Trump's NATO Strategy Updated

Via the UK Evening Standard:

Britain is in talks with European allies about deploying a military force to Greenland in an effort to dissuade Donald Trump from seizing the Arctic island.

Military chiefs are drawing up plans for a possible Nato mission that would involve troops, warships and aircraft protecting the strategically important territory from Russian and Chinese aggression.

British officials have held discussions with counterparts in Germany and France in recent days as preparations for the operation begin to take shape, The Telegraph reported.

The plans, which remain at an early stage, are aimed at persuading Mr Trump to drop his controversial plans to annex Greenland, a self-governed island that is part of Denmark.

European nations believe that significantly boosting their military presence in the Arctic would allow the US president to claim victory by arguing that America's allies were shouldering more of the financial burden.

As best I can figure this out, the European NATO countries, or maybe just the UK, France, and Germany, would deploy troops, warships, and aircraft to Greenland in order to reassure Trump that they would defend Greenland under existing NATO conditions, so that Trump wouldn't feel the need to annex Greenland to the US. His answer was implicit in the reply he gave to a reporter on Air Force One last night:

I like NATO. I just wonder whether or not if needed NATO would they be there for us? I'm not sure they would,' Trump said.

In other words, whatever force NATO could deploy in the Arctic independently of the US would be subject to possible hestation by NATO to stand up to any actual threat from Russia or China. Trump is clearly too much of a realist to accept any "reassurances" from NATO in that area. In fact, the "discussions" about NATO deployment to the Arctic must surely be aimed at suggesting to Trump that he would be fighting NATO if he chose military action in Greenland, which would end NATO.

What would be the global strategic effect of ending the NATO alliance? This site gives a hint:

The US’ 16% share of Nato Common Funding is widely recognized to be leveraged into 100% of Nato’s integrated command and control/intelligence (C3I) capability (i.e., the US is the glue that holds Nato’s integrated C3I together). In short, without the US, Nato would lose its airborne warning and control systems, most if not all of its ability to carry out joint training and exercises, management of joint facilities and infrastructure, common communications capability and Nato’s multinational integrated military command structure. Moreover, Nato would lose almost all of its strategic intelligence collection capabilities and the majority of its battlefield surveillance capability. Critical intelligence integration capabilities would also be impacted, meaning that any post-US Nato force would, in effect, be fighting blind.

In other words, if Trump were to conduct a military operation against Greenland in opposition to NATO, NATO would lose its intelligence ability or battlefield surveillance, which would previously have been solely a US capability. NATO without the US would also be without the B-2 bombers and other advanced weapons that have been key to recent US military operations. In addition, NATO forces would need some sort of transport to fight in Greenland, as no NATO forces other than the US are currently stationed there. But according to the same link,

The critical aspect of the Nato alliance is Article 5, or the commitment to common defense. Key to executing this commitment is the ability to deploy sufficient combat power rapidly to meet any emergent threat. While all Nato members possess indigenous logistical support capability, there is only one Nato member that has sufficient logistical capacity in terms of airlift/sealift/combat sustainability to meet the expeditionary needs of any Article 5 commitment, and that is the US. Should the US withdraw its support from Nato, the alliance would find itself virtually paralyzed in terms of being able to mobilize and deploy sufficient forces necessary to meet a military challenge from Russia [or the US itself]. Moreover, given the degree to which many Nato members are reliant upon US equipment, the question of maintaining this equipment under combat conditions void of US logistical support becomes a real issue.

At the UK Daily Mail link above,

Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One as he flew back to Washington, Trump was asked whether taking Greenland could damage relations with the alliance.

'If it affects NATO, then it affects NATO,' Trump said. 'But, you know, they need us much more than we need them, I will tell you that right now.'

So if NATO were to dissolve the alliance and resist a U S occupation of Greenland militarily, it wouldn't have US satellite intelligence to launch its missiles, and it wouldn't have US logistical support to move its forces to Greenland. Nor would it have B-2 bombers, electronic weapons, and apparently other advanced resources like the directed energy weapon that was reportedly used in Venezuela.

One thing I've noticed in the current discussions is that Canada is nowhere to be found in any collective mooting about military alliances against the US. I suspect they would want to maintain as much distance as they possibly could from any such thing.

This takes me back to the business-school analysis of Trump's negotiating style that I keep referencing here: Trump studies the strengths and weaknesses of his opponents' negotiation options carefully, but he prefers to negotiate with opponents who have no options. As he just put it, NATO needs the US more than the US needs NATO.

So Much Happening, So Little News

Let me see if I can tally up what's happened just since tbe new year:

• Trump raided Venezuela and removed its dictator
• Tim Walz dropped out of the Minnesota governor's race in the face of widespread allegations that he enabled Somali fraud
• There have been two ICE officer-involved shootings that appear to have been justified but badly misreported by legacy media
• Inchoate questions have been asked about who's funding national anti-ICE demonstrations
• Anti-government demonstrations have spread in Iran, leading to expectations that the mullahs may fall
• Trump has intensified his campaign to take over Greenland
• A coalition of NATO and other countries have organized to fund a continuing war in Ukraine
• The Trump administration has upped its efforts to investigate and eliminate fraud by and on behalf of illegal migrants.

