Pretending to help Donald Trump

The alarming events of the past couple of weeks have made it clear that not one but several crises are likely to occur in the relatively near future. It’s hard to predict how they will interact, and we cannot arrange them in any particular sequence. However, they certainly would interact – and they would all involve the United States.

The first and worst would be a civil war in the United States, probably emerging from a disputed outcome in the mid-term elections in November. The incumbents usually lose control of at least one House of Congress in the mid-terms, and it’s almost certain that the Democrats will win control of the House of Representatives this year.

That would severely hamper Trump’s ability to reshape US politics in his image, and he has a record of rejecting the results in elections he loses. With Trump’s private militia of recently hired ICE gunmen already deployed in Democratic-governed cities, he would be tempted to do in 2026 what he came so close to doing on 6 January 2023.

The likelihood of such an extreme violation of the US constitution is clearly non-zero, but an actual civil war remains a low probability. Outsiders can have little influence in American domestic politics, and it’s included here mainly because a civil war in the United States would cancel all of Trump’s foreign ambitions.

These ambitions include regime change or lesser military interventions in Venezuela, Colombia, Cuba, Panama, Mexico and Iran and the annexations of Greenland and Canada. He has retracted or modified his threats at one time or another in almost every case, but they keep coming up again in a day or a week or so.

The only intervention that has been activated so far is Venezuela. Even that is only partial, since Trump is trying to rule that country by manipulating and threatening the remaining members of the very regime he has just decapitated.

Trump hesitates because he is dimly aware that putting ‘boots on the ground’ in Venezuela is likely to trigger an anti-imperial guerilla war combined with a domestic civil war there. His Venezuela adventure will still probably end in tears, but probably not soon enough to deter him from further adventures elsewhere.

So who is next? It could be Iran, and that could be quite bloody for the Iranians since an American intervention there would be done entirely by bombers and missiles. It might kill a few ayatollahs and spare the lives of a few protesters, but it’s not the sort of gesture that will decide the outcome in Iran.

What really does matter is Trump’s intentions in Europe and North America, and specifically his aspirations to annex Greenland (and a little later, Canada). This is far more important for the rest of the world. If the United States invades Greenland then NATO, the alliance that has played a large part in preventing a nuclear war for the past 75 years, dies.

As part of Denmark, Greenland is part of NATO. The thirty-one NATO members rely on each other for protection. If they stand aside while Trump conquers Greenland (a simple task in military terms), then the promise of protection is void. But what if they preempt Trump and  send their own forces to protect Greenland first?

They would have to parrot all the lies Trump tells about the evil Russians and Chinese surrounding Greenland and planning to seize it. However, if the European Union, Britain and Canada (all NATO members) got their own ships, planes and soldiers into Greenland first at Denmark’s invitation, it would make a hostile takeover by the US difficult-to-impossible.

This is precisely the strategy that France, the United Kingdom and Germany are working on now, according a report in Britain’s Telegraph newspaper on 10 January. If Trump is sufficiently distracted by his Caribbean and Middle Eastern plans and they manage to act quickly, they may preempt Trump’s plans while pretending to support them.

It’s not known if Canada is also involved in these discussions yet, but if it is not, it should be.

Ottawa should offer Canadian forces to protect Greenland from the wicked Russians and the equally evil Chinese, but point out that the Canadian Arctic is threatened by the very same people and ask the Europeans to send some troops to Canada to protect it from the Northern Threat.

The Europeans would be glad to comply, because they don’t want to see Canada swallowed up by the Americans either. Not all Trump’s advisors are fools, so Ottawa might have to accept a couple of American warships stationed in its Arctic regions too, but it would be well worth it to get the Europeans directly involved in defending Canada’s borders.

Gwynne Dyer’s new book is ‘Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers’.  The previous book, ‘The Shortest History of War’, is also still available.