attractive.
Greenland as Leverage: Why This, Why Now
At this point, the Greenland question stops being abstract and becomes operational.
This helps explain Trump’s growing preference for sovereignty over cooperation. Sovereignty eliminates intermediaries. It removes allied veto points, parliamentary delays, financial entanglements, and narrative resistance. Where access requires consent, sovereignty imposes outcome. From Trump’s perspective, it is the difference between negotiating endlessly and deciding unilaterally.
But this alone does not explain why now.
The timing points to a second, more consequential motive. There is a high probability that Trump’s attempt to exit — or at least downgrade — the Ukraine commitment is connected to an implicit strategic understanding reached with Russia, most plausibly during the Anchorage meeting with Vladimir Putin. Whether formalized or merely convergent, the logic is consistent: de-escalation in Ukraine in exchange for reciprocal restraint elsewhere.
In this framework, Ukraine is the liability Trump wants to close. But the “elsewhere” is not defined solely by geostrategy. It is also shaped by monetary considerations that go largely unspoken.
Beyond geopolitics, there is a deeper monetary logic behind Trump’s asset consolidation. Venezuela and Greenland are not merely strategic holdings; they function as tangible backing in a debt-saturated system where credibility no longer rests primarily on productivity or trust, but on perceived collateral. Control over large, extractable resource bases — such as Venezuelan oil reserves or Greenland’s natural wealth — does not merely represent geopolitical influence; it strengthens the balance sheets of corporations and banks embedded in the U.S. financial system. Those strengthened balance sheets, in turn, support reserve creation, Treasury issuance, and the ongoing rollover of American sovereign debt. In this sense, assets are not prizes but monetary infrastructure. They function as collateral in a global system where the dollar’s durability increasingly depends on tangible anchoring rather than narrative dominance alone.
Although rarely articulated in public debate, but not controversial inside financial circles, Ray Dalio recently described the same dynamic at Davos, framing the current phase not as a trade war but as a capital war — a struggle over reserves, collateral, and monetary credibility. In that framework, resources matter less as commodities to be extracted than as anchors of confidence within an overstretched monetary system. The substance is identical; only the terminology differs.
This logic, however, collides with a European system that cannot absorb it. The European political and financial architecture is not positioned to exchange liabilities for assets in the same way. Its exposure to Ukraine is not tactical but embedded — written into debt structures, reconstruction expectations, political credibility, and institutional identity. Where the United States can attempt a balance-sheet reset through asset consolidation, Europe faces a recognition problem: disengagement would force losses that its political systems are not designed to admit.
Europe becomes the obstacle — not because of values or security concerns, but because European political leadership is structurally unable to disengage from Ukraine without triggering financial, political, and reputational collapse. Unable to compel Europe directly, Trump reaches for leverage.
Greenland is that leverage.
It is one of the few European-linked territories that Trump can pressure in a way that is geographically proximate to the United States, narratively justifiable through security language, economically meaningful, and politically destabilizing for European unity. Greenland is not the objective in itself; it is the instrument.
Seen this way, Greenland is not a provocation. It is a pressure point.
Geopolitics vs. Real Politics
Trump’s attempt to end — or sharply downgrade — the U.S. commitment to Ukraine follows a clear internal logic. He views the war not as a moral crusade but as a neoconservative escalation that provoked Russia unnecessarily, drains American resources, and delivers no immediate strategic return. Ukraine, in this view, is a permanent tripwire: costly to sustain, impossible to “win” decisively, and incompatible with any broader realignment of U.S. priorities — including strategic disengagement and a pivot toward containing China.
But unilateral de-escalation collides with something stronger than public rhetoric: European balance sheets.
This is where the distinction between geopolitics and real politics becomes unavoidable. Seen through this lens, the problem Trump encounters is not Russia. It is Europe. More precisely, it is a European political class unable to comply with strategic recalibration because it is financially and institutionally locked into a war posture it cannot exit without admitting failure.
This helps explain Trump’s broader behavior across multiple theaters. His interest in Venezuela, for example, is not moral or ideological. It is asset-oriented. In a debt-saturated system where influence has become abstract and alliances unreliable, Trump gravitates toward tangible assets — oil, land, resources — that can be controlled, leveraged, or written onto a balance sheet. Venezuela fits that logic. So does Greenland.