The puzzling thing is how little intelligent or informed reporting or commentary we're seeing about any of these developments. For instance, what's the plan in Venezuela? I haven't even seen anyone ask this question seriously. What's the plan in Iran? Ditto -- nobody's asking. What's the plan for Greenland? What's the plan for Ukraine, with the Europeans now wanting to continue the war?

I feel certain that Trump and his immediate circle do in fact have plans for all this; that's not the problem. The problem is that nobody in the media is bright enoough to be able to prompt them to articulate those plans. For instance, yesterday we had a few reports that went like this:

The Trump administration is reportedly preparing preliminary plans for an attack on Iran, including the option of large-scale airstrikes.

Officials are considering how to follow through on President Trump’s recent elevated threats against the Islamic Republic, including what sites might be targeted, insiders told the Wall Street Journal.

A massive aerial strike campaign on multiple Iranian military targets is one option being considered — although Washington has not reached consensus on a plan of action.

If I were an editor, I wouldn't stand for this. Let's consider what we've learned about how Trump, Rubio, and Hegseth do business, based on what we've seen from the June B-2 raids on Iran and the strikes on Caracas: there's meticulous planning and execution based on thorough electronic and photographic intelligence. The idea that right now, they're just preparing preliminary plans and targeting options, but so far without consensus, is simply incredible.

On one hand, we might attribute media sluggishness to the mere speed with which all these developments have taken place, but this is in some measure due to continuing media inertia in the face of how Trump 2.0 works: his aim is to overwhelm the media with events. I think Mark Halperin unintentionally explains things in his rationale for his show The Morning Meeting: at 9 AM each weekday, the editors all get together and decide what the news items for the day will be and how they'll cover them.

The problem now is that Trump gets about four hours of sleep a night, and the rest of the time he's not asleep, he's working. He's calling cabinet secretaries at midnight and giving them new projects, and the results keep falling out throughout the day. A single morning meeting to figure out the day's spin isn't going to cut it.

He holds an oil executives' roundtable to talk about Venezuela, but oh by the way, he has important things to say about Greenland as well. Nobody in media, alt or legacy, is equipped to deal with this. We might expect more from alt media, but let's face it, they're amateurs, they can't write, and they can't think any better than legacy reporters and commentators.

I hate the idea that we've just got to expect to keep being surprised, but it is what it is. Trump is simply ahead of all of them.

Trump Has More To Say About Greenland

As of this morning:

Political leaders in Greenland strongly rejected U.S. President Donald Trump's proposal to bring the Arctic island under American control, saying Greenland’s future belongs to its people.

In a joint statement on Friday, Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen and four party leaders made it clear that any decisions about the territory’s status, which is now a self-governing part of the Kingdom of Denmark, must be made by Greenlanders themselves.

“We don’t want to be Americans, we don’t want to be Danes — we want to be Greenlanders,” they said.

As of yesterday,

US President Donald Trump on Friday again suggested the use of force to seize Greenland as he brushed aside Denmark's sovereignty over the autonomous Arctic island.

"We are going to do something on Greenland, whether they like it or not," Trump said at a White House meeting with oil executives looking to benefit in Venezuela, where the United States last week overthrew the president.

"I would like to make a deal, you know, the easy way. But if we don't do it the easy way, we're going to do it the hard way," Trump said when asked of Greenland.

. . . "We're not going to have Russia or China occupy Greenland. That's what they're going to do if we don't. So we're going to be doing something with Greenland, either the nice way or the more difficult way."

Commentators keep referring to the Louisiana Purchase as a sort of paradigm for US expansion, I assume because they learned about it in middle school history class. But the Louisiana Purchase brought about a number of other complex issues they don't talk about in middle school, such as the status of Florida. For instance, just how far to the east of New Orleans did the purchase extend? And Spain laid claim to "East Florida", the Florida peninsula, but Spain had never been in actual control of the interior, which was an increasing problem at the Georgia border.

To stop the Seminole based in East Florida from raiding Georgia settlements and offering havens for runaway slaves, the U.S. Army led increasingly frequent incursions into Spanish territory. This included the 1817–1818 campaign by Andrew Jackson that became known as the First Seminole War, after which the U.S. effectively seized control of Florida; albeit for purposes of lawful government and administration in Georgia and not for the outright annexation of territory for the United States. According to [Secretary of State John Quincy] Adams, the U.S. had to take control because Florida . . . had become "a derelict open to the occupancy of every enemy, civilized or savage, of the United States, and serving no other earthly purpose than as a post of annoyance to them". . . . Some of President Monroe's cabinet demanded Jackson's immediate dismissal for invading Florida, but Adams realized that his success had given the U.S. a favorable diplomatic position.

