Trump, Greenland & Left's Pitfall
On the 7th of January 2025, at West Palm Beach, Florida, the elected president of the United States, Donald Trump, announced that for economic and national security reasons, he intended to annex Greenland and Panama. According to him, the Panama Canal is operated by China, and ships from China and Russia are “all over the place,” which he deemed unacceptable. If Denmark refuses to relinquish its legal claim to Greenland, he threatened to impose steep tariffs on Denmark1.
While this announcement has sparked outrage, with many emphasizing that both the U.S. and Denmark are NATO members, this focus misses the point. NATO membership does not inherently prevent such actions, nor does it address the deeper ethical and legal questions. This reliance on NATO rhetoric is a classic pitfall, where the focus shifts to procedural norms instead of the morality of the act itself. By centering the argument on NATO, critics unintentionally validate the framework established by the absurd proposal.
Such rhetorical traps are not new. Since the 1980s, right-wing rhetoric has often sought to punish challengers to the status quo in the most extreme ways, provoking outrage while obscuring the underlying issues of justice and legality. This type of rhetorical trap often leads to the quiet acceptance of a “lesser evil,” reinforcing unjust systems rather than challenging them. Consider a judicial system where a disproportionately harsh punishment is handed down for a minor offense. Public outcry might focus on mitigating factors specific to the case—“but it was a first-time offense!”—while leaving unchallenged the broader principle that such punishments are inherently unjust. This focus on circumstantial exceptions implies that in other, less “sympathetic” cases, the harsh punishment might be acceptable. In doing so, the public unintentionally legitimizes the punitive system as a whole, rather than questioning its moral foundations or structural fairness.
This dynamic illustrates how rhetorical traps shift attention away from systemic critique. By centering the debate on whether a specific instance crosses a perceived threshold of absurdity, the deeper ethical question—whether the system itself is just—is obscured. Such concessions to the “lesser evil” are not merely passive; they actively entrench the very systems of power and control that they ostensibly oppose.
Similarly, the absurdity of annexing Greenland and Panama risks distracting from the deeper issue: the normalization of coercive tactics that violate sovereignty and international law. These proposals, while extreme, are not isolated. They reflect a broader trend of imperialist ambitions cloaked in the language of economic and national security. The real danger lies in the precedent this sets: a world where powerful nations justify domination under the guise of protecting their interests, while international systems designed to prevent such actions remain ineffective or complicit.
The key question is not simply how to stop such absurdities but what concessions might be made to avoid them—and what these concessions reveal about the fragility of international norms. To prevent falling into the same traps, we must interrogate not only the immediate absurdity but the broader systems that enable such rhetoric and actions to thrive.