Threatening Greenland Is Evil

Why do Democrats have so much trouble saying so?

Donald Trump is an evil tyrant. One recent way in which he has demonstrated his evil tyranny is by his disgusting threats to seize Greenland by force. This week he lied that the US “needed” Greenland for its security interests, and his White House thuggishly threatened that “utilising the US military is always an option”.

Just about simultaneously, Trump claimed that he was going to invade Greenland because he didn’t receive the Nobel Peace Prize and therefore doesn’t feel bound “to think purely of peace.” I’m not going to go into all the ways that doesn’t make sense, because the takeaway is the same; Trump is an evil fucking tyrant who does evil things because he revels in evil.

Greenland is currently part of Denmark; attacking it would be an attack on NATO and Europe. Europe has not threatened the US; Denmark has not threatened the US; Greenland has not threatened the US. This would be a war of choice, in which we would invade, conquer, and subjugate a neighbor and an ally based on nonsensical claims about security and wealth which would not justify invading, conquering, and subjugating people even if they made sense, which they do not.

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Just condemn the evil tyrant, ffs

This is, it would seem, an easy messaging lay-up for Democrats. Trump is an evil tyrant doing evil tyrant things. Say he’s an evil tyrant. How hard is that?

Too hard, it appears, for many Democratic leaders. Senate Minority Leader and reliably spineless sack of appeasement Chuck Schumer characterized Trump’s “quest to takeover Greenland” as “quixotic”— a word which means overly idealistic and impractical. But Trump’s quest to take over Greenland is not overly idealistic. And while it may, hopefully, turn out to be impractical, the pragmatic pros and cons are also not really what is at issue. Invading Greenland is not bad because it is foolish or ill considered or too dreamy. It is bad BECAUSE IT IS FUCKING EVIL! IT IS MONSTROUSLY EVIL! FOR FUCK’S SAKE YOU ARE THE OPPOSITION PARTY! CONDEMN THE EVIL THING ON MORAL GROUNDS NOT BECAUSE IT WON’T WORK! WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU!?!

Luckily, while centrist stooges like Schumer have failed to speak to the moment, the progressives in the Democratic party, led by crusading moral icon Bernie Sanders, have spoken out with real passion against ugly and cruel imperial adventures abroad. Right?

Ha ha. No, not so much. On social media Sanders responded to Trump’s Greenland threats by suggesting that the problem with Trump threatening Greenland is that it will distract from domestic safety net concerns.

“Trump seizes Greenland from Denmark,” Sanders blithered, “does that mean that all American will be entitled to: Free healthcare with no deductibles?” After listing other pro worker policies like “a free college education” and “5 weeks of paid vacation” Sanders delivered the punchline, which is that “everyone in Denmark and Greenland” has these benefits.

Which is nice for them. But does them little good if THE US INVADES THEIR COUNTRY AND FUCKING KILLS THEM AND/OR SUBJUGATES THEM TO AN IMPERIAL TYRANNY, SANDERS YOU DOPE!

There are some politicians who are doing a bit better; Senator Chris Murphy sounds genuinely outraged when he talks about the dangers for the US of a war with Europe—even if he doesn’t exactly point out that the main people who would suffer would be the people of Greenland. Republican representative Don Bacon of Nebraska said he would lean towards impeaching Trump over the invasion and added, “It’s utter buffoonery to think that we should compel Greenland to be part of the United States.” Calling it “buffoonery” is not the best choice of words, but at least Bacon actually names the core wrong here, which is that the US is trying to “compel” Greenland by force of arms to live under a government they have not chosen and in which they would have no say.

I don’t expect more than that from Bacon, who, again, is a Republican and is generally horrible. But why do Democrats—centrist and otherwise—have such trouble condemning evil tyranny as evil tyranny? Why can’t they just say—as three US cardinals did in a striking statement—that “war as an instrument for narrow national interests” is wrong?