In this context, Greenland is not an Arctic obsession or a geopolitical eccentricity. It is a tool. A means of exerting pressure on European leadership that cannot be ignored, cannot be easily neutralized through diplomatic language, and cannot be defended without exposing the fragility of alliance solidarity.
This is not a story about America’s decline or resurgence. It is a story about institutional failure — about a political system that produces escalation, denial, and coercion because it lacks mechanisms for correction, accountability, or strategic humility.
And that, more than Trump himself, is the real problem being revealed.
Three Explanations — and What They Reveal
There are three broad ways to interpret Trump’s actions, including the Greenland episode. Each explanation reveals something different — not only about Trump himself, but about the political system that produced him.
1. Trump as Irrational or Unhinged
The first explanation is that Trump is simply unstable — driven by ego, grievance, and impulse rather than strategy. His fixation on personal slights, such as not receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, his public threats against allies, his vulgar language, and his erratic tone would, under this view, be symptoms of personal pathology.
This explanation cannot be dismissed outright. But if it is true, it indicts not Trump alone, but the political system that allows such an individual to reach and wield the highest executive power.
A political order that depends on the personal restraint, temperament, or sanity of one individual — rather than on institutional constraint — is not a serious system of governance. If Trump is irrational, then the system that empowered him is fundamentally defective. The problem is not the man; it is the mechanism.
2. Trump as a Conventional Geopolitical Actor
The second explanation treats Trump as playing a familiar geopolitical game: Arctic dominance, great-power rivalry, resource control, and strategic positioning against Russia and China. This is the explanation offered by most analysts — and it is also the narrative Trump himself feeds to journalists.
Under this view, Greenland is about shipping lanes, military bases, rare earth minerals, and deterrence. Denmark is framed as an ally unable to protect strategically vital territory, while the United States asserts a right — moral, historical, or security-based — to step in.
This explanation is comforting because it fits existing doctrines. It allows commentators to recycle familiar language about spheres of influence and strategic necessity. But it is also shallow. It assumes that geopolitics is the driver of events, rather than the vocabulary used to justify them after the fact.
Geopolitics, in this sense, functions less as analysis than as narrative cover.
3. Trump as an Actor in a Deeper Conflict Against Transnational Power
The third explanation goes further — and this is where mainstream commentary stops.
In this reading, geopolitics is not the cause but the disguise. Trump is not primarily confronting rival states; he is confronting a transnational system of financial, bureaucratic, and political power that constrains national sovereignty while profiting from permanent instability.
From this perspective, Europe is not a genuine ally but a politically captured space. Ukraine is not a moral cause but a balance-sheet exposure for banks, pension funds, investment vehicles, and political actors deeply entangled in land, debt, and postwar reconstruction fantasies. Venezuela is not about democracy but about assets, reserves, and collateral in a debt-saturated financial system. Greenland is not a territorial obsession — it is leverage.
The purpose of this article is not to demand agreement with this third explanation. It is to show that it explains far more than the first two.
Davos, Respectability, and the Misreading of Power
The reaction of respected commentators to Trump’s Greenland posture is revealing. Figures such as John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs have described Trump’s behavior as thuggish, gangsterism, or fundamentally irresponsible. In contrast, they have praised figures such as Mark Carney for their composure, restraint, and willingness to “stand up” to Trump — often pointing to his interventions at venues such as the World Economic Forum as evidence of serious leadership.
This contrast, however, rests on a misreading of where power actually operates.
Mearsheimer and Sachs are correct in many of their diagnoses: Western foreign policy has been reckless, militarized, and frequently lawless. Where they go wrong is not in what they criticize, but in the analytical frame they retain. Their interpretation remains grounded in great-power politics — states competing, deterring, escalating, and miscalculating. Within that framework, Trump appears as a destabilizing anomaly: a leader who violates norms, weakens alliances, and undermines strategic coherence.
But that frame misses the deeper structure shaping outcomes.
Carney’s credibility does not stem from independence from power, but from integration within it. He speaks the language of rules, stability, multilateralism, and responsibility because he operates comfortably inside a transnational financial and institutional ecosystem that rewards continuity. His authority is not oppositional; it is systemic. What is praised as courage is, in fact, conformity with the expectations and constraints of that system.
