Posted on January 19,
2025
Something Rotten
Few condemn Trump's threat against
Denmark
by
Daniel
Clark
It's not every day that the president-elect of the
United States threatens to commit an act of war against a tiny, friendly nation
without even pretending to have any moral justification. Then again, maybe it is, judging from the lack of
reaction to Donald Trump's declaration that American
ownership of Greenland is "an absolute necessity."
The opinion leaders within his own party have met that
assertion with, at best, blithe acceptance, and at worst, enthusiastic
approval. The fact that Greenland is
already owned by our longtime ally Denmark has been treated as little more than
a minor inconvenience standing in the way of the inevitable. So what happens if the Danes won't provide us
with this absolutely necessary thing? We
might have to kill them, apparently.
When
asked if he would take the military option off the table, Trump said, "I'm not
going to commit to that. It might be
that you'll have to do something." Really? Why might we have to do something
militarily, against Denmark? Just
because it has something we would prefer to have instead? Or has it got more to do with the fact that Denmark
is a fellow NATO member, and thus is perversely viewed by Trump as the enemy?
This would have been an outrageous suggestion even if
it had come from someone who didn't routinely disparage his political opponents
as warmongers. Nevertheless, it has
drawn no objections from the new "anti-war" majority in the Republican Party,
the group that might be called the Code Pink Elephants for their habit of
regurgitating the simplistic, self-congratulatory peacenik mindbarf we'd been
hearing from liberal activists for the past half-century. Its grand poobah Tucker Carlson, Trump's
closest foreign policy confidante, seems completely disinterested. Tulsi Gabbard has not denounced it, let alone withdrawn
her nomination to be Trump's Director of National Intelligence. Podcasters at The Blaze and The Daily Wire
have only winked and nodded along.
Those among them who have discussed the matter at all
have only offered intelligence-insulting rationalizations. Of course, Trump isn't serious about
attacking Denmark, they say. He's only trolling,
you idiots! You've got to take him
seriously, but not literally. He's a
nineteen and a half dimensional chess grandmaster, you know. This threat of military force is merely the
opening bid in a negotiation.
Okay, so it's a negotiating tactic, but it can only be
an effective one if the Danes take it seriously. If it works, the result will be nothing short
of a mugging. Suppose somebody walks up
to you on the street and says, "Sell me your watch for a dollar, and I won't
sock you in the forehead with this mallet."
How much would it matter if he later claimed to have been bluffing?
Donald
Jr., among others, told us repeatedly throughout the presidential campaign that
his father had been the first American president of the past fifty, or hundred,
or three bigl-illion years not to start a war. This "America First" point of view casts the
USA as a serial aggressor. Our country
only becomes involved in wars because our president's "start" them, and why do
they do that? To enrich their cronies in
the military industrial complex, of course.
Anyone who really believes this must perceive America
as the villain in most international conflicts.
Yet in this particular case, they want to make it be true. Entirely without provocation, they want to use
our military superiority to bully one of our most loyal allies, for no better
reason than that we covet one of its possessions.
They can call that "an absolute necessity" if they
want, but that's no different from Vladimir Putin's defenses of his actions in
Ukraine, or Xi's for wanting to gobble up Taiwan, or Maduro's for his designs
on invading Guyana. It's a simple matter
of might makes right. From this
perspective, the only thing Putin has done wrong is lacking the might.
With a total lack of self-awareness, the Code Pink
Elephants will soon go right back to condemning America's past leaders for
invading Afghanistan after 9-11, terminating Saddam Husssein's terror state,
and opposing Communist aggression around the world. They'll tell us all about how these and other
American military actions have been those of vicious, warmongering, neocon
brutes, who are constantly driven by a need to slake their thirst for money and
blood. It would never occur to them that
far more credible accusations could be thrown right back at them over Greenland,
so convinced are they that they are simply better people.
The Shinbone: The
Frontier of the Free Press