Go West, young man, and grow up with the country. There is nothing for you in the East. The irascible New York newspaper editor Horace Greeley said that around 1833, of course, except that he probably didn’t. It is appropriate that this famous epigraph of America’s romantic nineteenth century seems to have been stitched together after the fact, an imagined quote about the future from an imagined past.
Who cares. It’s a good line, and it was a romantic time. Hegemony is boring. America was growing then, fighting to be born. Back before antidepressants and collateralized debt obligations, the malaise of modern life, a man could get all he needed with just his wit and hands: a paraffin lamp—made in the United States, no less—a hardy wife capable of surviving at least a few childbirths, and hopefully no more than one or two run-ins with rickets or the Russian grippe.
It all went to plan, for good and ill. But then we ran out of West. We ran out of Guano Islands. We ran out of overseas markets to open. We even ran out of history, in time. We put Mikhail Gorbachev in a Pizza Hut ad. For a while we had some hope for what we called the “New Frontier”—go up, young man—but what’s out there is mostly rocks. America seemed fated for a dark future: tedium, stasis, and email jobs.
But today, we have discovered a new cardinal direction. Go north, says Charlie Kirk, founder and chief brain-thinker of Turning Point USA, the institution that translates Donald Trump’s Republican Party to the youth of America. In January, two weeks before the inauguration, Kirk joined Donald Trump Jr. on “Trump Force One,” the famous campaign 757, as the two took a half-day trip to Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, where they met with a small group who want independence from Denmark and closer ties with the United States.
Trump Sr. is the source of the push to annex Greenland, of course. He keeps talking about the island like a Dick Tracy villain—we’ll “get it,” he says, “one way or the other,” always hinting that while peaceful acquisition is preferable, force is a possibility. But because he’s not very good at articulating why, or what exactly he means and wants, it falls to folks like Kirk to translate. So he says: “There are three options of who will control Greenland. America, Russia, or China.” That’s the strategic rationale. Next, there’s the economic rationale: The island has “incomprehensible amounts of wealth. We’re talking that Greenland could be the new Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Russia, Permian Basin, Marcellus Shale, and the Balkan all mixed into one.” (He means the Bakken formation.)
The spiritual bounty offered by Greenland is the real thing; what we might call the Weltanschauung rationale: It’s a portal to the 19th century.What Kirk saw sometime between when his plane landed in the late morning and the moment it took off later that day was a place that offers “the resurrection of masculine American energy.”
There are some signs Kirk may not entirely know what he’s talking about. In his nine-minute dispatch, he does not pronounce the name of the city he visited correctly once. (It’s more like “nuke” than the room you might eat breakfast in.) But details are for pedants. The spiritual bounty offered by Greenland is the real thing—what we might call the Weltanschauung rationale: It’s a portal to the nineteenth century. What he saw sometime between when his plane landed in the late morning and the moment it took off later in the day was a place that offers “the resurrection of masculine American energy. It is the return of Manifest Destiny,” said Kirk.
American men would find a blank canvas on which they could paint the visions that reality-based liberals have spent decades suffocating with their feminine rules and admonitions. The Arctic frontier will make us “dream again,” he said; will give us the space to reject modernity, liberate ourselves from the sight of Uncle Sam as a “low-testosterone, beta male slouching in our chair, allowing the world to run over us.”
I am by any fair evaluation a low-testosterone male with bad posture. But there is something in Kirk’s call I cannot deny. Besides, as a freelance magazine journalist, I am a blue-collar manufacturing worker in a collapsing industry that no amount of tariffs can fix. My day-to-day has become a Rust Belt of the mind, and there is nothing left for me in the West. Off I go.
In late March, a mostly empty charter flight takes me to Kangerlussuaq, a settlement of around 400 people about 30 miles north of the Arctic Circle, about one-third of the way up the western coast of Greenland at the end of a 120-mile long fjord. Kangerlussuaq is a base station and logistics hub with two notable assets. There is an airport, built by the Americans in 1941 and maintained as an air base until 1992. For a while it was, improbably, a chic jet-age stopover—a midway point on the Copenhagen-to-Los Angeles route. Before last year’s opening of a new four-gate airport terminal in Nuuk, it was Greenland’s primary landing strip for international flights. There is a hotel in the old barracks, one restaurant, and one bar. The other asset is the road out of town, built by the Swedish firm Skanska to test German cars. At 19 miles, it is the longest in Greenland, and the only place where the island’s massive ice sheet is accessible by car, providing a thin reason for Kangerlussuaq to keep existing.
