Dear Weekend Jolter,
President Trump's Arctic maneuvering has truly been an Iditarod of insanity, has it not?
As things stand, the U.S. president is touting "the framework of a future deal" with NATO on Greenland. Details are sketchy and in dispute. The proposal reportedly would respect Denmark's sovereignty over the land, mostly, with discussions centering in part on U.S. access for military bases, possibly involving giving the U.S. a sovereign claim to “pockets” of territory. Trump aborted planned tariffs on allies in the meantime.
So: Was it worth it? Considering Trump probably could have exploited existing arrangements dating back to 1951 to pursue his security aims without the drama — indeed, updates to that pact are being discussed, the New York Times reports — the price looks unacceptably steep.
Make no mistake, that price has already been paid. Back when acquisition was theoretically on the table, the sticker price for Greenland was estimated to be as high as $700 billion. That didn't represent the true cost. The add-on, intangible costs — to the integrity of the already-strained Atlantic Alliance, to America's reputation as a steady and trusted partner in the West — were accumulating at a brisk pace all along. The latter is blowing away like the windswept snow off Sermitsiaq. The former is being tested, to use one of Trump's favorite phrases, like never before.
Noah Rothman itemizes the bill:
Even if the president's account of the framework is accurate — a dubious presumption, but one to which many will cling — the notion that the U.S. could not have secured additional basing and commercial licensing rights in Greenland absent the threat of invasion and occupation is nonsensical. His bullying incurred material costs, sacrificed American prestige, tarnished its reputation with its allies, and bore an ugly resemblance to America's irredentist enemies abroad. Nothing that could not have been gained through more diplomatic means was secured. Much that should not have been sacrificed in this process was lost.
I urge you to read Jim Geraghty's ten-point refutation of Trump's message to the prime minister of Norway, which last weekend escalated his NATO-nation browbeating beyond all rational boundaries, linking the get-Greenland campaign to the Nobel Peace Prize–shaped space in his trophy den — following the threat of now-scrapped tariffs. "In a saner and better world, we would be having a serious discussion of the 25th Amendment of the Constitution right now," Jim wrote.
Even if Trump's antics yield a real deal, this week's Davos gathering offered a glimpse of their dangerous consequences. By the time the president assured the World Economic Forum audience that he wouldn't actually use military force to acquire the resource-rich and inhospitable island, leaders had already begun eulogizing the postwar order.
"The old order is not coming back," Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said. With characteristic charm, Trump sneered from the podium, "Canada lives because of the United States — remember that, Mark." This, as he appealed to the Europeans to cede the territory as a token of appreciation and for the sake of international security.
On The Editors, Noah warned that "essential elements of the American national character abroad" — respect for sovereignty, respect for democracy, etc. — are being tossed aside. Even the Euro nationalists are souring on Trump as a result of the Greenland gambit. In addition to Jim's ten-point rebuttal, I commend to you everything Andrew Stuttaford has written about the strains this episode has put on America's alliances. The always-diplomatic Andrew underscores how Trump's conduct also distracted from otherwise valid concerns about Greenland, which certainly would be a useful piece of national real estate (cue Jeff Bridges):
The irony of all this is that the administration has been right to stress that under-defended and very sparsely populated Greenland is both a vulnerability and, through its raw materials, an opportunity. At the same time, however, the way it has set about remedying the former and pursuing the latter has been counter-productive and, in the case of the former, something that could largely have been resolved under existing treaty arrangements.
NR's editorial urges all sides, most importantly Trump, to take the temperature down, in hopes of working toward an agreement amicably — noting that "what has been said cannot be unsaid, and some of the damage caused by this episode will take a very long time to put right."
It didn't have to be this way. Trump could have, and should have, made clear from the start that military force was never an option against allies. He could have negotiated for what he wants short of ownership, without rattling the West. Failing that — and looking to the precedent of his intervention in the performing arts — he could have simply announced that Greenland will henceforth be renamed "Trump," then updated its website and signage.
