In the fall of 2021, I flew down to Mar-a-Lago with my husband, Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at the Times, to interview Donald Trump for a book we were writing on his first term in office. After an hour and a half, an aide moved to end the conversation, but we threw in one last question: why had he pursued the purchase of the Danish territory of Greenland—to the shock of European allies and the general bemusement of much of the American public? Trump presented his interest as the musings of a canny businessman: “I said, ‘Why don’t we have that?’ You take a look at a map. So I’m in real estate. I look at a corner, I say, ‘I gotta get that store for the building that I’m building,’ et cetera. You know, it’s not that different. I love maps. And I always said, ‘Look at the size of this, it’s massive, and that should be part of the United States.’ ” He added, “It’s not different from a real-estate deal. It’s just a little bit larger, to put it mildly.”

Greenland was hardly headline news at that point. We had asked Trump about it because, in conducting interviews for the book, we had been surprised to learn that his pursuit of it had not been the transitory whim that it had initially appeared to be, when, in the summer of 2019, it was first made public, but a persistent demand over several years of his Presidency. Several former officials had told us that Trump’s insistence had prompted serious internal study. Trump’s college friend, the cosmetics magnate and philanthropist Ronald Lauder, had planted the idea with the President, we were told, and even presented himself to Trump’s national-security adviser, John Bolton, as a possible secret envoy to Denmark. In the summer of 2018, according to Bolton, Trump mused about trading Puerto Rico for Greenland. After an early Oval Office meeting during which Trump expounded on buying Greenland, another mystified Cabinet member was struck by how delusional the President sounded. “You’d just sit there and be, like, ‘Well, this isn’t real,’ ” the secretary later told us. “But then you’re, like, ‘Oh, well, maybe this is real in his mind.’ ”

At the time, our interest in the episode was more historical than geopolitical. Trump himself was exiled in Florida, a political outcast. Joe Biden’s foreign policy was all about reinforcing America’s commitment to its allies in Europe, such as Denmark, and repudiating Trump’s undermining of the U.S.-led international order. But just a few years later, we now know that Trump’s pursuit of Greenland will not end up as it should have, an obscure footnote to the story of a failed one-term President.

On Tuesday, giddy after the success of a daring weekend raid to capture the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, Trump’s White House put out a statement threatening Denmark, a NATO ally, with military action if it did not hand over Greenland—a threat so reminiscent of Vladimir Putin’s bald demands in the run-up to his invasion of Ukraine that it had Russian officials openly cheering. In the days since, Trump has insisted that the United States simply must have the vast, sparsely populated, and resource-rich territory. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is set to meet with Denmark’s leaders next week to present terms. Seven European nations put out a joint statement condemning the threats, leading to yet another Trump statement claiming that it was the Europeans who could not be trusted to defend their fellow alliance members.

What some of Trump’s own senior officials once viewed as the delusional musings of a dilettante have now become a genuine international crisis, one that could lead—or maybe it already has led—to the effective end of NATO. After this week, is there anyone who can credibly claim to be sure that the United States, under Trump, would honor the commitment to mutual defense that is the foundation of the alliance?

Greenland, it turns out, is not a punch line but a template that explains much about Trump’s foreign policy: it’s about a power-grabbing President who looks at territory on a map and says he wants to own it. Trump could not articulate a rationale for acquiring Greenland—“from a strategic standpoint, from a locational standpoint, from a geography standpoint, it’s something that we should have,” he told us—any more than he can elaborate on what his plan is for Venezuela now that he’s toppled the country’s leader and seized some of its oil. Asked by reporters from the Times, on Wednesday, why he couldn’t just settle for the terms of the existing 1951 treaty with Denmark, which grants the U.S. military nearly unlimited use of Greenland’s territory, Trump replied, “Ownership is very important.” He added, “because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success.” There are no limits to his global powers, Trump said, except one thing: “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

Trump’s approach to the world is not the isolationism that many of his supporters celebrated when he returned to the White House, vowing an “America First” shift away from the liberal internationalism of his predecessors, but a narcissistic form of unilateralism that says, loudly, I can do whatever I want, whenever and however I want to do it. Unrestrained power wielded for its own sake is the theme, and, along with Trump himself, his deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, is its muse. Miller’s snarling enunciation of this doctrine, in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Monday, during which he asserted America’s right to do as it wished with Greenland, has justifiably been taken as an important statement of the world view underpinning this Administration. “We live in a world, the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Miller said. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

Counting last weekend’s daring commando raid on Maduro’s compound, Trump has now ordered U.S. military attacks on seven different nations since returning to the White House: Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen. “Trump is tough with the weak but weak with the tough,” as Raphaël Glucksmann, a French member of the European Parliament, put it to the Wall Street Journal. Does it make it better or worse that, in most cases, Trump’s attention has come and gone as quickly as the missiles he has unleashed? That he has lingered on his military triumphs only long enough to make sweeping claims about the transformative, brilliant, incredible results he has achieved before quickly moving on to some other preoccupation? In the days since the Venezuela attack, Trump has explicitly threatened not only Greenland but also Colombia, Iran, and Mexico. Why? Because he can. A decade into Trump’s political career and nearly a year into his second term, we can now say definitively that the President’s signature geopolitical move is not withdrawing the United States from the world but performative displays of force to impose his will on it.

For a man who’s also spent the past year proclaiming himself the “President of PEACE,” this seems like an almost inconceivable twist. It’s not—Trump views these dramatic military actions as stand-alone accomplishments in their own right. The use of force is, for this President, not so much a means of achieving American national-security goals as an end in itself. Trump’s reaction to observing the Venezuela attack unfold in real time is worth remembering in the context of an operation that, according to the latest U.S. estimates, killed some seventy-five people, including both Maduro’s security detail and local residents. “I mean, I watched it, literally, like, I was watching a television show,” he marvelled in an interview with Fox News, on Saturday. “And if you would have seen the speed, the violence.”

The situation we now find ourselves in—of an unrestrained Trump, seemingly intoxicated with the use of military force and determined to swaddle his Presidency in its reflected glory—is exactly why Europe is right to fear for Greenland. There are few who think it would take more than a few minutes and a few helicopters for Trump to take possession of it, thus writing himself into history as a leader who remade the map of North America.

Those who oppose such a move are left to take comfort in the minor signs of institutional resistance that have emerged in recent days—those sternly worded European statements, the mumblings of dismay about the President’s Greenland threats from nine Republican senators, and a vote by five of them, on Thursday, to demand that Trump consult Congress before any further military action in Venezuela. As if that would matter. I can remember a time when all fifty-three Republican senators would have said that the mere hint of an American military attack on Greenland was crazy, outrageous, and in and of itself an impeachable offense. When was this long-ago time, you might ask? I can give a very specific answer: 11:59 A.M. on January 19th of last year.

Welcome to 2026. Trump’s apologists may be right when they say that the martial bluster is no more than a bargaining tactic. It appears that’s what Maduro thought, too, right up until the moment Trump sent the Delta Force into his bedroom in the middle of the night. ♦