Kirk’s entreaty to American youth to find a future in Greenland provides one key insight: Trump’s push to annex the island is best understood in terms of American psychology and pathology, habits of thought and action. It doesn’t take long to realize that the rest of it is nonsense. Greenland is a beautiful and unique place, but it has nothing—Arctic ports, mineral resources, room to develop—that the United States is not already blessed to have in great abundance. What Greenland does have in great abundance is nothing, a biblical amount of nothingness. The ice sheet covers almost 80 percent of the island and is about a mile thick on average. It weighs, perhaps, 2.35 quintillion tons, flows and shifts like a very slow-moving river, and is profoundly hostile to most forms of life.
On a Friday morning, a day when the morning temperature at the airport is about five degrees Fahrenheit—spring is in full swing—I meet a guide named Søren, who has agreed to take me to the ice sheet. Søren is a friendly, scoffing, caustic Dane in an immaculate cable-knit sweater who keeps roasting me, correctly, for bringing the wrong gear. “You’re going to be extremely unhappy,” he says. He drives a giant army-green Mercedes diesel truck with tires that are substantially as tall as I am.
Søren comes from the Werner Herzog school of tour-guiding. The theme on the drive to the ice sheet is human futility. The road out of town is a kind of living museum of the waves of short-timers who have come here for some reason that no longer applies. There’s the golf course, now partially washed away, built by two pilots. There’s the “forest” just out of town, where an optimistic scientist came to see if he could make pine trees grow. The survivors are about a half-century old and as stubby as Charlie Brown’s Christmas shrub. Otherwise, the land is totally barren. We drive for about two hours, and the sights are few. We stop at a plane crash—a Lockheed T-33A—whose mangled turbojet engine breaks up the visual monotony. There is a field where the Americans left unexploded ordnance, which schoolchildren used to find. Søren points out a radio station where an American was once mangled by a polar bear.
There is occasionally a reindeer, a ptarmigan, a gyrfalcon. But the life that prospers here is weird and ancient. One currently frozen lake is said to contain Arctic tadpole shrimp. Another is called plum lake, because the prehistoric algae that grows there clumps into balls. We pass two Inuit graves. The ground being totally frozen, the bodies are not buried but covered with rocks. This still seems like it must have been hard to do, because there aren’t many rocks around.
The end of the road and civilization—a place called Point 660—is marked incongruously by a very small yellow Caterpillar tractor, partially snowed under, facing east across about 440 miles of ice as if ready to do battle. It seems outmatched.
It takes roughly five hours to hike about six miles on the sheet. The expensive hiking boots I was happy to have procured for the trip are the wrong kind to take crampons. My right foot keeps sliding out of the frame, and I roll my ankle a little scrambling up a 10-foot ledge of fresh powder, with a good deal of help from Søren, feeling a little bit like the boat in Fitzcarraldo. The pants I brought aren’t long enough to keep snow from piling around my ankles, and in a few hours they’re uncomfortably wet. My gloves aren’t tight enough. The sun is out, thank God, but the wind is bitter. Having established myself as a stupid American from the jump, I resolve to be as cheerful as possible.
The ice is incredibly beautiful. Battered by wind, the great slabs of ice that form the terrain are smoothed like river rocks, but also shaped in a way that catches the sunlight in strange patterns. It is a river, Søren reminds me. The snow that covers the ice in parts is pure, fresh white powder, and when the wind slips it over the mounds of ice, catching the sunlight, too, it looks—and I’m sorry to reach for this—like the spice in Dune.
It’s the most hostile environment I’ve ever experienced. Søren keeps pointing out new ways to die. Everywhere we walk, he points out moulins, the holes that lead to deep channels into the interior of the ice sheet. Last season, he says, pointing to the bottom of a house-size funnel, a hiker fell and began to slide down to the hole here, and the guide caught him by the straps of his crampons. In the summer, the moulins are easy to identify because they are fed by fast-moving rivers—fall in, and you’re gone—but in the winter, the crevices and holes may be hidden by snow bridges. These dangers are replicated mile by mile across the ice sheet, which is a tad larger than Iran.
