Open Letters, from Anne Applebaum

01/06/2026

If might makes right, if the U.S. gets to do what it wants using any tools it wants in its own sphere, then there is no need for transparency, democracy, or legitimacy. The concerns of ordinary people who live in smaller nations don’t need to be taken into account, because they will not be granted any agency. Their interests are not the concern of the imperial companies that want their mineral resources, or the imperial leaders who need the propaganda of conquest to keep power at home.

This is a criminally short-sighted policy. For seventy years, American prosperity and influence have been based on a network of allies who worked with us, not because they were coerced, but because they shared our values. Now those allies will begin to hedge:

Trump’s pursuit of an illusory sphere of influence is unlikely to bring us peace or prosperity—any more than the invasion of Ukraine brought peace and prosperity to Russians—and this might become clear sooner than anyone expects. If America is just a regional bully, after all, then our former allies in Europe and Asia will close their doors and their markets to us. Sooner or later, “our” Western Hemisphere will organize against us and fight back. Far from making us more powerful, the pursuit of American dominance will make us weaker, eventually leaving us with no sphere, and no influence, at all.

Trump and his henchmen will also eventually discover that Venezuelans do have agency. They might even discover that Americans don’t like their expensive, well-trained military being used to replace one dictator with another, for the benefit of Trump’s oil-industry donors.

The American military action in Venezuela has created a wave of anxiety across Europe, and especially in Denmark. In part, this is thanks to comments Trump made to my colleague, Michael Scherer: “But we do need Greenland, absolutely. We need it for defense,” Trump said during a phone call on Sunday. On Monday, Stephen Miller, Trump’s Homeland Security Advisor, told CNN that the US would take Greenland because no one would fight for it. Greenland is technically part of the Western hemisphere, and thus presumably part of what the Trump administration imagines to be its sphere of influence too. But here is the strange thing: Greenland is already in the American sphere of influnce. I was in Denmark exactly a year ago, in January 2025, and wrote about the shock caused by what seemed, to the Danes, an American policy of Kafkaesque absurdity.

The worst part, several Danes told me, was that Trump could not articulate, even in private conversations with the Danish prime minister, exactly why he needs to own Greenland. Many had concluded that the true explanation was optical: Trump just wants the U.S. to look larger on a map.

Americans would pay a high price for Trump’s whimsical obsession with the Mercator projection. Greenland is Danish territory. Its inhabitants are Danish citizens who vote in Danish elections. Denmark is a founding member of NATO and a longstanding US ally. Danish companies have huge American investments, and vice versa. Any attempt to invade or coerce Greenland, or to forcibly turn Greenlanders into Americans, would break even more precedents than the recent raid on Venezuela, with consequences lasting decades. This is a disaster Congress must stop before it begins.