What Is Trump Doing With Greenland?

Walter Russell Mead uses his Wall Street Journal column to muse about President Trump’s reasons for his repeated statements about making Greenland a part of the United States:

Disentangling Mr. Trump’s true intentions is difficult. The blizzard of foreign and domestic initiatives unfolding around the most hyperactive White House since Franklin D. Roosevelt and the extreme unconventionality of many of the Trump administration’s policies make this administration singularly difficult to analyze. The president’s approach to politics, intuitive rather than analytical and working from intellectual and moral foundations that largely reject the mainstream consensus of the post-Cold War era, adds to the complexity of the task.

The administration’s conscious use of shock and outrage as political tools makes cool, levelheaded assessment harder still. The president’s preternatural talent for baiting his adversaries into self-defeating, over-the-top responses to his provocations is a not insignificant factor in his meteoric rise.

He goes on to characterize the “political establishment’s” view of the president’s remarks about Greenland:

a political absurdity and a moral monstrosity

concluding with the following advice:

To be effective, Trump administration critics need to think more and rail less.

As I’ve said any number of times, I find President Trump baffling. Here’s a thought that I don’t think I have heard anyone else suggest. Have you ever heard of a “brushback pitch“? Said another way what do you think of the idea of China or Russia occupying Greenland?