The sheet is melting at the fastest rate in 12,000 years. In some of the more hype-driven corners of the Annex Greenland movement, you see excitement about this—“Make Greenland Green Again / Emit CO2,” Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee tweeted. It may take one to 10 more millennia to fully melt, but if it does it will raise the global sea level by about 24 feet, and by that time the earth we knew will have been destroyed. There may be wonderful things under here, but we are not meant to know them.
At the start of his second term, President Trump has stressed his affection for two nineteenth-century expansionist presidents: William McKinley, who, among other acquisitions, annexed Hawaii, and James Polk, whose most audacious addition to the Union was California. He’s looking for a legacy, and he wants to acquire something. But the ice sheet is not California. I mean, not even Bakersfield is this bleak.
Unlike other presidents, who used rhetoric and performance to playact, Trump operates within a comedic register. His world is irony. This offers two pitfalls for the observer, who can err in taking him too seriously or not seriously enough. He maintains plausible deniability until the point when he acts—see the aftermath of “Liberation Day.”
Trump’s desire to annex Greenland, when it surfaced in his first term, seemed too bizarre to take seriously. It is still hard for Americans to take seriously—as it is when he vows to annex Canada or reoccupy the Panama Canal Zone. But we are not taking it seriously enough. His desire to enlarge the United States, to acquire new territory, and his appreciation for the legacy of Polk and McKinley is a through line that connects his campaign, his pre-presidency, his inaugural speech, his recent address to Congress, and both the official and unofficial actions of his administration and wider circle.
While the American public is absorbed with more pressing Trump-related problems, there is a looming possibility that he sets off a real international crisis by using force or the threat of force against a longtime ally. No, Marines are not likely to be storming the beaches of Nuuk anytime soon, or of Kingston, Ontario, for that matter. But there is much damage that Trump could inflict short of a war. He could, for example, greatly expand the deployed forces at America’s base in Greenland’s north and dare Denmark, and the island’s government, to respond.
Trump’s Greenland fixation—and his love of the glories of the nineteenth century—has something important to tell us about Trump’s brain, and possibly about the direction of the United States. But to get there, we need to do a little housecleaning, because it’s important to say that essentially every part of the case Trump makes is wrong. In the first place, they don’t make sense because formal control of Greenland is not necessary to achieve the administration’s stated objectives. In the second place, Trump’s approach is hurting America’s reputation in Greenland, a place where it could easily develop much closer ties through diplomacy and investment. In the third, the details of the practical case they make for the necessity of U.S. involvement in Greenland are simply wrong. Redundance, incompetence, dishonesty.
These three things collided in the last week of March, when an extraordinary diplomatic crisis hit Nuuk. The capital is home to around a third of the island’s population and has many of the signs of a modern, wealthy city—a shopping mall, mass transit in the form of the Nuup Bussii, and sleek modern apartment buildings.
There are also continual reminders that it is not. Sewage flows into the pristine fjord at a building the locals call the “chocolate factory,” whose vicinity seems to host most of the birds in town, perhaps because the water is warmer. The older housing blocks look Soviet. There are a handful of restaurants in the “downtown” area and seemingly one proper bar, Daddy’s, kitted out like a 1990s T.G.I. Friday’s and open till 4 a.m. on Fredag and Lørdag.
You can feel every ripple, in other words, and the Americans caused a big one when the administration announced a visit by Usha Vance, along with national security adviser Michael Waltz and Energy Secretary Chris Wright. Later, JD Vance joined, becoming the highest-ranking U.S. official ever to visit the island.
The alarm this caused was hard to overstate, because of something any capable diplomat could have pointed out to them. On March 11, Greenland held elections. The five parties that won seats in the 31-member Inatsisartut expressed unanimity on one issue—a lack of desire to become an American colony—and near-unanimity on another—fully 29 seats went to parties that favored independence from Denmark. (Though they differed on a timetable.) The parties had 45 days to form a government, until which time there was no one who could speak for the island in an official capacity.
The scribes at the mighty little newspaper Sermitsiaq faithfully reported the two possible responses to this pressure campaign. “It is important that we do not panic,” the soon-to-be prime minister of Greenland, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, told the paper. Nielsen has been in high-pressure international situations before: He won a gold medal in badminton for his home in the 2023 Island Games, where he defeated a player from the British crown dependency of Guernsey.