US pols don’t think we care about anyone but Americans

The most obvious answer here is that US politicians, regardless of party, are focused on US interests and US voters, and simply do not believe that Americans care about the rights or sufferings of anyone who is not an American. Discussions of foreign policy are thus framed entirely around American interests and American priorities.

You can see this dynamic in the coverage of the shuttering of USAid. Trump and his billionaire Nazi toady Elon Musk gutted vital health and nutrition assistance to poorer countries early in Trump’s term. In the year since, some 758,000 people have died needlessly, most of them children. This is easily the worst atrocity of the second Trump administration, The longterm damage could result in 14 million deaths by 2030, which would be arguably the worst atrocity committed by a single president in US history.

US media has reported on this, which is how I know about it. There was also some Democratic pushback. But, obviously, the horrific death toll abroad has received a lot less coverage than, say, rising prices in the US, or than ICE depredations in US cities. And covering ICE depredations and rising prices is important. But it’s hard to argue that they should so completely push one of the worst genocides in human history off the front page.

Maybe Schumer and Sanders are right and the American people simply will refuse to care about the brutalization of Greenlanders. It is worth pointing out, though, that many Americans were in fact horrified by Israel’s genocide in Gaza. People demonstrated and spoke out at considerable personal cost. The genocide even seemed to affect people’s votes—at least to the extent that Zohran Mandani’s anti Zionist principles did not hurt him in his bid for New York mayor and may even on balance have helped him.

Zionists often claim that the vocal protest against Israel’s colonial violence is unfair and antisemitic. Americans, they point out, don’t seem to care about the well-being of other colonized peoples; it’s just Palestinians.

But rather than bemoan the existence of any American solidarity for anyone, we could instead see the pro-Palestinian movement as a model and a hope. Maybe, with sustained effort, messaging, and attention, at least some Americans can find their way to solidarity with Palestinians, with Greenlanders, with people in Africa dying because we’ve decided to starve them to death for no reason. Given that our current indifference has helped usher in Trumpism, it seems like the Democrats might consider giving global solidarity a try.

US pols maybe don’t care either

I think the big barrier here is not really voters, but politicians themselves. Democratic leadership has, after all, spent a lot of time and energy opposing the pro-Palestinian movement—Chuck Schumer wouldn’t even endorse Democratic nominee Mamdani who was running against a bunch of Trump stooges. And Democrats have historically liked the flexibility afforded by voter indifference to foreign policy. Obama’s drone war (which Trump expanded and Biden mostly ended) was made possible in part by a consensus that protecting America, however defined, was worth some indefinite but non-zero number of civilian deaths overseas.

Democratic politicians are not used to speaking in moral terms of the wrongs done to people who aren’t their constituents. At best, they worry that it won’t resonate with voters; at worst they worry that it will interfere with their own ugly foreign policy goals. As a result, when Trump targets Greenlanders, the knee-jerk Democratic response is to treat it as a distraction.

That’s not because Trump intends it as a distraction—Trump does lots of evil stuff because he likes doing lots of evil stuff, not because he’s trying to get people to focus on one evil thing rather than another. But to many Democrats it feels like a distraction because those Democrats aren’t ready to address certain ills or extend certain kinds of solidarity. Trump harms lots of people. If you see some people as more important as others, it can fell like an imposition to be forced to defend those who aren’t your constituents when they are facing invasion and brutalization. You’d much rather talk about health care for your voters.

And health care is important. But so is imperial tyranny. When you’re facing a global fascist threat—and Trump is a global fascist threat all by himself—you don’t get to pick which people the fascists will target for your convenience. In fact, one of the key fascist strategies is to target those with the fewest resources and the fewest allies.

We need, therefore, to get used to treating all targets as neighbors, whose fates are intertwined with ours. That means talking about Greenlanders as if their lives and their dignity are valuable in themselves, rather than treating them as a kind of joke or as an excuse to pivot to supposedly more important issues. The more people we treat as disposable, the weaker we are, the more territory—in every sense—the fascists will take.