Trump's view of Greenland at this point isn't too far from the Adams-Monroe view of Florida: unless the US owns it, it's going to be open to anyone. In the case of Florida, Andrew Jackson had already effectively seized it; in the case of Greenland, Trump is aggressively pursuing de facto seizure and ownership, the easy way or the hard way.

Spain officially ceded Florida to the US via the 1819 Adams-Onis Treaty that cleaned up ambiguities in the Louisiana Purchase by giving Florida to the US, establishing the boundary between the Louisiana Purchase and Spanish Mexico, and eliminating any Spanish claim to the Oregon Country.

This piece linked yesterday at Real Clear Politics takes the position that the US already has, but hasn't effectively exercised, the ability to take full de facto control of Greenland, short of acquiring it outright:

[T]he administration should do exactly what Denmark has been asking it to do – request expansive military access under the terms of the 1951 Defense of Greenland Agreement. Copenhagen repeatedly argues that Washington does not need closer relations with Greenland because it enjoys broad military access under the terms of the 1951 treaty, yet has rarely exercised those rights in recent decades. President Trump should take this issue off the table immediately by requesting Danish cooperation in transferring substantial U.S. assets to Greenland, including anti-submarine warfare aircraft; Arctic training and support personnel and equipment; intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets; and appropriate Special Operations units.

. . . Finally, to make clear the long-term view of Greenland as an integral part of the Western Hemisphere and a key node in hemispheric defense, the administration can designate Greenland as a “Tier-1 Strategic Territory of the United States,” bureaucratic nomenclature equivalent to Guam or Diego Garcia. This sends a powerful signal to the world, and to Congress, that the administration will resource its long-term effort to bring Greenland closer to the United States commensurate with its strategic significance.

When I read this, I had an immediate sense that Trump would be impatient with all this bureaucratic shilly-shallying, and he'd want to cut the Gordian Knot. He did this yesterday afternoon in the same remarks he gave at the oil executives' roundtable:

President Donald Trump says the US needs to "own" Greenland to prevent Russia and China from doing so.

"Countries have to have ownership and you defend ownership, you don't defend leases. And we'll have to defend Greenland," Trump told reporters on Friday, in response to a question from the BBC.

We will do it "the easy way" or "the hard way", he added. The White House said recently the administration is considering buying the semi-autonomous territory of fellow Nato member Denmark, but it would not rule out the option of annexing it by force.

. . . Under existing agreements with Denmark, the US has the power to bring as many troops as it wants to Greenland.

But speaking to reporters in Washington, Trump said a lease agreement was not good enough.

"Countries can't make nine-year deals or even 100-year deals," he said, adding that they had to have ownership.

"I love the people of China. I love the people of Russia," Trump said. "But I don't want them as a neighbour in Greenland, not going to happen."

"And by the way Nato's got to understand that," the US president added.

When I was in school, getting mostly the middle-school version of US history even through my time as an undergraduate, questions like the Louisiana Purchase, the Mexican War, Seward's Folly, manifest destiny, the Spanish-American War, and the Mexican Punitive Expedition seemed little more than remote footnotes. The US boundaries had been firmly and finally established with the 49th and 50th states, a perfect round number; the whole question of how they'd gotten that way was a recondite footnote. US history, frankly, was over. The borders are established. Everything that needed to be done has been done.

All of a sudden, renewed US expansion has become a front-burner issue, and everything is open to rethinking.

Georgia Floyd?

The one thing nobody's mentioned about the officer-involved shooting in Minneapolis Wednesday is that yet again, we have a well-publicized case of political violence connected with sexual deviance.

A blood-covered woman who identified herself as the wife of Renee Nicole Good hysterically blamed herself for her partner’s killing at the hands of ICE agents, gut-wrenching footage shows.

The woman was filmed distraught and sobbing just steps from Good’s wrecked car in Minneapolis Wednesday morning, as a neighbor who heard the commotion asked her what happened.

“I made her come down here, it’s my fault,” the woman said through sobs. “They just shot my wife.”

“They shot her in the head. I have a 6-year-old in school,” she appeared to say.

. . . Just before the gunshots were heard, she was seen closely following federal agents and filming them.

She was also standing near the car when the shots rang out, and didn’t seem to notice that anything had happened until the vehicle sped away and crashed. She sprinted after the car soon after, while other photos from the scene showed her trying to help Good as she lay bleeding out in the driver’s seat.

Good had described herself as a “wife and mom” on social media.

On Monday, a 26-year-old man with a history of mental health problems insisted on being booked with a female name after trying to break into Vice President Vance's home:

William DeFoor, 26, was arrested by the U.S. Secret Service and Cincinnati police and charged with damaging government property, engaging in physical violence against any person or property in a restricted building or grounds, and assaulting, resisting or impeding federal officers.