On the other hand, perhaps a little panic was just the thing. Outgoing prime minister Múte Bourup Egede took to Sermitsiaq to declare—perhaps correctly—that the whole postwar international order was dead: “Until recently, we could safely trust the Americans, who were our allies and friends.” Greenland had played an active role in the history of the “Western allies who helped each other through thick and thin,” he said. “That time is over.” The paper drew an uncomfortable parallel between the American push for the island and the Russian push, a decade before, for Crimea, the asymmetric drive to destabilize the region and precede the final push made by the “little green men.”
If this seems hyperbolic to you, consider what a nation of around 340 million looks like to a country of five digits. The island has much that others covet, no military forces besides the Danish Arktisk Kommando, and a population smaller than Missoula, Montana’s. And consider what the following days looked like. The administration presented Vance’s trip as a “private tour,” which doesn’t make a lot of sense to begin with but is peculiarly unreflective of the vast expense and machinery that kicks into place when a high American official visits a foreign country.
An advance team set up in the Hans Egede Hotel, Nuuk’s swankiest. They had to find poor Usha something to do on her private visit to Nuuk, and to their embarrassment no one seemed to want to host her. Tupilak Travel, a tour agency near the center of town, initially agreed but then pulled the invitation upon realizing that they had signed on to a circus. There would be significant protests, because there had been large anti-Trump protests recently.
To keep things cool and dignified, the Danes were flying in police officers, who immediately made themselves felt on the streets of the capital. One Danish member of Parliament grumbled that the expense should be borne by the United States, which was flying its own forces in. The “U.S. vanguard,” as Sermitsiaq put it as the crisis intensified, arrived in Nuuk via two Hercules C-130 transport planes, the workhorse of the empire, which brought four bulletproof cars and passengers, who dispersed throughout the country. The two planes reappeared in Kangerlussuaq. “The aircraft’s pilots and crew,” the paper reported, citing an anonymous source, “keep a low profile in Kangerlussuaq, where they move around the settlement in civilian clothes.” As they did so, Trump spoke ominously from the Oval Office about fifth columnists in Greenland, with whom he was working, and who shared his vision of the Stars and Stripes hanging above the Greenland legislature.
Then, suddenly, the Americans gave up. They would visit their base instead of Nuuk, a much less provocative port of call. On a Wednesday morning, I stood outside the airport and watched the Hercules depart, reflecting on the strange feeling of reporting from a country that my own had threatened to invade. Would it be the last?
That Friday, hours before JD Vance arrived, Egede and Nielsen announced a unity government, of the kind that parliamentary democracies sometimes form in wartime—one capable of warding off the Americans if they tried to come again. Only one of the five parties in the Parliament, Naleraq, didn’t join. Nominally the America-friendly party, it was reduced to calling the other parties hysterical and trying to make excuses for the Americans that they did not bother to make themselves. “Trump is only going to be president for four years,” said one Naleraq parliamentarian, at which point the island would still need American friendship.
Greenland’s desire to declare independence, and its need for external investment and subsidy, is fertile ground for a stronger relationship with the United States, and an adept and subtle U.S. administration could forge that closer relationship without sacrificing its relationship with Denmark. Much is made of the need to replace Denmark’s subsidy of $511 million a year, but that’s chump change. That’s about how much the Texas Legislature is likely appropriating in film production incentives this session. Greenlanders want a partner. But they will never opt to become another colonial subject.
Greenlanders might be the least receptive people in the world to Trump’s high-pressure, bullying approach, said Dwayne Menezes, the founder of the Polar Research and Policy Initiative, a north-facing think tank in London. “These are people with great pride,” he said. The American attitude is that “surely there’s a price they’re going to be willing to accept before selling their birthright.” There is no price. In 2024, the government of Greenland produced a foreign policy and defense plan for the next decade. Presenting the report at a symposium in Anchorage, Alaska, Aaja Chemnitz Arnatsiaq Larsen, a Greenlandic member of the Danish Parliament, tried to draw attention to part of the report’s title: “Nothing about us without us.” The world should understand, “When we say that, we really mean it.” The first step to approaching the island is to treat it with respect. Instead, American leaders have talked about the island as an object, not a subject.
