Donald Trump has probably not read Machiavelli, even the short one, The Prince. Machiavelli’s most famous advice was that it’s better for a prince to be feared than loved. But above all, he said, a ruler should strive not to be hated. Nobody likes a bully. The US President, however, clearly doesn’t care about any of this in his attempt to intimidate Denmark into handing over Greenland. 

Why does Trump want Greenland? A clue lay in his meeting at the White House last week with the Florida Panthers ice hockey team. The team lined up for a photo: red ties and muscle-bound torsos bursting out of suit jackets, Trump in front of them at a lectern. ‘Good-looking people, young, beautiful people, I hate them. You hate standing here with all this power behind you.’ He went on: ‘But I got power too, it’s called the United States military. I don’t care.’

Trump saw one of the team hovering with gifts, a hockey shirt – with ‘Trump 47’ on the back – and a gold hockey stick: ‘Ooh, that looks nice. I hope it’s a stick and not just a shirt. That stick looks beautiful… Maybe I get both. Who the hell knows. I’m President, I’ll just take them.’ Whatever rationalisations Trump’s officials come up with, there’s a similar reason he wants to take Greenland: because he can.

Thomas Dans, the US Arctic commissioner, told USA Today that some kind of American action could happen within ‘weeks or months’. Dans said he hoped a deal could be done, so it may be just a coincidence that the 11th Airborne Division, based in Alaska, has been put on a few hours’ notice to move. The public story is that they may be needed to help immigration agents in Minneapolis, but they are trained in Arctic warfare and are the closest American unit to Greenland. Sending them to the US base there would ratchet up the pressure on Denmark. 

Rasmus Jarlov, chairman of the Danish parliament’s defence committee, believes an American invasion can’t be ruled out. ‘We wake up every morning to new threats and new false accusations from the US administration,’ he says. ‘Very little would surprise me at this point.’ Danish politicians give off an air of befuddlement. They are hurt to be treated this way after years as one of America’s most loyal allies, shoulder to shoulder in Iraq and Afghanistan, and think American officials have taken leave of their senses.

Jarlov tells me: ‘We’re struggling to understand. We keep asking the Americans why they want Greenland and we’re not getting logical answers. If they would tell us what it is that they would gain from annexation, then we could talk about how we could achieve that in other ways. But they’re not. They’re not really coming up with a reason. We’re willing to give them access to what they think they need, but we can’t do that if they don’t tell us what it is.’

Perhaps the end........

© The Spectator