With U.S. President Donald Trump’s operations in Venezuela appearing, at least in the administration’s eyes, to be a success, the White House appears eager to build upon its foreign-policy momentum. And while there are plenty of opportunities the administration may turn to next, there is one geopolitical project that stands in the immediate offing: annexing Greenland.

Trump himself said as much over the weekend. “We do need Greenland, absolutely,” Trump told the Atlantic on Sunday. “We need it for defense.” If anyone missed the message, administration surrogate Katie Miller—perhaps best known as the wife of White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s domestic and immigration policy—tweeted a photo of Greenland covered in an American flag, with the text, “SOON.”

With U.S. President Donald Trump’s operations in Venezuela appearing, at least in the administration’s eyes, to be a success, the White House appears eager to build upon its foreign-policy momentum. And while there are plenty of opportunities the administration may turn to next, there is one geopolitical project that stands in the immediate offing: annexing Greenland.

Trump himself said as much over the weekend. “We do need Greenland, absolutely,” Trump told the Atlantic on Sunday. “We need it for defense.” If anyone missed the message, administration surrogate Katie Miller—perhaps best known as the wife of White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s domestic and immigration policy—tweeted a photo of Greenland covered in an American flag, with the text, “SOON.”

Trump’s gestures at annexing Greenland are hardly new; even during his first term, the president announced an interest in acquiring the island. But whatever space once existed to dismiss Trump’s comments as mere bluster are gone. Following the United States’ lightning strike on Caracas, and the effective decapitation of Venezuela’s government, any geopolitical plans Trump has repeatedly announced—especially those focused on the Western Hemisphere—have to be taken as not merely serious, but even inevitable. And on fewer things has Trump been clearer than the supposed “need” to annex Greenland, whatever the cost.

Which is why it’s long past time not only to treat an American move on Greenland as a theoretical exercise but a real likelihood—one that would be not only a morally reprehensible crime, but a national security crisis of a sort the U.S. has not seen in decades. There’s good reason to think it would be the greatest foreign-policy blunder since at least the Vietnam War.

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