FBI sources confirmed to Fox News that DeFoor demanded to be called "Julia," after he allegedly used a hammer to try to break into Vance’s Ohio home.

It is unclear if DeFoor identifies as transgender or nonbinary, but recent social media pages show up under the name Julia DeFoor.

Agents observed DeFoor running along the fence line of Vance's home around midnight, according to an affidavit. Officials said DeFoor ran up the driveway and attempted to break the driver's side window of an unmarked federal law enforcement vehicle blocking the entrance.

This follows the September 2025 assassination of Charlie Kirk, in which the alleged shooter had a trans male as a romantic partner, the August Minnesota Catholic school shooting by a trans male, and the freqeuent involvement of "furries", people who engage in sexual activity while wearing animal costumes, at anti-ICE protests. For now, we'll just note this and move back to the Minneapolis incident:

The woman who was killed was identified as 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good. After her death, Good’s mother insisted that her daughter was “not part of anything like that at all” when it came to the anti-ICE protests.

The witness account tells a very different story, one that places Good at the center of an organized effort to obstruct federal agents.

. . . According to the witness, ICE agents exited their vehicles and ordered Good to leave the area. The witness described Good actively maneuvering her vehicle during the confrontation.

“The ICE agent was in front of her car, and he pulled out a gun and put it right in, like, he was, his midriff was on her bumper, and he reached across the hood of the car and shot her in the face like three, four times,” the witness said.

Of course, anyone who has watched the videos of the incident could see that Good attempted to run over the ICE agent. As for whether Good was even a part of the effort to impede ICE, the witness did not hesitate.

“Definitely, yeah,” the witness said. “That was her goal.”

The witness went further, explaining that Good was not a peripheral figure but the lead vehicle in the protest.

“They clearly wanted her out of there, um, because she was the main car leading the, um, the protest is my understanding,” the witness said. “I talked to another guy who was driving behind her.”

The witness continued, “She was very — she was very successful in blocking traffic. She was doing what she was, what she was set out to do, and so they wanted to get her the hell out of there.”

Since he ended his campaign for reelection as Minnesota governor days before the shooting, Gov Walz's public profile has been erratic.

Tampon Tim Walz says it's "a patriotic duty" to protest ICE.

Only a deranged, sick individual would encourage his constituents to obstruct the arrests of criminal illegal aliens. pic.twitter.com/VyiZR4SXBV

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) January 7, 2026

From ABC News,

The governor said he has issued a "warning order" to prepare the Minnesota National Guard, saying there are soldiers in training and prepared to be deployed "if necessary," while urging "peaceful resistance."

"I want Minnesotans to hear this from me: The desire to get out in the protest and to speak up to this administration of how wrong this is, that is a patriotic duty at this point in time, but it needs to be done safely," he said.

The Minneapolis mayor has been less restrained:

The Minneapolis mayor, however, at an impassioned news conference, said that he saw video of the incident and claimed the agent's actions were not self-defense.

"This was an agent recklessly using power that resulted in somebody dying -- getting killed," Mayor Jacob Frey said.

Frey said it does not appear the victim was driving her car toward the agent and using her car as a weapon. She was a U.S. citizen who was "an observer" and was "watching out for our immigrant neighbors," according to Minneapolis City Council member Jason Chavez.

Frey said his message to ICE is to "get the f--- out" of Minneapolis.

However, the ability of local policiticians to use county and state resources to investigate the shooting or prosecute the ICE agents is strictly limited:

The U.S. Attorney’s Office took the unusual step soon after the shooting of ousting the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension from the investigation into the killing.

The BCA typically investigates police shootings in the state, and was on the scene in south Minneapolis on Wednesday collecting evidence as part of a joint investigation with the FBI.

Then the U.S. Attorney’s Office “reversed course” and decided the investigation would be led solely by the FBI, said Drew Evans, BCA superintendent, in a statement.

. . . Gov. Tim Walz during a Thursday press conference expressed doubt about the results of any investigation conducted by the federal government because Minnesota officials have been purposefully excluded.

“Now that Minnesota has been taken out of the investigation, it feels very, very difficult that we will get a fair outcome,” Walz said. “People in positions of power have already passed judgment … and told you things that are verifiably false.”

. . . If the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office is able to complete a criminal investigation and file charges, they face another difficult task: convincing a federal judge that the ICE officer was not acting reasonably in carrying out his lawful federal duties.

If state charges are filed, the officer will likely ask to move his case to federal court to assert immunity under what’s known as the Supremacy Clause, which protects federal officials from state criminal prosecution if they are reasonably carrying out their duties. Attorneys with the Department of Justice may then assist with his defense.

Nevertheless, both Walz and Frey are pressing for state involvement in the investigation, presumably to have an exculpatory narrative included.