Donald Trump is right, in a very broad sense, about one thing: Greenland is on the edge of the map but in the middle of everything. The European colonization of North America, the biggest story in all of history, began in Greenland in 986, with the Norsemen soon continuing on to Canada. You can see the remnants of their settlements still today in the fjords around Qaqortoq and Narsarsuaq.
That the first place in the Americas to be colonized is now set to become—if it separates from Denmark in the next decade, as seems likely—an independent, modern, and potentially prosperous nation, is a miracle of history. The Greenlandic Inuit survived the thousand-year gauntlet and have the chance to occupy the only place in North America in which the original inhabitants—some 90 percent of Greenland’s 60,000 people count themselves as native—have survived long enough to claim sovereignty. One of the many small tragedies of this affair is that Donald Trump has made this remarkable story a story about him.
From 1774, the kingdom of Denmark managed Greenland through Den Kongelige Grønlandske Handel, a company that had a trading monopoly on the island and set up a racial caste system. The United States repeatedly expressed interest in Greenland in the nineteenth century, most prominently in the administration of Andrew Johnson. Secretary of State William Seward attempted to make an offer to Denmark at roughly the same time he was negotiating the purchase of Alaska. Securing both would advance the great American cause of the nineteenth century: annexing Canada. But it wasn’t to be. In 1917, the United States bought the Danish Virgin Islands instead. In that treaty, the United States agreed to shed any claim to Greenland and recognize the Danish claim.
After Denmark fell to Nazi Germany in 1940, Greenland became a protectorate of the United States. This was supposed to be a temporary arrangement, but in practical effect it has been a loose appendage of the United States ever since. We have shared, with Denmark, a kind of informal, loose condominium over Greenland that is still in effect today.
But just a few decades later, after Denmark fell to Nazi Germany in 1940, Greenland became a protectorate of the United States. This was supposed to be a temporary arrangement, but in practical effect it has been a loose appendage of the United States ever since. We have shared, with Denmark, a kind of informal condominium over Greenland that is still in effect today. This is what is so strange about Trump’s push to annex the island. He wants to take direct control—expensive, tiresome—over a place where he already exercises a high degree of indirect influence.
World War II became an inflection point in how empires work. Before, empires dominated large stretches of territory to control rare mineral resources and strategic choke points. As Daniel Immerwahr, a history professor at Northwestern University, wrote in How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, the widespread adoption of synthetic materials—plastic, artificial rubber—negated much of the need for physical control of resource extraction around the world. Air power ran on an entirely different logic than sea power, which necessitated worldwide coal and oiling stations. And soft power—the radio and movies and blue jeans—was much more powerful than gunboat diplomacy had ever been.
This played out in a very concentrated way in Nuuk, then called Godthaab, in 1941, when the Americans arrived. Into the formerly closed colony walked a bunch of corn-fed boys who seemed much more powerful than the Danes. Instead of company stores, residents began buying consumer goods from the Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalog. A newspaper and a radio station started up, and American movies started playing.
The Americans built 15 bases up and down the east and west coasts of Greenland, lacing it up like you would a shoe. Kangerlussuaq was Bluie West 8; the last remaining American base in Greenland, formerly Thule Air Base, was Bluie West 6. Greenland saw real combat in the war—the Germans kept trying to set up secret weather stations—but the most important events were cultural and economic. The old colonial model was dead and dusted.
After the war, the Americans offered to buy Greenland again. Denmark declined. But awkward conversations ensued. Would the United States even vacate Greenland if Denmark asked? The island gained a new prominence in American strategic thinking as a stopover to bomb Moscow. (Some of the footage of B-52s in Dr. Strangelove was filmed over Greenland.) The Soviets in turn made clear that if Denmark allowed the Americans to roost in Greenland, Denmark would be fair game in a wider war. So the Danes, traditionally proud of neutrality, joined NATO.
From then on, the United States, Denmark, and Greenland, as it began to assert autonomy over the years, existed in a complex web of multilateral relations in which the United States got basically everything it wanted for very little, and with the consent—sometimes enthusiastic, sometimes grudging—of its partners. It got the bases, it got market access, and it got two faithful allies in the bargain.
