THE global community’s limp response to America’s perversion of the rule of law in Venezuela has offered something far more dangerous than silence: a template. It has shown the American presidency what can be done without consequence. Emboldened and transparent in his intentions, Trump is executing a strategy telegraphed all along: the systematic dismantling of democratic restraint.

This is no longer the behavior of a man testing limits. It is the conduct of a leader who has perfected impunity. Trump governs through calculated chaos: each new outrage is designed to bury the last. Venezuela eclipsed Epstein. Greenland now threatens to eclipse Venezuela. The press staggers from spectacle to spectacle, never quite catching up. Scandal no longer accumulates; it evaporates in the heat of the next provocation.

What emerges is not disorder, but design.

Internal politics: The great capitulation

Most damning is the total surrender of the GOP. A party once defined by institutional pride now sits reduced, cowed — its tails between its legs — before a cult of personality. A handful still mutter about legality, alliances, and norms — faking real resistance — but they are paralyzed by MAGA primed to crush defiance. “America First” was once coded as patriotic refrain. Now Venezuela and Greenland expose it as selective aggression.

This is not a partisan turn. It is the destruction of that heirloom myth — “checks and balances” — a museum piece now displayed in a republic that governs by appetite. When institutions become inconveniences, accountability becomes an artifact. America has entered a regime where impunity is policy and self-discipline is treason.

Why Greenland?

America’s fixation with Greenland is not new. It began in the Cold War, when its location rendered it an “unsinkable aircraft carrier,” a northern shield against the Soviet Union — much like China’s co-optation of islands and rocks in the South China Sea/West Philippine Sea that have been converted into Chinese military bases astride the shipping routes. Geography was destiny (this is another topic for subsequent columns).

But the appeal of Greenland does not lie in romance but in arithmetic. The Arctic is thawing, and with it, new corridors of power. The Northwest Passage across Canada — still reluctantly an ally — the Northern Sea Route along Russia can shorten global shipping between North America, Europe and Asia by as much as 40 percent. For maritime trade, time is money made visible: fewer days at sea, lower fuel costs, faster capital turnover.

What Suez and Panama once were, the Arctic is becoming — except this time, the map is being redrawn by climate. Greenland sits astride this transformation. It is no longer peripheral. It is pivot.

Rare earths: The new strategic hunger

What has become critical in Trump-imposed world tariff is America’s near-starvation diet of rare earth minerals. These are the sinews of modern power — semiconductors, electric vehicles, renewable energy systems, and nearly every advanced weapons platform in the US arsenal.

Dependence on foreign — especially Chinese — supply chains turns this craving into a strategic vulnerability, where economic leverage can become geopolitical coercion. China dominates both the global extraction and processing.

Greenland’s Kvanefjeld mountain contains one of the world’s largest, rare earth deposits. American mining interests have salivated for it. In a tariff-fractured world, scarcity becomes strategy. Greenland is no longer ice and fire. It is leverage.

The colonial underlay: Camp Century and Thule

After the war, Washington attempted to purchase Greenland from Denmark for $100 million in gold bullions. Copenhagen rejected the offer. The compromise was subtler — and crueler: American bases on Inuit land, including Camp Century, an underground city of tunnels and missiles entombed beneath the ice.

When the ice proved unstable, the Americans left. They abandoned radioactive water, diesel and toxic PCBs, sealed inside a glacier now melting. As the Arctic warms, Cold War poison inches toward the surface — toward a people who never consented to bear its cost.

This was not merely environmental vandalism. It exposed Denmark’s colonial duplicity and America’s strategic indifference. For centuries, Greenland’s worth was calculated by outsiders — first Danish administrators, then American generals — while Inuit life absorbed the damage. Modernization fractured communities, displaced language, and suspended identity between worlds.

The cruelty became explicit in 1953, when the US expanded Thule Air Base. Inuit families were given four days to abandon ancestral homes. They were relocated to barren ground with little shelter, less dignity. In 1968, a B-52 carrying nuclear weapons crashed nearby, scattering plutonium across hunting lands. Cleanup was partial. Illness followed.

Thule became a monument to American security. For Greenlanders, it was loss made permanent.

Today’s staggering suicide rates among young Inuit men (80-120 per 100,000) are not mysteries of climate or temperament. They are the aftershock of dispossession — families uprooted, identities thinned, futures negotiated elsewhere. This is not a public-health anomaly. It is colonial trauma unfolding in real time (US and Danish rate: 14.7 and 9 respectively).

America is complicit. Denmark enabled it. And now, as the ice recedes, the vultures gather once more.

Russia’s stake: The northern empire

For Moscow, the Arctic is not a frontier — it is destiny. The melting ice unlocks the Northern Sea Route, transforming Russia’s frozen coastline into a toll-collecting superhighway between Asia and Europe. Arctic hydrocarbons and minerals reinforce Moscow’s grip on energy and strategic materials.

Control of northern sea lanes reduces dependence on southern chokepoints policed by Western navies. It extends strategic depth against NATO. In this calculus, Greenland is not land. It is a sentinel at the Atlantic gateway. Any rival presence there threatens Russia’s ambition to turn the Arctic into both engine and moat of a revived empire.

China’s stake: The frozen Belt and Road

For Beijing, Greenland is convergence — resource security, strategic positioning, future logistics. Its rare earths offer an escape from Western chokepoints. Arctic ports promise weeks shaved off trade routes to Europe and North America.

By investing in mining, research stations and infrastructure, China advances its claim as a “near-Arctic state.” The Arctic is not a frontier in Beijing’s imagination. It is a supply chain-in-waiting. Greenland is its keystone — a frozen Belt and Road.

Geopolitical implications

What appears as Trumpian absurdity is, in fact, structural. Greenland is where climate, commerce, minerals and military geometry converge. It is where colonial residue meets 21st-century power.

This is no longer about ice. It is about authorship — who gets to write the map of the next century. The Arctic is mutating into the new Mediterranean: a basin of trade, transit, rivalry and consequence. In that theater, Greenland is Malta, Cyprus, Singapore and Suez in one glacial body. Whoever choreographs its destiny will dictate the syntax of future power.

And here is the farce disguised as fate: this world-historical pivot is being entrusted to a presidency that governs by impulse over intellect, by mood rather than method. When territorial ambition is paired with impunity, strategy becomes improv. Geopolitics turns into a late-night monologue, and early morning tweets — history reduced to a punchline. The map of the century deserves a cartographer. It has been handed a showman.