Former Naval War College professor Tom Nichols warned in The Atlantic that if President Donald Trump continues with his escalating threats to seize control of Greenland by force, U.S. armed forces — many of whom have worked side by side with Danish forces in NATO exercises — will be faced with impossible decisions.
Trump has begun to argue that Denmark “cannot protect” Greenland from outside threats like Russia and China, which gives the United States justification to annex the territory — something even Republican lawmakers have flagged as alarming talk and are urging Trump to abandon.
“The U.S. military is obligated by law, and by every tradition of American decency, to refuse to follow illegal orders,” wrote Nichols — something Trump’s administration is threatening legal action against certain lawmakers for saying publicly. “But what about orders that may not be illegal but are clearly immoral and illogical? The president, for example, can order the Pentagon to plan for an invasion of Greenland; such an order would be little more than a direction to organize one more war game. (The military, as it sometimes does during war games, might not even use real place names, but rather use maps that look a lot like the North Atlantic as it organizes an invasion of ‘Verdegrun’ or something.)”
“But after years of experience with American military officers, I believe that even these hypothetical instructions will sound utterly perverse to men and women who have served with the Danes and other NATO allies,” wrote Nichols. “Denmark not only was our ally during the world wars of the 20th century, but also, as my colleague Isaac Stanley-Becker has written, joined our fight against the Taliban after 9/11 and suffered significant casualties for a small nation. Their soldiers bled and died on the same battlefields as Americans.”
Indeed, Nichols wrote, if he had ever proposed aggression against Denmark on a scale of what Trump is doing now during his time at War College, “I might have been relieved of my leadership duties.”
“Some military officers will shrug at Trump’s ravings and say that orders are orders, and that yesterday’s friends are today’s enemies,” he wrote. “Every defense organization has people in it, uniformed and civilian, who are morally hollow and see only figures on a map that must be targeted for elimination. But most Americans, and the members of the military that serves them, are decent people. They know that attacking your friends is evil and mad. I am certain that the men and women of the armed forces will be conflicted and disturbed as they try to turn Trump’s unhinged obsessions into a coherent military plan.”
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