Transcript: The Scary Thing Trump Might Do on His Birthday

Columbia political scientist Elizabeth Saunders says wrongly thinks that the U.S. can easily repeat its quick overthrow of Maduro in other countries.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the May 26 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: And so we’re going to talk about three different nations that Trump is threatening or dealing with—Cuba, Iran, and Greenland. I’ll start with Greenland only because it was off my radar screen that Trump was still thinking about taking over Greenland.

There was a story in The New York Times on the 18th—Greenland politicians have circled a date on their calendars to be wary of: June 14th, Trump’s birthday. They’re worried about some kind of invasion that day. And I guess the talks are that the U.S. wants some kind of military arrangement to ensure troops are in Greenland indefinitely, and they also want to have effective veto power over any investment deals Greenland makes.

So let me jump back and start with the—I don’t remember. I’ve covered four or five presidents. Was there a push to change Greenland with Bush or Obama or Clinton or Biden that I missed, or even in Trump’s first term?

Elizabeth Saunders: He did talk about it in his first term, actually.

Saunders: And we edited a piece—published a great piece by a political scientist named Jeff Colgan, who studies climate politics. He pointed out that buried under the ice, which is now melting, is a lot of nuclear and toxic waste. So be careful what you try to annex as U.S. territory, because it comes with some very thorny problems.

So yes, Trump talked about it in his first term. But this has been another level—although it seems like the crisis over Greenland, and I would say it was a crisis during the Davos meeting in Switzerland in January—it already feels 100 years ago.

It was already one war ago, right? It was between the intervention in Venezuela—which resulted not in a major military operation but a one-day seizing of the president, Nicolás Maduro, bringing him back to the U.S. to face trial—and the Iran war, which started about a month later.

But Greenland was a real crisis. We’ve subsequently learned that the Danes took it very seriously, and the troops that went to Greenland, ostensibly for prearranged NATO military exercises, had pints of blood go with them—the kind of steps that you would take if you were expecting there to be a fight. And that is just almost unthinkable between NATO allies. I think that was truly the final—if anybody else in Europe needed waking up, that woke up the deepest sleepers, I would say.

So Greenland has been going on the whole time—just like we have foreign policy with all these countries that doesn’t make the news every day. The Iran war has been dominating all the news, so it’s not that surprising that it fell off everybody’s radar.

Saunders: Not Trump’s. His radar—you could write a whole book about what he decides to put and keep on his radar.

Bacon: Let me repeat my question, though. Besides Trump, the U.S. government’s point of view was not previously we have to take over Greenland—with either Republican or Democrat, right?

Saunders: No. And I think when the Greenland crisis happened in January, a lot of people pointed out that we had a tremendous number of bases in Greenland. We had gone down to only one, as part of, I assume, the post–Cold War peace dividend.

But if the U.S. wanted more troops and bases in Greenland, the Danes would undoubtedly be happy to negotiate that in good faith—and probably would welcome it, because the Arctic is now very much a front in the conflict with Russia, and with China, as the ice melts and you can transit the Arctic more, and so forth.

So I don’t—I think that if Trump really only wanted basing rights, this is not how you would go about it.

I think that having had the Greenland crisis, it will be that much harder to try to get back basing rights that we had in previous administrations. But previously, most administrations have recognized—at least since the end of World War II—that it is actually far better and cheaper, in the sense of not just money but the cost in forward deployments and risks and not having to govern.

What would it mean to take over Greenland? Are we going to be running the policing and the courts? All those things come along with annexation. And they don’t want to be annexed, which creates a whole host of other points of conflict.

So administrations previously have recognized that negotiating deals with our allies to have military bases—and they’re not perfect deals, and there’s not perfect behavior on the part of the U.S., as we know, in places like Japan and so forth—but that is efficient for the United States within an alliance.

It benefits both sides. And it is far preferable from the U.S. point of view. Leaving aside the moral problem with trying to annex. anybody’s, but most certainly your ally’s territory—just in the coldest, most cynical cost-benefit view—it is much, much more efficient to negotiate deals for bases.

Bacon: What’d you make of him sending the governor—I guess they made the governor of Louisiana the envoy, and he’s—what’d you make of that? Because he has no foreign policy knowledge that I know of that could have been comforting to Greenland or Denmark. Was that a move to show we don’t care what you think, basically? Or what do you make of that?

Saunders: It’s an insult to everyone around, because presumably he also has duties as governor of Louisiana, right?

Bacon: One would hope.

Saunders: I’d be pretty pissed off if I were a resident of Louisiana and my governor was spending all his time in Greenland. I think it’s yet another—yes, it’s a sign of: we’re not sending somebody serious about diplomacy. We’re not sending somebody for whom this is their primary job. We’re sending somebody who is loyal to Trump, and I can’t even begin to understand why this particular person for this particular mission.

But I think it’s yet another sign that they don’t invest at all in real diplomacy—which has shown up in all of these conflicts and made everything harder. Again, you could have made a deal with Greenland, even including some of the mineral raw materials. That might have been more contentious, but you could imagine skilled diplomats getting around to that, because at a minimum, they would want to make the deal with the U.S. and not with the Chinese.

But once you burn all your diplomatic capital threatening to take it by force—the diplomacy—it’s like starting with a time penalty in the biathlon, those things in the Olympics where you’re down a certain amount because you missed a shot. It’s self-harm. It’s diplomatic self-harm. It just makes the task that much harder.

Bacon: We’re going to talk about Cuba and Iran in a second. But this June 14th day—I hadn’t really thought about that until I read the piece. Do we think that—

Saunders: Also Flag Day.

Bacon: Flag Day. Do we think that—whatever the country is—part of celebrating Donald Trump’s birthday or America 250 is going to be that we invade someone? Is that something you think is serious or not very serious?

Saunders: I wouldn’t dismiss it entirely if the Danes think it’s true. But first of all, the U.S. military doesn’t usually announce—even Venezuela, that everyone knew was coming—we were all shocked. I spoke to you that morning after the operation, and nobody expected it to be that night. And the Iran strike—same thing, big buildup and then—I’d be shocked if we actually did anything military on his birthday that was pre-announced in that way.

The only country I can think of that regularly chooses to do what it sees as aggressive moves on American holidays—not even the Dear Leader’s birthdays—is North Korea, which is famous for shooting off missiles on things like Columbus Day. Things that it thinks are super important to every American—big national holidays that are no longer really that salient to most people.

Bacon: So what do you think is going to happen? Predictions are bad, but what’s your sense of where this is heading? More bellicose rhetoric? Because this is still ongoing—the Danes have to deal with this. Trump has to get a win out of this, right? So something has to happen along those lines.

Saunders: The comfort I think the Danes can........

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