"Хеломскiя Вѣдомости" в изгнании

If Donald Trump’s foolishness over Greenland gets out of hand, recall the U.S. Senate has ratified numerous treaties codifying U.S. duties under the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which under the U.S. Constitution are now the “supreme law of the land.” NATO’s Article 1, for instance, makes it illegal for the U.S. to exercise the “threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.”

The U.N. Charter, adopted by the Senate 89-2 in 1945, giving it also the force of U.S. law, bans the U.S. from issuing the “threat or use of force against the territorial integrity” of a nonoffending member state. In 2023, for the benefit of any adjudicating judge, Congress further expressed its will by preventing a president from withdrawing from NATO without a two-thirds Senate vote.

These realities, widely unmentioned in the current moment, probably aren’t lost on Mr. Trump. The whole kerfuffle fits better under the heading: Why is he throwing his presidency away? Look at his tariff and immigration overkill, his sagging approval ratings, likely GOP defeat in the House midterms, his probable impeachment soon after.

The mysteries of personality will always be with us. Mr. Trump can turn 180 degrees yet never admit doubt or a mistake. But his strangest quality may be the pleasure he gives himself by constantly talking about his desired triumphs as if he has already achieved them.

If it sounds like we’re in the hands of a neurotic, what kind of people do we think become president? But something is also different today. The conservative thinker Yuval Levin shrewdly notes that both parties, in fact, are in a groove where they confuse “winning for a minute” with winning. In this game of nonstop cynicism, bereft of ideals or any long-term purpose, Mr. Trump is up by one. “Stop the steal” delivered him back to the presidency. The Russia collusion hoax? The grift by which Democrats sought to return a senile Joe Biden to office? Not so effective. The result is the one Mr. Levin notes and this column pointed to last week: Mr. Trump dominates his age like no president since FDR.

In politics, all winning is temporary, of course. All political careers, to borrow the famous observation, end in anticlimax if not humiliation. That is, unless the hero is lucky enough to die at his moment of supreme triumph. For Mr. Trump, that moment was his improbable 2024 return, from which all was bound to be downhill.

At 79, he may even be flirting with cognitive decline for all we know. Yet wrapped up in his peculiarity has been a knack for rubbing America’s face in realities. He summons an FDR-like strategic cool at unlikely moments. The better part of discretion may actually be to settle for leaving “our SOB” in charge of Venezuela. Using words alone to draw a red line against the mass slaughter of regime opponents in Iran may be wiser than making a large U.S. investment to control an outcome we can’t control.

Since home rule in 1979 and passage in 2009 of the Greenland Self-Government Act, the Danes and their Greenland subjects have furled themselves in lip service to independence, now an uncomfortable fact as a new strategic order is emerging.

Independence has remained more talked about than acted on due to Greenland’s fiscal dependence on transfers from Denmark, but China could fan the embers at any moment with promises of infrastructure riches and bribes to Greenlanders. American presidents have concerned themselves with the island’s strategic value since the Andrew Johnson administration. In response to Trump mau-mauing, the Danes and Greenland last week formally shelved further moves toward separation. This is the right path, whereas Mr. Trump’s demand for ownership is simultaneously superfluous and obnoxious. Greenlanders and Denmark can have their cake and eat it—U.S. defense investment in their territory without having to swear allegiance to the United States of Trump. This is the same basis, after all, on which all of Europe has related to NATO for 75 years.

Mr. Trump’s preoccupation with owning Greenland, like his Nobel Prize obsession, would be best addressed elsewhere: in therapy. I’m perfectly serious. Once he started unburdening himself of his insecurities and traumas, he probably wouldn’t stop for a week. The world, and the U.S., would be better for it.

As my bonus for saying so, my inbox will soon bear witness to an important corollary of a Trump-like political figure: the willingness of weaker personalities to subordinate themselves to the neurotic needs of stronger ones. Human history itself is my witness. The same reality also underlines the oldest advice in politics—never fall in love with a politician—which apparently every generation must learn anew.