In the opening weeks of 2026, the tundra of Greenland has become the hottest fault line in global politics. Fresh from the brazen capture of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, Donald Trump has pivoted north, treating the world’s largest island not as a people or a territory, but as a strategic void waiting to be filled. “We’re going to be doing something with Greenland, either the nice way or the more difficult way,” Trump told oil executives on 9th January, invoking the spectre of Russian and Chinese encroachment in the GIUK gap.

It was not diplomacy. It was an ultimatum.

What Trump said aloud, his court ideologues made explicit. Stephen Miller, the administration’s resident theorist of coercion, openly questioned Denmark’s right to sovereignty, dismissing centuries of treaty law with the sneer of an imperial bureaucrat. “Nobody is going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland,” Miller said, as if power itself were a legal argument. Marco Rubio echoed the logic with a senator’s varnish, warning that Greenland could not be allowed to “fall” into the wrong hands. Pete Hegseth, ever the cable-news crusader, framed annexation as a civilizational necessity. Together, they form a chorus of contempt for the very rules America once claimed to write.

This is no longer the crude real-estate fantasy Trump floated in 2019. It is something far more dangerous: a doctrine—a 21st century manifest destiny dressed up as security........

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