Trump could take Greenland as easily as Putin took Crimea

I turned to Politico, a magazine I can't stand usually, to see how the European political elite is coping with the US threat to Denmark's possession Greenland. 

A Politico journalist has spoken to a Danish politician who asked for anonymity to speak freely.

“It could be like five helicopters ... he wouldn't need a lot of troops. There would be nothing they could do.”

If Greenland can be annexed because the USA needs her "very badly" and Denmark doesn't then populous China should be allowed to annex empty Asian Russia.

Former US Ambassador to KSA Chas Freeman says the USA has created a sort of international tyranny

'And so the first thing is that the operation itself was very skilfully managed. The second is that it's entirely illegal, indecent, an atrocity really. And I think it put an end to three centuries of effort to develop a rule of law facsimile internationally, starting with the 18th century and going on. And the last 50 years of the 20th century, or much of the 20th century, was spent by the United States trying to promote a revision of the rule of law internationally. That decayed, by the time of the Biden administration, into something called the Rules-Bound Order, which was basically: we make the rules and we enforce them on whomever we wish and exempt whomever we wish, including ourselves, from the rules. But I think what we're seeing is an international reaction that is building to this really outrageous repudiation of the whole idea of rules internationally.'

Quotations

“Let me get this straight: We go to a country, we capture their leader, we bomb it, and then we say we run this country now — and that's not war. But when they send cocaine over here, that people are willingly snorting — that is war. That doesn't make any sense.”

Kat Timpf

Reposted on X by the excellent Elon Musk:

“The intellectuals could not, of course, actually prevent the masses from attaining literacy. But they could prevent them reading literature by making it too difficult for them to understand – and this is what they did. The early twentieth century saw a determined effort, on the part of the European intelligentsia, to exclude the masses from culture. In England this movement has become known as modernism. In other European countries it was given different names, but the ingredients were essentially similar, and they revolutionized the visual arts as well as literature. Realism of the sort that it was assumed the masses appreciated was abandoned. So was logical coherence. Irrationality and obscurity were cultivated.”
John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939

Shaiel Ben-Ephraim

@academic_la

·

2h

The genocide was not the product of the Netanyahu government. All of Israeli society, including the center and the left fully supported it and believe that the IDF fought morally despite the horrific war crimes it committed. The very small minority that opposes the genocide is bullied into silence.

I have to admit I agree with C.S. Lewis

“Lewis was also disturbed by the mobility which the masses were displaying, abetted by increasing leisure and access to travel. He saw that global tourism would become an increasingly urgent problem as world populations increased. People moved ‘in great herds’ to the seaside, only to find that a sea of people rather than of water awaited them. It was exhausting, and they did not enjoy it. If a travel permit were required before tickets could be bought, much congestion and wear and tear on the roads would be avoided. Most people are ‘born molluscs’ and would be much happier staying at home. Mass tourism is, in any case, an ‘absurdity’, since only scholars are really interested in cathedrals and artworks. The tourists who gawp at them are filled with boredom and self-reproach, and would never, Lewis contends, have dreamed of such a pastime had not holiday advertisements contrived to turn them into sham students and fake cosmopolitan aristocrats.” John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939 (1992)

Invading Panama, Ukraine, Greenland, anywhere

There is no distinction in law between the USA attacking Caracas and Russia attacking Kiev but there's a big distinction between those two things and a putative Chinese attack on Taiwan. That would not be illegal. Taiwan is part of China.

There is no distinction in law between the USA invading Panama and Russia invading Ukraine.

Interestingly General Noriega of Panama was the last man to declare war on the USA, something he no doubt enjoyed. 

Before him the last man was Admiral Horthy, Regent of Hungary. 

I don't suppose the King of Denmark will declare war on the USA if the Americans invade his realm. It would not do Denmark any good. 

Denmark leaving Nato would be magnificent but it would make an invasion inevitable. 

And Trump doesn't give a fig about Nato anyway. 

I have no idea if any woman has ever declared war on the USA. Queen Victoria did not but it was a possibility in 1895, over Venezuela as it happens.  What a small world it is.

