Wednesday open thread: Greenland?

Donald Trump being able to do a smash-and-grab in kidnapping Nicolás Maduro has gotten him creaming his Depends. He thinks that this raid proves his utter puissance and strategic genius. His sycophants like Stephen Miller are screaming from the mountaintops that the Western Hemisphere belongs to the United States, and that they can do anything they want to all the lesser countries in it.

Now the talk of Greenland has returned. 

Trump wants the world's largest island. (No, it's not Australia, that's a continent.) His "team" is pursuing several avenues, including offering to buy it from Denmark, as if the people of Greenland have no voice in the matter. (To Trump's ilk, they don't.) But the regime hasn't ruled out using military force to seize the island.

I cannot overstate how ludicrous this all is, and how dangerous.

It's apparent that Trump has slipped fully into insanity. He may know that he's dying, and wants to take the world with him. Much like Hitler's Nero Decree, no one can survive once he passes. He will destroy everything in one last glorious holocaust. He will have the final laugh on a world which has mocked him for the entirety of his public life. The dead cannot mock.

I don't know the seriousness of his obsession with Greenland, and how far he will go to see it through. And the sad fact is that Europe won't be able to do much; the militaries of the NATO nations combined are still not quite a match for the US. If Trump used force to take Greenland, NATO doesn't have the ability to project power. As it is now, it depends on American logistics to move troops in any sizable number. An American seizure of Greenland may well succeed.

But oh, what then? What happens to all the US troops in Europe surrounded by hostile host countries? As a teenager I read the post-apocalyptic novel Warday. The US and the Soviet Union fought a ten-minute war, ravaged each other with nuclear weapons, and ceased to exist as nations. Europe had stayed out of the conflict; the members of NATO and the Warsaw Pact quickly seized and disarmed the American and Russian troops on their soil, and became the new superpowers. If this insanity were to play out to its logical conclusion, much the same would happen this time. At the very least American forces would be besieged and quarantined.

The military went along with the raid on Maduro. But would it go along with such a blatantly illegal order as to seize a territory of a NATO ally? Would generals and admirals who have spent their entire careers operating within the security structures which America itself built submit to their destruction by a mad king? Our friend Rational Left thinks that if Trump ordered the military to shoot protesters it would revolt. I think that if Trump ordered the invasion of Greenland, that would be when the military would take its oath to protect the Constitution from enemies foreign and domestic to heart. These are men and women with advanced degrees, with a deep knowledge of world affairs and global history. Seizing Greenland would mean, eventually, the end of this Republic. 

I know nothing. We went through the Looking Glass long ago. I can only speculate. But I think we're nearing the point where the untenable can no longer continue. Venezuela was the out-of-town try out before the show hits Broadway Greenland.

This could have all been avoided if people had, firstly, not shivved Joe Biden in the back, and then afterwards had not abandoned Kamala Harris. We are a deeply unserious and uneducated people. Our pathologies have brought us to the brink of destruction. Anything can happen. 

But this blog will be here as a source of strength and community. Hang tough.