A newspaper owned by conservative media tycoon Rupert Murdoch has warned that President Donald Trump’s land-grab threats have turned into a “self-defeating exercise in U.S. bullying.”
“Successful U.S. presidents don’t reduce America’s role in the world to might-makes-right,” the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote Tuesday. “Maybe the Greenland affair is merely what now passes for online MAGA entertainment. But Mr. Trump would help his own cause in every hemisphere if he dropped the invade-Greenland routine.”
The MAGA leader has repeatedly threatened Greenland since assuming office for the second time last January, refusing to rule out the possibility of taking the Danish territory by force.
In the aftermath of the Trump administration’s lightning invasion of Venezuela to capture despot Nicolas Maduro over the weekend, the president’s supporters have increasingly turned their attention to Greenland as a prospective next target.
“Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland,” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller told reporters Monday night.
The WSJ’s editors appeared genuinely baffled by this rhetoric.
Noting the MAGA administration’s hard talk on Greenland is probably “to prod a negotiation to buy the island or end up with some other expanded U.S. presence,” the newspaper’s editorial board writes that “even the suggestion of force is damaging America’s interests across the Atlantic.”
Denmark’s leaders have balked at Trump and his allies’ threats, with Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen putting out a statement that “if the United States chooses to attack another NATO country militarily, then everything will come to an end.”
Those sentiments were further echoed in a joint statement Tuesday from leaders in France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain, who wrote that “Greenland belongs to its people, and only Denmark and Greenland can decide on matters concerning their relations.”
The Wall Street Journal argues the response from NATO allies in Europe shows how Trump has lately become set on “feuding with friends,” in turn serving no purpose other than to give “Vladimir Putin another wedge to divide America from Europe to his benefit.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment on this story.
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