Erratum

I was accurate when I said that Emmanuel Macron, unlike Marine Le Pen, initially approved the US’s kidnapping of Mr Maduro, saying Venezuelans could “only rejoice”, but yesterday he issued a statement saying he “neither supported nor approved” the US military operation. Just so you know. 

Douglas Macgregor: Trump never has a strategy

Douglas Macgregor thinks Trump has no strategy in kidnapping Maduro and never has a strategy. Maduro was kidnapped to distract attention from the Epstein papers, rather as Serbia was bombed for 72 days to distract Americans from Monica Lewinsky. 

He interestingly said the Monroe doctrine, which Trump has reinterpreted to mean the USA can do what it likes in the Western hemisphere, presumably including Greenland, was a line from a speech by James Monroe that was forgotten until Warren Harding revived the idea, after the USA withdrew from Europe. 

Venezuelan oil is low standard, hard to refine and will not make a difference to world prices quickly. The country's mineral resources are mostly in the interior and will be hard to extract and transport for years.

The Daily Telegraph this morning: 

“There is no blueprint, no plan for what comes next,” said one source. “And anybody who tells you that it’s anything other than day by day is really not being forthright with you.”

....“The duration of the transition, its benchmarks, and its ultimate outcome all remain resoundingly unclear,” said Laurel Rapp, director of the US and North America programme at Chatham House, in a recent commentary. “Trump and Rubio’s imprecise language about who currently runs Venezuela hints at limited succession planning, if any.”

....“It is not a criticism. It is his style,” said the first source familiar with the president’s Venezuela thinking. “Pull the trigger and then figure out how it works.

In this case, he added, Mr Trump and his team were particularly incensed by the way Mr Maduro had responded to US demands by dancing in public.

"At some point here, he did feel that sometimes he was being mocked,” he said, confirming previous reports by the New York Times.

What if Liechtenstein had annexed Alaska?

In 1867 the Tsar Alexander II offered to sell Alaska to the Prince of Liechtenstein who refused it thinking it was useless. 

Who would have expected that?

The rouble was the strongest-performing currency of 2025. It rose 45% against a basket of major currencies. 

The US dollar fell more than 8% last year, its largest decline since 2017.

Quotations

Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.

Edward W. Said. Not true of Hitler's short lived empire and some others, but true of most.

Years ago, someone told me: 'They’re going to end up accusing you of being a drug trafficker—you personally—you, Chávez. Not just that the government supports it, or permits it—no, no, no. They’re going to try to apply the Noriega formula to you.'

Hugo Chavez

Rousseau and his disciples were resolved to force men to be free; in most of the world, they triumphed; men are set free from family, church, town, class, guild; yet they wear, instead, the chains of the state, and they expire of ennui or stifling loneliness.

Russell Kirk

IF evolution simply means that a positive thing called an ape turned very slowly into a positive thing called a man, then it is stingless for the most orthodox; for a personal God might just as well do things slowly as quickly, especially if, like the Christian God, he were outside time. But if it means anything more, it means that there is no such thing as an ape to change, and no such thing as a man for him to change into. It means that there is no such thing as a thing. At best, there is only one thing, and that is a flux of everything and anything. This is an attack not upon the faith, but upon the mind; you cannot think if there are no things to think about.

G.K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy.

To see suffering does you good, to make suffer, better still.

Nietzsche

Sadism is not an infectious disease that strikes a person all of a sudden. It has a long prehistory in childhood and always originates in the desperate fantasies of a child who is searching for a way out of a hopeless situation.

Alice Miller

You very cheeky man!

Ugandan dictator Idi Amin replying to Monty Modlyn, much to Modlyn's delight. Modlyn had asked him how many people he had murdered. Modlyn was a portly British television journalist who cultivated a South London working-class, irreverent persona. 

There have been about a hundred regime changes brought about by the USA

Often they involved tampering with elections. 

In Albania it involved creating a pyramid scheme which caused economic misery for years to get rid of a Prime Minister who was given his job originally because of US bribery. He offended the Americans by becoming too close to Turkey.