This is the genius of American power in the postwar period. “A lot of the mainstays of U.S. power are subtle,” said Immerwahr. “A lot of iterated negotiation with foreigners, carrots and sticks, etc. And I think Trump is uncomfortable with nearly all that.” Immerwahr isn’t sure how serious Trump is about Greenland, but he shares my fear. Trump, he said, “has a good gut feel for formerly outrageous things that are now politically possible.” Squint around at the world now, and “you can develop the argument that the taboo against colonization, roughly held since World War II, with exceptions, is breaking down.”
Land acquisition is on the table again. Russia’s partial annexation of Ukraine, the brewing Chinese attempt on Taiwan, the open question of what is to happen to an ethnically cleansed Gaza Strip.… In all three places, land claims are justified with antique logic, and they’re not the only ones. Even small countries are questioning long-closed points of the international order: Politicians in Hungary moan endlessly about the 1920 Treaty of Trianon.
The postwar international system, its trade agreements and multilateral institutions and proxy wars, were not all wine and roses. American power could be extremely brutal and immoral, particularly in what was called the Third World. But it “just seemed to sort of knit the world together,” said Immerwahr, at least for a time. If it starts to buckle under, you could see a “game of musical chairs,” he said, in which the great powers scramble for spheres of influence and direct, old-school control, in a similar way that they did at the end of the nineteenth century. “The worst fear is that we do that again,” he told me, “this time with nuclear weapons.”
There appears to be a good deal of disagreement on the desirability of this point. Trump and fellow travelers keep pointing to the nineteenth century as a model, something to emulate. This goes back to his first term, when he made a self-conscious effort to identify with the political legacy of President Andrew Jackson. McKinley and Polk came more recently. Portraits of Jackson and Polk hang in Trump’s Oval Office with other notables of the era, where he can stare at them while he presses the hidden Diet Coke button. McKinley received a higher honor—the re-renaming of the mountain that Alaskans have long preferred to call “Denali.”
From these men, he draws on three matters of importance. Jackson, and to a lesser extent Jackson’s mentee Polk, were populists, friends of the little guy and enemies of The Elite. (McKinley was not even remotely a populist.) All three men passed tariff bills. (They sought to lower tariffs, but still.) And all three, of course, were expansionists. Jackson accelerated seizures of Native American land in defiance of the U.S. Supreme Court, Polk waged an aggressive war to seize almost half of Mexico, and McKinley brought manifest destiny to the Pacific and Caribbean.
It says something important that Trump and the team around him have picked these three men for his White House vision board—and it says something more important that he prefers not to stress continuity with leaders from the twentieth century or the postwar period. These parallels seem very significant to the right-wing intellectuals who form the thinky section of Trump’s movement, at places like the Claremont Review of Books: “For Jacksonians like Trump, America’s spiritual renewal—its republican virtue—depends upon the ‘sober pursuits of honesty industry.’” (If you can square that with Trump’s “Strategic Crypto Reserve,” you have a nimbler mind than I.)
But Trump gives no indication of having thought very deeply about them. In March 2017, Trump traveled to the Hermitage, Jackson’s estate, to celebrate his 250th birthday. Right-wingers would hail this speech for years afterward, but it was one of those Trump speeches where he did not even try to convince the audience he had read it beforehand. When he read a line he liked, he looked around and smiled, like ain’t that something?
Jackson opposed the elites, Trump said. So did he! “I’m a fan, I’m a big fan,” he said. Jackson’s great enemy Henry Clay called Jackson’s victory “mortifying and sickening,” Trump said. “Oh boy, does this sound familiar?” But Jackson persevered, and “imposed tariffs on foreign countries to protect American workers.” In fact, it was Clay who was the great protectionist. It was his signature issue. All presidents of the nineteenth century oversaw tariff regimes, because that’s how the premodern state raised revenue. But Jackson (and Polk) saw protectionist tariffs as a tax on the poor to support elites—Northern industrial capital.
Trump’s understanding of McKinley on this point is not much better. “We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913,” he said in January. “That’s when we were a tariff country.” The first point is flatly wrong, of course, but McKinley was a protectionist in Congress who had a dramatic about-face as president, declaring to the world his intention to pursue global free trade—immediately before he got shot.
Trump’s pick-and-choose focus on the nineteenth century is a positive version of a negation—the wholesale rejection of the postwar, post–New Deal American experience. Gutting America’s state capacity and its international profile are parts of the same project. Refugee resettlement, the Voice of America, USAID, the 1965 Immigration Act, and Social Security—you have to kill them all to fully and properly wind back the clock.