"People in positions of power have already passed judgment, from the president to the vice president to Kristi Noem — have stood and told you things that are verifiably false, verifiably inaccurate," the governor said.

Frey, the mayor, told The Associated Press: "We want to make sure that there is a check on this administration to ensure that this investigation is done for justice, not for the sake of a cover-up."

Elsewhere,

Progressive Democrats are threatening to leverage the end-of-January government funding deadline to push restrictions on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), escalating tensions within their party following the fatal shooting of a woman who struck an ICE agent with her car in Minneapolis.

. . . [A] growing faction within the party is linking the DHS appropriations process to immigration enforcement changes. “Democrats cannot vote for a DHS budget that doesn’t restrain the growing lawlessness of this agency,” remarked Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) in a post on X. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) also stated: “We can’t just keep authorizing money for these illegal killers. That’s what they are, this rogue force.”

But for the time being,

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.), however, is showing little appetite for another shutdown fight even as liberal colleagues in the Senate and House and grassroots activists spoil for a new battle with the president.

I think there are several obstacles to mounting large-scale protests and riots over the Minnesota ICE shooting. For starters, there will be a major snowstorm in the upper Midwest this weekend, making demonstrations unlikely in Minneapolis, Chicago, or Milwaukee. In the Northeast and New England, there'll be wind and rain. Second, it's hard to make a lesbian a martyr. Good was driving a Honda Pilot, which markets in the $45-55,000 range, although she's been characterized as a "stay-at-home mom", which is to say she was affluent with luxury beliefs, not a member of the usual victim class.

The entire left-wing response to the Renee Good tragedy seems terribly forced, like they resent being assigned the task of trying to build up George Floyd levels of outrage over this incident.

They're trying nonetheless, but you can tell their hearts aren't in it.

— PoIiMath (@politicalmath) January 9, 2026

I think this will be yet another issue that puts the Democrats on the wrong side of an 80-20 divide.

"Everything Would Stop"

In the midst of his ruminations on Trump's desire to acquire Greenland, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen cut to the chase:

“If the United States decides to militarily attack another Nato country, then everything would stop – that includes Nato and therefore post-second world war security,” Frederiksen told Danish television network TV2.

He was, of course, referring to remarks from the administration earlier this week:

US President Donald Trump has been discussing "a range of options" to acquire Greenland, including use of the military, the White House said.

The White House told the BBC that acquiring Greenland - a semi-autonomous region of fellow Nato member Denmark – was a "national security priority".

The statement came hours after European leaders issued a joint statement rallying behind Denmark, which has been pushing back against Trump's ambitions for the Arctic island.

I've got to give the intellectual welterweights at Instapundit credit for at least linking to discussions of the US's Greenland options this morning, but they all miss the point. For instance, via this link,

Trump does not intend to “buy” GREENLAND as “buy” is used in common usage. What the administration hopes to purchase is DENMARK’s claim over GREENLAND as a matter of public international law.

Such a purchase of a public international law claim would be akin to the U.S. purchase of the LOUISIANA TERRITORY from FRANCE—as negotiated by President Thomas Jefferson and Secretary of State James Madison, and ALASKA TERRITORY from RUSSIA—as negotiated by President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William H. Seward. In each case, the U.S. did not purchase the actual land at issue from a foreign power. Rather, in each case, the U.S. payment was consideration for FRANCE’s and RUSSIA’s divesting themselves of their public international law claim over the relevant territory.

I don't understand why this guy needs to render the names of countries in all caps, but leaving that aside, the point he misses is that the purchase of "public international law claims" simply wasn't the only way the US acquired territory during its 19th century expansion. Given the reaction from the European NATO countries, a much closer analogy is the Mexican War of 1846-48.

Democrat James K. Polk was elected on a platform of expanding U.S. territory to Oregon, California (also a Mexican territory), and Texas by any means, with the 1845 annexation of Texas furthering that goal. However, the boundary between Texas and Mexico was disputed, with the Republic of Texas and the U.S. asserting it to be the Rio Grande and Mexico claiming it to be the more-northern Nueces River. Polk sent a diplomatic mission to Mexico in an attempt to buy the disputed territory, together with California and everything in between for $25 million (equivalent to $798 million in 2024), an offer the Mexican government refused. Polk then sent a group of 80 soldiers across the disputed territory to the Rio Grande, ignoring Mexican demands to withdraw. Mexican forces interpreted this as an attack and repelled the U.S. forces on April 25, 1846, a move that Polk used to convince the Congress of the United States to declare war.

The analogy with Louisiana and Alaska fails insofar as both France and Russia wouldn't have been in any position to defend those territories militarily if the US as the North American continental power wanted to seize them, and it was a much better strategy to monetize the situation on the ground. The situation with Mexico was actually a bit closer to the current one with Greenland: Polk began the discussion by making Mexico an offer to buy Texas, California, and the territory in between.