Foreign leaders captured by the USA since the end of the Cold War include Manuel Noriega (Panama), Saddam Hussein (Iraq), and Jean-Bertrand Aristide (Haiti) in 2024. 

Juan Orlando Hernández (Honduras) was arrested in Honduras in February 2022, extradited to the US, sentenced to 45 years in prison on drug trafficking charges and in November 2025 was pardoned by Donald Trump. (According to Max Blumenthal and Whitney Webb the CIA is closely involved in the drug business around the world.)

This is the context in which the illegal and murderous Russian invasion of Ukraine can be viewed.

The execution of the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, portrayed by Manet here, is also part of this long story. 

What will Russia and China do?

'Fascist philosopher Alexander Dugin described Maduro’s fall as a “sharp and acute challenge to Russia” and warned that the US’s infiltration techniques in Venezuela could be replicated on Russian territory. MH-17 perpetrator Igor Girkin bemoaned that “another country that was counting on Russia’s help did not receive it” and argued that Russia’s “bloody quagmire of Ukraine” prevented it from aiding Venezuela.'

Samuel Ramani in the Daily Telegraph today. Apparently Girkin is still allowed to criticise Putin from his prison cell, which is curious. Dugin says he's a conservative who disapproves of fascism, communism and liberal democracy.

Maduro supplied China with cheap oil so his fall will be a big blow to her - but I also read that the US will now be able to drive down world oil prices to hurt Russia - if you understand this contradiction, gentle reader, please enlighten me.

The UK applied to join the EEC simply to please the US - we have been US vassals since 1956

From How Europe failed us by CD Montgomery in the August-September 2025 issue of The Critic here.

'Despite Macmillan making clear to JFK the demerits of the EEC as it actually existed, the official US minutes of the PM’s chat with the President in 1962, a year after Britain had finally applied to join (and De Gaulle had vetoed for the first time), are stark: US support depended upon the UK “fully [accepting] the political and institutional obligations of the Rome Treaties”.

'And thus we have our first Powellite lesson: the EEC was, for Britain, an American project. We tried to join it because we thought doing so curried favour with Washington; our entry was as they wished it. They did not make it happen: we did that. We responded to our post-imperial situation with decisions we thought were in our interests, but our Cold war (and quintessentially post-Suez) calculus was, “How does this play in DC?” That was our European strategy. It was not that of France whose strategy (so admired by the young Henry Kissinger) was precisely the opposite — to make America sweat for her relationship with it.'

Sir Anthony Eden was the last British Prime Minister to follow a foreign policy independently of the USA and was destroyed by Eisenhower as a result. The supine obedience to Washington that Sir Keir Starmer displays today over Venezuela is the same vassalage that Macmillan, Mrs Thatcher and all the others displayed. 

Jeremy Corbyn has many appalling (and some good) opinions. Regardless of his views he would have been incapable of being a competent Prime Minister but it was his antipathy to the USA that ensured he would be destroyed by a well organised campaign in which no doubt security services and foreign governments were involved.

I posted before something that Eden said after the Suez crisis, quoting Enoch Powell.

"Ah, Enoch, dear Enoch! He once said something to me I never understood. He said, "You know, I've told you all I know about housing, and you can make your speech accordingly. Can I talk to you about something that you know all about and I know nothing? I want to tell you that in the Middle East our great enemies are the Americans." You know, I had no idea what he meant. I do now."

It might be argued that the Americans have been Britain's enemies not just in the Middle East but much more generally at least since the cold war ended, perhaps long before. 

Jeremy Corbyn of course might argue that and so might have Enoch Powell.

At least Harold Wilson kept us out of the Vietnam war.

Military idiot and bar

As I mentioned, I was conned into renewing my Daily Telegraph subscription but hardly read it because it's such disgraceful propaganda for the British, US and Israeli defence establishment (it seems to be almost one establishment these days).

I think of Hamish de Bretton-Gordon as possibly the most stupid writer the paper has, excepting Colonel Richard Kemp, and I could drive a coach and horses every day through his absurdities could I bring myself to read them. 

But today's idiocy is worrying.