This is where a simple structural diagnostic becomes useful — not as an accusation, but as an analytical filter.
Support for the Ukraine project has become a reliable duck test. Political figures who unconditionally affirm Ukraine’s war trajectory, or who eagerly join what are framed as “coalitions of the willing,” consistently emerge from — and are rewarded by — the same transnational financial, institutional, and bureaucratic environment. That environment has material exposure to Ukraine: debt instruments, reconstruction contracts, defense procurement pipelines, land expectations, and political capital invested in narrative continuity.
This does not imply personal corruption, nor does it negate the sincerity of belief. It reveals constraint. Alignment is incentivized. Deviation carries costs. The pattern is too consistent to dismiss as coincidence.
From this perspective, the praise directed at Carney and the condemnation aimed at Trump reflect less a moral judgment than a system reacting defensively. Trump is not condemned because he uses leverage — leverage is routine within the system. He is condemned because he uses it crudely, outside accepted procedures, without the familiar language of values, multilateralism, and technocratic mediation — and because he refuses to accept the underlying truth of the system itself: that democratic sovereignty is increasingly held hostage to Wall Street lobbying and asset managers such as BlackRock.
This is why even sharp critics like Mearsheimer and Sachs still misread Trump. They see violations of geopolitical norms, where the deeper conflict is structural. They interpret behavior through state rivalry, when the decisive pressures are elite incentives, institutional lock-in, and financial exposure. Trump looks irrational in a great-power frame. In a structural frame, he is exactly what he promised to be: a disruptive actor trying to clean up an entrenched elite system that has, for the last 150 years, shaped politics to the detriment of the public. Presidents brave enough to confront that system openly were few — and mostly shot dead.
The charge of “gangsterism” fails for a deeper reason. It presumes a lawful baseline that does not exist. Trump’s conduct is not criminal behavior intruding upon a rule-bound international order. It is power exercised without ritual inside a system that long ago ceased to treat law as a binding constraint on foreign policy.
What shocks observers is not the substance of Trump’s actions, but the absence of moral choreography. Previous leaders coerced, sanctioned, destabilized, and intervened while cloaking those actions in the language of rules, values, and humanitarian concern. Trump dispenses with the theater. He does not justify power; he asserts it.
Calling this gangsterism is therefore a category error. Gangsters violate law. Trump exposes that, in this domain, law has already been replaced by leverage — and that only the rituals had been preserved.
States Are Not Actors — Factions Are
One of the greatest errors of modern analysis is the assumption that nations act as unified entities. This is the central deception of geopolitics — of great-power politics theory itself.
Geopolitical language speaks as if:
“Germany wants.”
“Russia decides.”
“America fears.”
“China plans.”
But nations do not think, want, fear, or decide. Institutions do. Elites do. Power does.
The fiction of national agency is not accidental; it is functional. It serves three essential purposes.
First, it erases internal conflict.
It dissolves the divisions that actually shape political outcomes:
- between citizens and ruling classes,
- between labor and capital,
- between public interest and institutional momentum.
Second, it collectivizes responsibility.
- War becomes our war.
- Sanctions become our choice.
- Suffering becomes a necessary sacrifice — shared rhetorically, but not materially.
Third, it converts elite decisions into natural forces.
Political choices are rebranded as:
- “security imperatives,”
- “balances of power,”
- “national interest.”
What is decided by specific people, inside specific institutions, under specific incentives, is presented as inevitable — almost geological.
This is how accountability disappears.
This is how coercion becomes policy.
This is how geopolitics becomes ideology.
Once this deception is abandoned, the structure of power becomes visible.
America does not act. Europe does not decide. These are abstractions. What exist instead are factions: political cliques, bureaucracies, intelligence agencies, parties, corporate lobbies, media networks, and — most importantly — financial power.
Washington is not a center of authority; it is a battlefield.
Wall Street is not aligned with the American public.
European governments often function as transmission belts for interests that are not genuinely national.
Seen through this lens, the Greenland episode is not evidence of “American decline” or “European resolve.” It is evidence that the political systems involved no longer translate collective interest into coherent action. Executive power becomes porous to capture and improvisation. Politics becomes theater because institutions no longer discipline outcomes.