When Mexico refused the offer, Polk went to war, and within 18 months or so, US forces under Winfield Scott had seized Mexico City. Subsequent negotiations led to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo:

Mexico recognized the cession of present-day Texas, California, Nevada, and Utah as well as parts of present-day Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming. The U.S. agreed to pay $15 million (equivalent to $479 million in 2024) for the physical damage of the war and assumed $3.25 million of debt already owed by the Mexican government to U.S. citizens. Mexico relinquished its claims on Texas and accepted the Rio Grande as its northern border with the United States.

So at the end of the war, Mexico had foregone the original offer of $25 million but settled for $15 million plus assumption of debt. As a practical matter, with colonial rebellions in both California and Texas and other vast territories in the intermountain West it could never realistically defend, Mexico had little alternative.

What we've seen in the reaction of the Danes and other NATO countries is that they're envisioning a Mexican-style military resistance in the face of what's likely to be a very generous monetary offer for Greenland from the US. Let's put this in the context it deserves -- many of the same NATO countries as of this past Tuesday confirmed a 2026 Ukraine aid pacKage of $60 billion to prolong its war with Russia. On one hand, the US is not on board with this; on the other, it's simply absurd for Denamrk to rattle a NATO sword over military action to take over Greenland, when NATO is already stretching its resources with its proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

In fact, the possibility of everything NATO coming to a sudden stop isn't as unlikely as Prime Minister Frederiksen would like to believe. The same "coalition of the willing" conference this week

assembled in Paris as the operation to manipulate the U.S. into forming the cornerstone of the Ukraine “security guarantees” continues. A great deal of this is public relations and psychological operations intended to create something against President Trump’s expressed intention.

. . . There’s no President Trump because the intent of the principals is against our America-first interest. Hence, the USA did not sign up to the EU created security guarantees, because Trump is demanding they do their own work.

Key word “proposed” -- ”These elements will be European-led, with the involvement also of non-European members of the Coalition, and the proposed support of the US.”…

President Trump is presenting: The U.S. will provide intelligence *monitoring* assistance, but that’s it.

Not in our strategic interest. Not our war. Not our issue.

So if Denmark and NATO implicitly threaten to go to war over any attempt by Trump to seize Greenland militarily, then indeed from their point of view, "everything would stop" -- in particular, the ability of the NATO tail to wag the US dog. You want to end the agreement? Fine, it was set up originally as an alliance against Stalin and subsequent Soviet adventurism. The Ukraine war has shown that Russia is now a second-rate power that can't overwhelm a third-rate power. The US at this point can defend itself against Russia without NATO's aid. Let NATO without the US make its own choices.

This is the direction NATO is headed no matter what. It's plain at this stage that Trump is determined to acquire Greenland. I strongly suspect that in the near term, he's going to emulate Polk and make Denmark what will amount to an offer they can't refuse -- but this will also mean the end of NATO, or at least a NATO with the US as a member. But at that point, what happens to Canada? If Canada remains part of a NATO alliance potentially aligned against US interests, that would be an intolerable situation, as far as I can see.

Trump is playing a long game here.

Why Delcy Rodriguez?

Reports that have trickled out over the past several days indicate that Trump decided to leave Delcy Rodriguez, who had been Maduro's vice president, in place following Maduro's removal. She was sworn in as "interim president" on Monday by her brother, Jorge Rodríguez, the President of the National Assembly. According to CBS News,

She quickly denounced the U.S. operation as a violation of the United Nations founding charter and a unilateral attempt to force regime change on Saturday, but soon adopted a more conciliatory tone.

In a social media post following a Cabinet meeting on Sunday, Rodríguez called for "respectful international relations" between Caracas and Washington and extended an invite for "the U.S. government to collaborate with us on an agenda of cooperation."

. . . Mr. Trump said Saturday that the U.S. had been in contact with Rodríguez and "she's essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again."

But in an interview with The Atlantic published on Sunday, he added a warning.

"If she doesn't do what's right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro," Mr. Trump said.

The latest information suggests things may be more intricate. According to this Wall Street Journal story behind a paywall,

A recent classified U.S. intelligence assessment determined top members of Nicolás Maduro’s regime—including Vice President Delcy Rodríguez—would be best positioned to lead a temporary government in Caracas and maintain near-term stability if the autocrat lost power, people familiar with the matter said.

This page excerpts a little more of the story:

The analysis by the Central Intelligence Agency was briefed to President Trump and shared with a small circle of senior administration officials, according to two of the people. It was a factor in Trump’s decision to back Maduro’s vice president instead of opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado, some of the people said.

The assessment provides insight into Trump’s decision not to support the opposition’s bid for control of Venezuela following the brazen U.S. military operation to capture Maduro last week and bring him to the U.S. for trial. As in his first term, Trump was convinced that near-term stability in Venezuela could be maintained only if Maduro’s replacement had the support of the country’s armed forces and other elites.