"Operation Absolute Resolve, the US government’s audacious seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, is a stark reminder of the extraordinary, unique military power available to President Trump when he chooses to use it. Every dictator, despot and rogue regime will have taken note: no tyrant is beyond reach if the US decides to act."

He relishes the forthcoming overthrow of the Iranian government and hopes other autocrats will be toppled. 

In other words international law does not figure in his outlook and nor, I presume, does it in the outlook of the MoD or MI6. 

Iraq has been forgotten. 

Afghanistan and Libya too.

Labour MPs who want the PM to condemn the attack the Telegraph calls 'Maduro apologists'. The enemy within, by implication.

I recently read an Irishman of centre-left politics saying Donald Trump SHOULD annex Greenland. 

The useful idiots who write the Telegraph editorials may come round to that in time, for fear Greenland might be a gap in Nato defences, even though Denmark is in Nato and what threat is there to America in the Arctic or anywhere else?

Rory Stewart, the former Tory MP, is exactly the romantic, dashing, socially concerned, leftish Tory I loved and thought I was in the 1980s. Now his views are the antithesis of mine on everything - until today that is, when he said Europe must “wake up to the threat posed by the US”. I bet Nigel Farage doesn't say that.

Quotations

“Cruelty is one of the oldest festive joys of mankind.”  Nietzsche

Journalist at press conference: “Why did the Palestinians initiate this on October 7th?” Max Blumenthal: “Well they didn’t. This war has been going on for 75 years. Israel initiated it in 1948 by ethnically cleansing 750,000 people.”

"Are we still a liberal democracy? My answer is no longer. This did not happen in a dramatic and single event. This is a process in which essential aspects of democracy are under severe attack and democracy is weakening. The protection of human rights, the separation of powers, the rule of law and the judiciary's independence are weakening. Our regime is now a government of one political authority that is effectively controlled by one person, the same person who controls the government and controls the Knesset. This is the prime minister." Israeli former Supreme Court President Aharon Barak addressed demonstrators in Tel Aviv in a video message yesterday.

"We're so collectively desensitized to the US empire that we're not even registering the absurdity: the US - a country where guns are sold at Walmart - has just kidnapped the president of a sovereign nation (and head of the army) to charge him with "possession of machineguns." Arnaud Bertrand today on X.

"In 2006, two academics, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, wrote a paper called “The Israel Lobby,” which argued that a loose group of Israel supporters used their connections and financial resources to tilt US foreign policy in Israel’s direction. One of them, Stephen Walt, was academic dean of The Harvard Kennedy School, which put him at the pinnacle of his profession. The savage response to the paper was like nothing academia had ever seen. We can now report that Jeffrey Epstein helped coordinate the counterattack with Alan Dershowitz, while Larry Summers was Harvard president. And Les Wexner was one of the largest donors to the Kennedy School, if not the largest. Epstein controlled Wexner’s money. In other words, a loose group of powerful supporters of Israel used their financial resources and connections behind the scenes to destroy the reputations of two academics who wrote a paper arguing that a loose group of Israel supporters was using their connections and financial resources to shape American foreign policy." From Drop Site News which is a very useful guide to what is known about Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein and Dershowitz ensured the article "The Israel Lobby" was not published in the Atlantic which had commissioned it. The London Review of Books published it instead and the book which the article became was also published by Allen Lane in London not the USA.

A friend just sent me this

 

Katie Miller posted this on X 15 hours ago. She is married to Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy.

 

In response to this the Prime Ministers of Greenland and Denmark protested.

Yet Sir Keir Starmer, Emanuel Macron, Ursula von der Leyen etc do not criticise the abduction of Maduro or Trump saying Marco Rubio is now in charge of Venezuela. Only Marine Le Pen and Marjorie Taylor Greene do.

Max Blumenthal said on X:

France's billionaire banker president supports Trump's gangsterism
The collective West is consolidating the supremacist post-WWII order through the law of the jungle, thuggery, and no consent from the citizens it's turning to subjects

By the way the abduction was obviously arranged with the help of Venezuelan generals and some of the Venezuelan government. It might be a management buyout.