In all seriousness, such a stunt would have had the benefit of only making the world further question his mental state, not America's moral authority.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
It's . . . only . . . been . . . one year: Trump at Year One
The Greenland editorial, once more, is here: Trump's Reckless Greenland Antics
So much for moderation: Democrats' Radical Left-Wing Vision for Virginia
ARTICLES
Andrew McCarthy: After Being Excoriated by Trump-Appointed Judge, Halligan Is Removed by DOJ
Dan McLaughlin: Vance Will Have to Choose Between Tucker and the Presidency
Noah Rothman: Radicalized Progressives' Long Knives Are Out for the Democrats' Political Realists
Jeffrey Blehar: Trump Versus the World
Jeffrey Blehar: Our Impossibly Small-Souled President
Charles C. W. Cooke: California Flirts with Economic Suicide
Scott Turner: It's Time to Ditch 'Disparate Impact Theory' — and Biden's Weaponization of Civil Rights Law
James Lynch: This Refugee Witnessed Atrocities in a Chinese Internment Camp. Years Later, She's Still Demanding Justice
Kathryn Jean Lopez: Let the Pro-Life Movement Declare Independence
Abigail Anthony: Montana College Student Resorted to Racist Harassment to Justify His Own 'Anti-Hate' Campaign
Jim Geraghty: Kamala Harris's Presidential Campaign Was Run by a Bunch of Lunatics
John Fund: Youngkin's 'Common Sense' Legacy in Virginia
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Brian Allen hits up Philadelphia's Museum of the American Revolution: Spreading the Word, from July 4, 1776, to Today
Armond White dissects the politics of Bruce: 'Faithless' — Springsteen's Latest Hysterical Politics
In-house Trekkie Jeff Blehar made the grave mistake of watching the reboot: Star Trek: Into Irrelevance
FROM THE NEW, MARCH 2026 ISSUE OF NR
Gordon S. Wood: The Five Greatest Words in the Declaration
Robert P. George: How to Keep Our Republic
Mary Katharine Ham: Reading Makes Us Better Citizens
Yuval Levin: America the Durable
Ayaan Hirsi Ali: How Religious Liberty Sustained America
Christian Schneider: A Love Letter to Shoeboxes
NOW THAT WE'VE GOT YOUR ATTENTION: PERUSE THESE EXCERPTS
NR's editorial assesses Trump at the end of Year One:
President Trump entered office one year ago today with the urgency of a man who was just given a few months to live. Within hours of being sworn in, he had already signed a blizzard of executive orders, both unraveling Joe Biden's unilateral actions and taking sweeping steps to advance his own agenda.
He has continued the frenzied pace. He is currently running everything from the Kennedy Center to (notionally) Venezuela. Just the last week or so, he has tried to pressure Iran to stop killing protesters and, much less consequentially, urged the New York Giants to hire John Harbaugh. His drive for action, controversy, and attention is so intense and relentless that even the hyperactive TR might have recommended that he slow down a little.
Much good has come from the unbridled ambition. Trump has made tremendous strides in scaling back the transgender insanity and DEI initiatives within the federal government. His aggressive enforcement of immigration laws has led to a historic decrease in border crossings and a significant outflow of illegal immigrants who have either been deported by force or who have decided to leave on their own. He's rolled back the preposterous campaign to usher gas-powered cars into desuetude. In his own significant legislative achievement, he got Congress to pass an extension of his first-term tax cuts, which was coupled, unfortunately, with various campaign gimmicks such as his "no tax on tips" pledge.
His need for speed, however, has meant that he took many actions haphazardly. Elon Musk's DOGE effort to rightsize the government ended without making a dent in the federal budget. Much more significantly, his shoot-from-the-hip tariffs, purportedly under the authority of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, are bad policy and legally dubious; they are currently hanging by a thread at the Supreme Court. It's quite possible that their chaotic rollout may be bookended by a chaotic rollback after an unfavorable Court decision.
Trump has also ramped up the pettiness in his second term. Things he only thought about in his first term, he's acted on in his second term. He has engaged in retributive lawfare against political enemies, issued arbitrary and disgraceful pardons, mocked ex-presidents in plaques hung up on White House grounds, and generally worked to create a sense that he's not to be crossed by means fair and foul.
He's often ignored rules and overstepped his constitutional authority, whether by disregarding the TikTok ban, blasting noncombatants out of the water in the Caribbean, or imposing the aforementioned tariffs. Determined to twist itself into knots to justify whatever Trump wants, the Justice Department has suffered a series of self-inflicted embarrassments.
James Lynch interviewed a Xinjiang internment camp survivor about her horrifying experience and daring escape. Remember, China wants the world to ignore this:
From November 2017 to March 2018, Dr. Sayragul Sauytbay was imprisoned at one of China's internment camps in Xinjiang where she witnessed mass atrocities few have lived to tell the world about.