But it wasn't just the CIA. According to Bloomberg,

As the US threatened Nicolás Maduro’s grip on power in recent months, a cadre of executives, lawyers and investors tied to the oil industry made their case to anyone who would listen — the Trump administration, congressional aides: His familiar No. 2 Delcy Rodríguez should fill his shoes in Venezuela.

. . . President Donald Trump’s inner circle came to the same conclusion, though people familiar with the matter say they did so independently. Both groups believed that the vice president, long seen as a bridge between the government and private sector, could stabilize Venezuela’s oil-based economy and facilitate American business faster than leading dissident María Corina Machado could, said the people.

. . . , In a Bloomberg Television appearance Monday, Greylock Capital Management Chief Executive Hans Humes, who is part of the creditor committee of Venezuela’s sovereign debt, reiterated what some global oil executives have said in private regarding Rodríguez: “If you want somebody who can operate in reasonably OK conditions, get the person who operated in the worst conditions,” he said.

According to the AP,

In 2017, as political outsider Donald Trump headed to Washington, Delcy Rodríguez spotted an opening.

Then Venezuela’s foreign minister, Rodríguez directed Citgo — a subsidiary of the state oil company — to make a $500,000 donation to the president’s inauguration. With the socialist administration of Nicolas Maduro struggling to feed Venezuela, Rodríguez gambled on a deal that would have opened the door to American investment. Around the same time, she saw that Trump’s ex-campaign manager was hired as a lobbyist for Citgo, courted Republicans in Congress and tried to secure a meeting with the head of Exxon.

The charm offensive flopped. Within weeks of taking office, Trump, urged by then-Sen. Marco Rubio, made restoring Venezuela’s democracy his driving focus in response to Maduro’s crackdown on opponents.

. . . Rodríguez entered the leftist movement started by Hugo Chávez late — and on the coattails of her older brother, Jorge Rodríguez, who as head of the National Assembly swore her in as interim president Monday.

Tragedy during their childhood fed a hardened leftist outlook that would stick with the siblings throughout their lives. In 1976 — when, amid the Cold War, U.S. oil companies, American political spin doctors and Pentagon advisers exerted great influence in Venezuela — a little-known urban guerrilla group kidnapped a Midwestern businessman. Rodriguez’s father, a socialist leader, was picked up for questioning and died in custody.

While she eventually joined Chávez's staff, he also fired her.

Years later, in 2013, Maduro revived Rodríguez’s career after Chávez died of cancer and he took over.

A lawyer educated in Britain and France, Rodríguez speaks English and spent large amounts of time in the United States. That gave her an edge in the internal power struggles among Chavismo — the movement started by Chávez, whose many factions include democratic socialists, military hardliners who Chávez led in a 1992 coup attempt and corrupt actors, some with ties to drug trafficking.

. . . As she amassed more power, she crushed internal rivals. Among them: once powerful Oil Minister Tareck El Aissami, who was jailed in 2024 as part of an anti-corruption crackdown spearheaded by Rodríguez.

In her de-facto role as Venezuela’s chief operating officer, Rodríguez proved a more flexible, trustworthy partner than Maduro. Some have likened her to a sort of Venezuelan Deng Xiaoping — the architect of modern China.

Hans Humes, chief executive of Greylock Capital Management, said that experience will serve her well as she tries to jump-start the economy, unite Chavismo and shield Venezuela from stricter terms dictated by Trump. Imposing an opposition-led government right now, he said, could trigger bloodshed of the sort that ripped apart Iraq [.}

. . . We'vw seen how expats who have been outside of the country for too long think things should be the way it was before they left,” said Humes, who has met with Maduro as well as Rodríguez on several occasions. “You need people who know how to work with how things are not how they were.”

The upshot so far: Note that Trump is referring respectfully to "the interim Authorities in Venezuela", "interim president" being the title under which she was sworn in. It sounds very much to me as though this designation was agreed to before the raid. Beyond that, according to The Guardian,

Since April last year, according to reports, vice-president and now interim president Delcy Rodríguez and her brother Jorge – the president of the Venezuelan national assembly – have been dealing secretly with Washington. This has reportedly been via that hotspot of informal diplomacy, Qatar.

We have yet to know the details. But the rumours are plausible that last week’s episode was staged to look outrageous, including Delcy Rodríguez’s initial condemnation of it as atrocious. President Nicolás Maduro was handed over to the Americans swiftly and peacefully. The only slip was Trump describing Delcy as “quite gracious” before she was hastily sworn into office soon after the raid. A more serious slip was his dismissal of the opposition leader, María Corina Machado, as lacking “the support within or the respect within the country”.

. . . After last weekend’s operation, people quite reasonably seek clarity of events and motive, but the truth is that international interventions by powerful states are drenched in hypocrisy. Their true purpose may be commercial gain or domestic glory – or to aid an ally. Or it may be just to sound good.