Robert Merry is a conservative author and historian who served as the editor of the paleoconservative publication The American Conservative and is a longtime critic of neoconservatives. He happens to have written the two most prominent recent biographies of McKinley and Polk. Both books, which I read in Nuuk, are dutiful accountings of the presidencies of both men, using official records, but they shy from ruminating on the wider political and moral universe the two men inhabited—a particularly strange omission in the case of Polk, a slaveholder who set the countdown clock to the Civil War. But in two recent pieces more or less directly addressed to Donald Trump, Merry fills in the gaps, telling Trump the lessons he should take.
The century between Napoleon’s defeat and the start of World War I, he says, was an era of “robust nationalism, European imperial expansionism, and an Enlightenment faith in human improvement and progress.” If we model this, perhaps we can return to the “widespread civic satisfaction and tranquility” of the McKinley era and its “peace, prosperity, national pride, and the American ascendancy.” This is, to put it gently, a weird way to describe the nineteenth century, a vast bloody arena that was no less complicated than the present—and that led, inexorably, to the crises of the early twentieth century, in Sarajevo, St. Petersburg, and at home.
But it appeals to Merry because of what came after: “the postwar Franklin Delano Roosevelt era,” in which we’re still stuck. Nationalism gave way to an “increasingly powerful globalist ethos,” he writes, and “a new meritocratic elite gained sway,” while “multicultural sensibilities became widespread and strident.” Egads!
Paleoconservatives like Merry have a problem. The America of the post-Roosevelt era—righties used to call him “Rosenfeld”—is by any reasonable metric more successful than the America that came before. The 1960s were traumatic, yes, free love and all that, but only a fool would trade them for the 1860s. They get around this with a bait and switch. The nineteenth century is romanticized; the prosperity of recent decades is decried as, somehow, fake.
They then say American power is broken, that the country has no choice but to revert. “Many Americans seem loath to accept or even acknowledge one of the fundamental developments of our time,” writes Merry in his lesson to Trump, referring to “the transformation of America from a unipolar world behemoth to a lesser power in a multipolar environment.” Trump “has absorbed the reality of a multipolar world,” he says. But what, precisely, is the nature of this American decline? America’s nominal GDP makes up about the same portion of the world economy that it did in 1995. China’s, of course, has grown rapidly. But America’s best asset remains the international system it created. The collective wealth and power of our allies—the ones Trump wants to discard—is vast.
The American crisis is domestic in nature, a crisis of confidence. The way we provide housing, education, and medicine is broken, while tax cuts have ensured we’re funding meager services through debt. Americans are in a scarcity mindset, and that’s the perfect time to destroy something like USAID, if you’re so inclined. To invert Bill Clinton, what’s wrong with America is eating what’s right with America alive.
The Sunday after the Vances leave the country, Nuuk is getting back to normal. The high is 18 degrees, and the low is 14. The HDMS Lauge Koch putters back into the fjord from a deployment, sliding past the happy birds at the chocolate factory and toward the industrial port. No Russians here yet. The sun is setting in the west, casting a pink and orange glow on the mountains. At Daddy’s, a bartender from the Philippines, of all places, is serving Carlsberg to a drunk Inuit who leans on me and says, pointing at the Filipino’s neck tattoo, “You’re a gangster? I’m a gangster, too.” Roy Orbison is playing on the stereo.
The National Museum of Greenland, through a presentation about the Danish movie industry, inadvertently diagnoses current American delusions. The Greenlanders above all know that their land is a canvas for the psychological projection of outsiders. Danish “films often stage Greenland as the country where you experience life as meaningful and epoch-making, and where one sees a search for identity in the wild landscape as the solution to the problems that life in the towns and modernity have entailed.” Kevn Cøstner in Dances With Seals.
Greenland is, among other things, a useful tool to produce conflict and division between Europe and the United States—to end or overhaul the postwar order. So are the tariffs. Why are the Americans doing this? My worry is that the answer is simple: We’re bored. “Life swings in a constant pendulum between pain and boredom,” said Arthur Schopenhauer, 174 years before Francis Fukuyama warned in The End of History that future generations would “struggle for the sake of struggle.”