This is where my disagreement with Jeffrey Sachs becomes clear. Sachs correctly observes that U.S. foreign policy has been lawless for decades and that Trump has stripped away the rhetorical veil. But Sachs still frames the problem as a deviation from constitutional order.
I see it differently.
The constitutional framework itself allows — and repeatedly legitimizes — this behavior. Trump did not corrupt the system. He stopped pretending it was clean.
The constitutional framework itself allows — and has long legitimized — this behavior. Trump is not inventing a new form of power; he is exposing an old one. What previous administrations practiced covertly — through alliances, bureaucracies, and moral rhetoric — Trump practices overtly, in public view. The shock is not that the system behaves this way, but that it no longer pretends otherwise.
There Was Never a Lawful Order
The shock many feel today rests on a false premise: that there once existed a lawful, restrained, or righteous international order from which we have fallen.
Such a period never existed.
European history is a chronicle of imperial conquest, colonial massacres, and wars of prestige conducted by elites who rarely bore their costs. The nineteenth century — often romanticized as an age of diplomacy — was defined by force. Even after World War II, France and Britain fought brutal colonial wars and violently suppressed independence movements across their empires.
The United States, while presenting itself as the architect of a rules-based order, simultaneously engaged in covert operations, regime change, proxy wars, and sanctions regimes that devastated civilian populations across the globe. What changed over time was not behavior, but language.
Earlier systems cloaked coercion in the rhetoric of civilization, development, security, or liberal order. Trump’s distinctive contribution has been to abandon the masquerade. He does not justify power; he asserts it.
The Nobel Peace Prize and the Collapse of Moral Arbitration
Trump’s fixation on the Nobel Peace Prize — and his ranting letter to Norway’s prime minister about not receiving it — was widely mocked as vanity. In fact, it is diagnostic.
The Nobel Peace Prize once symbolized the moral language of the postwar order: the idea that power could be sanctified through symbolic recognition. That authority was already compromised long before Trump began attacking it.
The decision to award the Peace Prize to Barack Obama in 2009 — at the very outset of his presidency, before any demonstrable achievement — emptied the award of substance. What followed only reinforced the damage: intervention in Libya, escalation in Syria, regional destabilization, the rise of ISIS, and the largest refugee wave into Europe since World War II.
The degradation did not stop with Obama. Subsequent awards — most notably to figures associated with unresolved or symbolic political struggles rather than achieved peace — further hollowed out the prize’s authority. When recognition becomes detached from outcome and tethered instead to alignment, the prize ceases to arbitrate morality and becomes structurally corrupted — no longer a moral constraint on power, but one of its instruments.
By the time Trump publicly fixated on the Nobel Peace Prize, the institution had already surrendered its capacity to constrain behavior. His obsession was not evidence of vanity alone; it was an intuitive recognition that the moral referee had left the field long ago.
Beyond Greenland: Why the System Must Change
The most revealing aspect of the Greenland episode is not Trump’s aggression, vulgarity, or style, but the system’s opacity of purpose.
In a political order that claims popular sovereignty, actions of this magnitude should be explained plainly to the public. If a president believes a strategic asset is essential to national survival, monetary stability, or long-term security, that belief should be argued openly. The people should be told what is being sought, why it matters, what it will cost, and what risks it entails.
That does not happen.
Instead, the public is offered smokescreens: vague invocations of security, abstract geopolitical language, moral posturing, or silence. The real incentives — financial exposure, asset consolidation, leverage over allies, monetary backing — remain unspoken. Citizens are left to guess, infer, or dismiss events as madness. Analysts speculate. Commentators moralize. And the sovereign public, in whose name everything is supposedly done, is never addressed honestly.
This is not unique to Greenland. It is a structural pattern. Vietnam was justified by domino theories rather than power projection. Iraq by weapons that did not exist. Ukraine by values that mask financial and institutional entanglements. The mechanism is always the same: decisions are made for reasons that cannot withstand public scrutiny, so narratives are substituted for explanations.
Greenland makes this failure impossible to ignore because the narrative collapses. There is no credible moral story, no imminent threat, no persuasive public rationale that explains the move. What remains is not strategy but silence — and the realization that sovereignty, as practiced, does not include the right to know.
That is the real scandal Greenland exposes: not the pursuit of leverage, but a political system in which power acts without explanation, and explanation is replaced by ritual.
And that is why Trump wants Greenland.