Russia and Europe were humiliated in Caracas

A Russian blogger calling himself 'Shakespeare' laments that the Americans "simply exterminated the political leadership of an independent and sovereign country. And this is against the backdrop of "our harsh response to Ukraine," which we're all expecting in the fourth year of the war and it's not a given that we'll get it. I have only one emotion now: shame. I'm ashamed, guys. Not for Venezuela. And certainly not for the USA. That's all. It's the holidays now. I went to see an old Soviet movie. I wish the same for you."

The abduction of Maduro, illegal though it was, because it was flagrantly illegal and justified by obvious and childish lies, will presumably scare lots of autocratic leaders. 

What effect will it have on Putin and US negotiations with him?

Whatever effect it has on him it will terrify America's allies (vassals). 

Jeffrey Sachs thinks so:

'The US is deliberately out to rip up any semblance or shred of international law. I don't know how Europe will feel when the, when the United States, invades Greenland. But, don't be surprised when it happens. Trump has announced it, he has announced it again and again, and it's very, very likely to happen. One day, Trump will say, "We have a national emergency," and Greenland will be occupied. And then probably Europe will say, "Oh, thank you. Thank you, US. It could've been worse." This is how things are right now. Principles? Who needs them?'

Another Russian blogger today:

Invasions are fine if America or Israel carry them out

Obviously the rules based order was always humbug. 

It's obvious now to the weakest intellect.

Andrew Napolitano's excellent Judging Freedom is the place I go to for insight into US foreign policy and retired Colonel Daniel Macgregor is as always interesting about the US kidnapping of President Maduro. 

Note that Colonel Macgregor and Judge Napolitano were both big supporters of Donald Trump. 

No liberals they. Though they are fierce critics of Israel.

Emanuel Macron supports Trump's action in Venezuela while Marine Le Pen condemns it, saying that supporting it would be "to accept our own enslavement tomorrow". 

Sir K Starmer and Frau v d Leyen, fierce believers in international law when Russia is breaking it, say nothing. 

The head of the Russian general staff's intelligence directorate yesterday handed over to the Americans the controlling mechanism of the Ukrainian drone that hit one of Putin's houses, contradicting the Ukrainian denial that such an attack took place and a CIA briefing that there was probably no such attack.

Scott Ritter, who's happy to admit that he's a supporter of Putin and of Hamas, says the drone attack was a CIA operation intended to show Putin that the Americans can kill him. 

He is confident that Trump will attack Iran and annex Greenland and calls him a dictator. 

I start to think today that historian Timothy Snyder might not be so crazy as I had thought in his warnings that Trump wants to establish a dictatorship. 

Luckily it cannot happen at home, despite the President creating tariffs by his fiat, ignoring Congress's authority over taxes. The US constitution still has checks and balances even though Congress is supine and bought. 

The USA is still a free country in a way that no country in Europe is free because it has free speech, despite Donald Trump's attempts to limit criticism of Israel in universities, and because Americans value freedom and distrust the government. With Europeans it's the other way around..

But abroad the checks and balances in the US Constitution don't work and the Administration does as it pleases.

It did for decades. 

But this administration is even more lawless than others. It seems as lawless as Israel's.

I feel the US government's anti-woke measures are a distraction. The Venezuelan big adventure looks like one too. 

From what I am not sure. 

The Epstein scandal? 

I suppose.

Let's hope this ends without bloodshed, unlike the American invasion of Panama, and things get better for the people of Venezuela. 

Noriega's going probably did Panama no great long term harm apart from the hundreds killed. Vladimir Putin expected his attack on Ukraine to go equally well.

Take the worst thing you can say about Hamas, multiply it by a thousand times...

"Take the worst thing you can say about Hamas, multiply it by a thousand times, and it still will not meet the Israeli repression and killing and dispossession of Palestinians."

Gemini (Google's AI) says "this is a genuine quote from Dr. Gabor Maté, a Hungarian-Canadian physician and Holocaust survivor". 

If he were to repeat that remark in the United Kingdom he would be looking at up to fourteen years in prison.

