A Glutton Loafing Around…!

The world is just about becoming aware that it has a President. He is Donald Trump of the United States, an emperor slightly encumbered by whatever is left of institutional restrictions. Despite such inhibitions, Trump brooks little opposition, disdains the United Nations and the rules-based international system, and has no regard for morality, fairness, or respect for normalcy.

Trump is living his ambition not just to make America great, but to create a new empire. He makes no pretences about it anymore – and has decapitated Venezuela and is taking their oil to demonstrate a practical example. Those who remember still recall how Trump regretted that Obama invaded Libya without draining its oil. Trump has nothing of Obama’s mistakes or reservations with Venezuela.

From Gaza to Venezuela, he is dragging the world into a new phase of brazen theft and recolonisation – no more the duplicity, subtle manoeuvres and proxy wars of the axis powers ravaging Africa and wherever else there are mineral deposits.

Not only has the US set very good precedents for Russia in Ukraine, and China against Taiwan and Hong Kong, but Israel may well do as it pleases with Palestine. The crimes against women and children in Gaza have continued, despite a ceasefire brokered by Trump. All the while, Trump kneels on the neck of Iran, the only state with the nerve to challenge the US’ arrogance in the Middle East.

He has dribbled the Gulf States into a Board of Peace that tactically isolates Iran. And the writing on that wall is very bold, legible, and predictable.

Trump’s current hallucinations about Greenland make sense only in relation to the empire that Americans elected this emperor to create. He is so suffused with narcissistic logic in this madness that even Marco Rubio and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt – who live, breathe, and swim in Trump-conceit, can hardly catch up with his rhetoric.

Before European leaders timidly resisted his advances, Trump’s covetous eyes gazed beyond the ice-scapes of Greenland to the island’s strategic value for the United States: its location, resources, and military potential in the Arctic region.

Geological surveys indicate that Greenland spans roughly 2,700 km north-south, with rocky coasts, tundra landscapes, and mountains. The ice sheet, up to three kilometres thick, holds about seven percent of Earth’s freshwater. Only 410,000 square kilometres of the island is ice-free.

Other features of this virgin of an island are even more seductive. It covers 2.16 million square kilometres (more than twice the size of Nigeria), with a small population of around 56,000 mostly Inuit people living along the coasts. As a gateway between the Arctic Ocean and the North Atlantic, the island fits into America’s surveillance, early-warning, and power projection in its power and resource competition with Russia and China.

As a consequence of global warming, melting Arctic ice is opening new maritime routes and accelerating the value of polar-domain intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. Trump and his Pentagon advisers must have figured that a US presence in Greenland could enhance rapid response options across such a vast and remote theatre, improving deterrence or pre-emptive action.

It’s not difficult to see why Trump is salivating like a glutton loafing around a bakery. His abduction of Nicolas Maduro and seizure of Venezuelan oil tankers before annexing Venezuela’s oil reserves show plainly enough. Greenland holds potential for minerals, rare earths, and energy resources. So it’s well beyond Trump’s military and security calculations.

It is a tragedy for the international community that Trump’s calculations on Greenland completely snubbed concerns about sovereignty, US relations with Denmark and Nordic partners, or relations with NATO. With delusional MAGA triumphalism, it was either the island, or tariffs against whimpering European states. Either way, Trump wins.

What Trump believes is what matters. His demand for a Nobel throws more light on the character of the man who sits atop the world like a boulder on a precipice. A cursory view of comments on his timeline reveals that not a few think the world is saddled with a psychopath – who presumes to demand as well as dictate conditions by which the Peace Prize should be given to him.

With or without the Nobel, Trump will continue to bludgeon all nations, including the US’s strategic allies in NATO – the UK, France, and Germany, with the sweetest word in Trump’s vocabulary – tariffs.

In the meantime, it is a pity that the Danes and Greenlanders who have enjoyed mutual and peaceful cohabitation since 1953 should begin to live under the fear of an American conquest. It’s not just the danger of an invasion, it’s the failure of a world system where might has become right, that should worry all.

And while the world is following Trump to his newer crime scenes, he very successfully deflects attention from Gaza and the Epstein files.

.Julius Ogar writes from Utako, Abuja