In the old days, expansion could be done in the name of strategic interest or economic imperative, but it usually served a domestic political purpose, too. The Trump administration may be frying its own state capacity as it lurches from self-created crisis to crisis, but it can offer a foreign policy to provoke, to entertain, to reassure the masculine energies. It can burn the house down. And in the future, when more entertainment will be necessary, this immense, powerful bully of a country may find itself chasing a stronger high.
In Køge, southwest of Copenhagen, I meet Søren Knudsen, a retired colonel of the Danish armed forces. Knudsen lives in a converted farmhouse with his American wife, Gina, born in Dallas. They keep me fed and a little drunk: Still, the night feels ever so slightly like a funeral. Knudsen has been living with an idea of America all his life that he now sees may need a rewrite. JD Vance’s repeated statements about the Danes—that they were not a “good ally,” lazy, incompetent—caused him to take his Bronze Star, given by the Americans for his service as part of the NATO mission in Afghanistan, off his wall.
Knudsen’s life sums up the passing era much more than Trump’s. His relationship with the United States begins in 1939. The hero in his childhood hometown was the captain who sailed the HDMS Danmark into New York Harbor for the World’s Fair—the one that promised “The World of Tomorrow”—putting him safely out of reach when the Nazis marched on Denmark in 1940. He gifted the ship to the U.S. Navy and went off to fight. “He was the war hero in town,” Knudsen said, a precious commodity in a nation whose war of resistance famously lasted six hours. As a child, he grew up in a country that had been buttressed by the Marshall Plan: He joined the army in 1979, when it was armed with surplus American equipment and the order of the day was to prepare for Soviet paratroopers and tactical nuclear weapons.
In the 1990s, he became a diplomat—here he opens a bottle of vodka, a gift from his diplomatic years. He joined DANIDA, the Danish equivalent of USAID, and became a foot soldier of the new nation-building European mission. He met Gina at a party at the U.S. Embassy in Tirana, Albania, where he was working development aid, and she was a lawyer with the American Bar Association’s overseas aid program.
If these were not happy times, exactly, there had been much sadder ones in living memory. Europe, the miserable slaughterhouse of the first half of the twentieth century, was an open garden at the turn of the millennium, and that was largely backstopped by U.S. power. The 9/11 attacks did not initially seem to have changed this. Knudsen watched the towers fall from the Danish Embassy in Tirana. This was not what NATO was for, as an alliance to maintain the peace in Europe. But it was immediately clear the Danes would help, that they would be stepping up because of the “inherited” debt of the transatlantic relationship. “We sent the best young ones we had, and some of them died,” he said, sent them knowing they would come home with “wounds on their souls and on their bodies, because the Americans asked us to do so.”
The Danes deployed to Afghanistan. Knudsen won his Bronze Star for his work supporting the Afghan legal system, but the Danes did the dangerous stuff, too: Denmark lost more soldiers there on a per capita basis than any other NATO country. The American mission dragged on, and on, even after it grew to include Iraq, which squandered Europe’s goodwill. A sense of irony and futility crept in. During his first winter in Kandahar, he said, his base was garrisoned by the Hawaiian National Guard, who couldn’t handle the weather. They were replaced by Alaskans in the summer, who fared worse. As the vice president of the Danish veteran’s association, he meets regularly with soldiers who struggle with trauma from the American wars. When Vance called the Danes cowards, he didn’t just insult national pride: “It feels like those guys are stomping on everything we have believed in and worked for for most of our adult lives,” Gina said.
America is very lucky to have such friends as Søren Knudsen; and it has them all over the world—people who respect us more than we’ve earned, perhaps. It would be very foolish to throw them away. The vodka and goulash gone, the sun fully set, Knudsen brings out his medals and the U.S. flag that used to hang on his wall and lets slip, in a more optimistic note than he’s voiced so far, that he’ll be able to put them back up someday.
This is a common sentiment among the Danes I spoke to. No matter how slighted they feel by Trump and particularly Vance, who seems to have a pathological hatred of Europe, they suspect their old friend America is going through a phase. I am considerably less optimistic, particularly after returning home on “Liberation Day.” It feels as if the United States—the most powerful nation in history—is walking off into the tundra in ill-fitting clothes. The angel of history beckons; the masculine energies are returning. Be careful what you wish for.
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