The Guardian characterized the Caracas raid as "a putsch. It was the militarised kidnap of one ruler to aid his more amenable deputy into power." We can grant tnis. The US has a long history of just this sort of thing. It does it best when it does it quickly and decisively, as it did in Iran in 1953.

Meanwhile,

On Monday, Rodriguez, who was Maduro’s vice president, was sworn in as president and a crackdown on support for Maduro’s ouster followed, including an order that police search for and arrest anyone supporting an armed attack by the U.S., The Washington Post reported.

She's rounding up the usual suspects -- after all, she seems to have worked behind the scenes to enable the whole show. I think Trump and his people are handling this brilliantly.

"Americans Love A Winner"

One of the most persistent images in cinema is George C Scott limning General Patton's words in front of an American flag. So far, Trump looks like the kind of winner Patton imagined, assuming his bet that the remnant of the Maduro regime will cooperate with the US going forward pays off.

The success of the operation vindicates his choice of Secretary Hegseth and Hegseth's purge of the Biden Pentagon, something that had been in question for much of the past year.

The operation was a demnonstration of US technological superiority:

At the core of Venezuela’s defensive architecture was a network of radars supplied by the China Electronics Technology Group, including JYL-1 three-dimensional surveillance systems and the JY-27 metric-wave radar, which for years had been promoted as a supposed “stealth aircraft hunter“. Based on assessments of the swift and decisive operation, these sensors were disabled during the initial phase through intensive electronic jamming, leaving the integrated air defense system without early-warning capability.

. . . The neutralization of the radar network prevented any effective employment of longer-range air defense systems, including the S-300V and Buk-M2 complexes acquired from Russia to establish a layered defense. In parallel, suppression strikes against several Buk-M2 systems—at least two confirmed—completely nullified their ability to respond.

K T McFarland said this at Fox News:

Russian President Vladimir Putin has thrown his entire military at Ukraine in hopes of establishing Russian domination and killing President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The bloody war has dragged on for three years, costing hundreds of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars, while draining both countries. And still, that war grinds on.

. . . President Trump sent a small group of special forces into Caracas. Within three hours, they had captured President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, transporting them to New York to face justice in a U.S. court. No Americans were killed.

I don't think the timing of Secretary Hegseth's announcement that he intends to demote Sen Mark Kelly from his rank as a retired Navy captain was coincidental. He did this in the shadow of the Venezuelan success. Kelly's reply is petty:

"Pete Hegseth wants to send the message to every single retired servicemember that if they say something he or Donald Trump doesn't like, they will come after them the same way. It's outrageous and it is wrong. There is nothing more un-American than that," Kelly said in a statement on X.

The problem is that the successful Venezuela raid was the product of "good order and discipline" in the armed forces that Kelly is alleged to have undermined, and he opposes that raid:

The President of the United States just overthrew a foreign ruler and explained to the American people that this is about taking control of the oil reserves of a foreign nation. He said that the U.S. will “run the country” until a proper transition can take place and went right into how U.S. oil companies will benefit from this takeover. He doesn’t understand the risks and costs involved with these poorly thought-out decisions that don’t make Americans any safer today than they were yesterday.

The visible Democrat strategy dsince the raid has been to question its legality and oppose it via Congressional action:

Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., called Trump's actions "illegal" and said opposing lawmakers plan to use the "power of the purse" to counter them.

. . . He pointed to a war powers resolution, whose cosponsors include Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., that senators intend to soon bring up for a vote to block further military action in Venezuela.

The problem for the Democrats is that the raid, at least so far, makes Trump a winner, and as Patton understood, Americans love a winner. Some Democrats recogtnize the potential problem, but so far, only Sen Fetterman has spoken out publicly:

Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., is breaking with many Democrats by praising the U.S. military operation that captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, saying Americans across party lines once agreed he needed to be removed.

"I don't know why we can't just acknowledge that it's been a good thing," Fetterman said Monday on "Fox & Friends."

"We all wanted this man gone, and now he is gone. I think we should really appreciate exactly what happened here."

the rest are remaining circumspect:

Some Democrats are grumbling at their party's largely oppositional stance to President Trump's raid to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, saying privately that their colleagues should be celebrating.

. . . These lawmakers argue it could be a major political miscalculation if the party fails to applaud the downfall of a brutal dictator with sufficient volume, even given grave concerns about the operation's legality and longer-term ramifications.

I'm inclined to trust Rump's instincts. As long as he acts decisively without any disastrous outcomes, Americans will want to be on the winning side.

🚨 NEW: CNN reports SURGE in support for what President Trump did to Maduro +25 POINTS among the American public

"After the ousting, look! Support went THROUGH THE ROOF!" says pollster Harry Enten.

"It turns out, Americans like what they deem to be successful operations!" pic.twitter.com/SCHCcPc9TY

— TV News Now (@TVNewsNow) January 6, 2026