Tulsi Gabbard is possibly my favourite politician after Ron Paul

Tulsi Gabbard 

@TulsiGabbard

Deep State warmongers and their Propaganda Media are again trying to undermine President Trump’s efforts to bring peace to Ukraine—and indeed Europe—by falsely claiming that the ‘U.S. intelligence community’ agrees to and supports EU/NATO viewpoint that Russia’s aim is to invade/conquer Europe (in order to gin up support for their pro-war policies). The truth is that ‘US intelligence’ assesses that Russia does not even have the capability to conquer and occupy Ukraine, what to speak of ‘invading and occupying’ Europe.

21 Dec 2025

Quotations

Elon Musk (@elonmusk). The EU Commission has destroyed countless life-seconds with their idiotic “accept cookies” pop-up!

Pindar, Olympian Odes 2.15-17 (translated by Anthony Verity):

But when some deed has been done, right or wrong,

not even Time the father of all things can undo its outcome.

                             τῶν δὲ πεπραγμένων

ἐν δίκᾳ τε καὶ παρὰ δίκαν ἀποίητον οὐδ᾿ ἄν

Χρόνος ὁ πάντων πατὴρ

δύναιτο θέμεν ἔργων τέλος.

Ukrainians take Monaco

On the last night of the cruise I met a very sympathetic young American. When I went to Antibes he had gone to Monte Carlo and he said he noticed that most of the most expensive cars seemed to have Ukrainian number plates. 

This is what Donald Trump Jnr said recently but my interlocutor had not heard that. 

So it is true.

Rather than spend money on a cruise I feel I should have given the money to the poor but I suddenly remember an upper class English girl saying she gave all her money to the poor because she spent it on clothes. 

She said that the rag trade employed the poorest of the poor. 

My cruise employed hard working people from all around the world, but most from Indonesia and the Philippines, so there is that.

Escape from Bucharest

A week ahead of its departure and to my complete surprise I suddenly bought a ticket on the Windstar Pride sailing from Barcelona on the 20th arriving at Fiumicino, the port of Rome, on the 27th. 

I recommend the Windstar line of small ships the size of big yachts. There were 220 passengers and 195 members of staff, the food and wine were great and by leaving it late to book I got a fairly good price with free alcohol, Wifi and 'gratuities' (a big thing for Americans) thrown in. 

The weather in December was mild, we avoided rain and had sunshine in Barcelona, Leghorn and Rome. The unexciting weather is offset by escaping the madding crowd.

It's probably the best time to see the Mediterranean.

It was my fourth Windstar cruise. I feel old saying this. 

One meets nice, very, very normal people, almost all from North America and most over 60. 

I know. It is what it is. 

Quotations

‘The Europeans dance to our tune…we have all these fictions that we tell people about ‘joint decision-making’…the US runs NATO and the Europeans do what we tell them.’ John Mearsheimer. If only Sarkozy and Frau Merkel had refused in 2008 to agree that Ukraine and Georgia might one day join Nato.

Aaron Maté

@aaronjmate

·

Dec 12, 2025

In military conflicts that the US is involved in, questioning the official narrative at the outset will result in marginalization or disqualification. One can only remain "respectable" in establishment circles if you defer your dissent until long after the damage is done. In the Ukraine proxy war, those who argued that there were reasonable diplomatic options that could have prevented, and then quickly ended, the Russian invasion were dismissed as Kremlin apologists. Now, hundreds of thousands of deaths later, senior Biden official Amanda Sloat admits that Ukraine declaring neutrality before the invasion, or accepting the April 2022 Istanbul peace deal just weeks after, "would have prevented the destruction and the loss of life." Proxy war cheerleaders, including on the left, might want to reflect on why they shunned those of us who wanted to prevent the destruction and the loss of life:

'Gaza has not been "a mess" for centuries. Gaza City was a prosperous Mediterranean port with extensive trade connections until 1948, when Israel shunted 250,000 Palestinians into the narrow strip of land we now call the Gaza Strip and imposed new military borders, cutting Gaza off from its trade routes and much of its agricultural land, and rendering all those who lived there, both refugees and residents, destitute.'

British economist Frances 'Cassandra' Coppola, on December 30, correcting Donald Trump