An educator of Kazakh descent, Sauytbay was forced to be a language instructor at one of the camps until she pulled off a miraculous escape to neighboring Kazakhstan. Today, she remains haunted by the torture, rape, beatings, forced confessions, and other horrors she experienced, saw, and heard at the internment camp in Xinjiang, which she refers to as East Turkistan because it remains the home of Turkic ethnic groups.
Through a translator, Sauytbay spoke with National Review at length about her experience in the Chinese camp, the persecution she faced in Kazakhstan after escaping, and her current life in Sweden as vice president of the East Turkistan government-in-exile, an activist-led entity that advocates for democracy and independence in the region.
The first Trump administration gave Sauytbay the International Women of Courage Award in 2020 in recognition of her bravery in shedding light on CCP atrocities. Five years after the first Trump administration declared the Chinese persecution of Uyghurs to be genocide, Sauytbay is telling her story once again in hopes that the current geopolitical instability amid U.S. intervention in Venezuela and unrest elsewhere will inspire change in her home country.
Beginning in January 2017, Sauytbay says Chinese authorities started to raid her home, interrogate her, and occasionally beat her. At the time she was overseeing five kindergartens in Xinjiang as an educator. At that point, Sauytbay's husband and two children had already fled to Kazakhstan, where they became citizens and lost contact with her. Sauytbay was prevented from leaving the country with her family.
In November 2017, authorities decided to bring her into one of the camps as a language instructor and gave her no choice but to accept her new role. Inside the camp, rape and sexual assault occurred regularly because the guards are given permission to commit whatever atrocities they want. Guards would pick out women at night and keep them until the morning, when they'd come back beaten and bleeding in sensitive places, she recounted.
There was also a "dark room" with an electric chair and another chair with its nails sticking out. Sauytbay says she was brought into the room on one occasion to be interrogated and tortured for a few hours. Cameras are constantly tracking the prisoners inside and outside of the facility, except when they enter the torture room. Sauytbay regularly heard screams coming from the room after victims were dragged inside.
One extremely graphic incident stands out in particular for Sauytbay. One day, the guards brought roughly 200 detainees into a conference center at the camp, where they were forced to watch a woman in her 20s get gang-raped after giving a forced confession to fake crimes. All the attendees were made to watch the assault. Since then, Sauytbay has had difficulty sleeping and regularly experiences nightmares based on her time in the camp. . . .
In March 2018, she was brought into a nearby city and officially removed from her job as a camp language instructor. Police interrogated and beat her, while handing down a one- to three-year stint as a detainee in a camp rather than an instructor. It was that moment when Sauytbay carried out her extraordinary escape to Kazakhstan because she calculated that she would not make it out of the camps alive anyway.
In the spirit of America’s 250th (speaking of which, do check out NR’s just-out, very special issue on the subject, some highlights of which can be found above), Brian Allen's got a piece on Philly's Revolution museum and its exhibit on the Declaration of Independence's "journey." Read on:
It's all well and good to declare independence. It's a different, more intricate matter to get the news out. "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" — unalienable rights as opposed to "nasty, brutish, short, and under-the-boot-heel existence" — were shiny, new genies out of the bottle. Over many, many decades, emboldened embrace by nations from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe led to thousands of movements, with tweaks here and there, copying our Declaration of Independence.
The Declaration's Journey is a smart, punchy, moving, and mind-opening take on July 4, 1776, and much of what followed. It covers far too much ground, and I would have done it differently, but 2026 is young. The show raises all the right questions. It's an optimist's take, too, but "from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe" is a hint. Tried a lot elsewhere, our Declaration of Independence might still play to full houses, with grumbling here and there, from West Quoddy Head in Maine to Cape Flattery on the Olympic Peninsula. It has bombed a lot, too, sometimes a whiff, often with much flop sweat, sometimes in a dumpster fire. . . .
The exhibition covers 1776 to, more or less, today. It's about the dissemination of the Declaration — getting the news out — and this is a marketing-and-communication theme. The Declaration of Independence is a document, but it's also a mega-thrust earthquake, aftershocks and all. How the ideas unfolded is, as our pivotal French allies would say, "très compliqué."
CODA
A shout-out to a hometown hero (okay, not actually my hometown, but near my hometown): Red Bank's own Count Basie. Here he is with his orchestra, doing a sultry swingin' song called "Love Flower."
Until we meet again. Thanks for reading — seriously, who does that anymore?
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