Whatever happened to America First?
Greenland and Cuba are the next contestants on Trump’s might-makes-right reality show By Jack Ohman Contributing Columnist January 9, 2026 Explaining the U.S. invasion of Venezuela and the dramatic capture and spurious arrest of President Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, President Donald Trump said the quiet part out loud: the United States is back in the business of nation building. “We’re going to be running it with a group,” Trump said Sunday without specifying who that group would include, “and we’re going to make sure it’s run properly,” Before last weekend, nation-building had been anathema to Trump’s MAGA base, and his pronouncement that the U.S. would now “run” Venezuela isn’t exactly “America First,” especially given Wednesday’s update that this U.S. boondoggle would last “for years.” In a Manhattan courtroom on Monday, Maduro declared himself a prisoner of war. The Trump Administration, meanwhile, has portrayed him as a drug dealer, an odd assertion given that Trump just pardoned former Honduran President and convicted drug trafficker Juan Orlando Hernandez, not to mention Silk Road website founder Ross Ulbricht, who money-laundered $214 million for drug dealers. For months, Trump and his Secretary of Defense and/or War Pete Hegseth, have been busy destroying what they claimed were Venezuelan drug boats, even though those vessels were not remotely capable of reaching the United States. In one such case, the U.S. killed at least two men clinging to their ship’s burning wreckage, an act that violates our rules of military engagement and would seem to qualify as a war crime. But once you’ve ignored one or two laws and your own Constitution, why stop there? To that end, Trump and his team have also set their sights on Greenland and Cuba. Greenland is under the control of Denmark, a NATO member nation and our longtime ally. Fifty-two Danish soldiers died helping us in Afghanistan and Iraq. Thank you for your service, now hand over your rare earth minerals. “Unfortunately, I think the American president should be taken seriously when he says he wants Greenland,” Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Fredericksen said Monday, adding, “but I will also make it clear that if the U.S. chooses to attack another NATO country militarily, then everything stops, including NATO and thus the security that has been established since the end of the Second World War.” Can a NATO member invoke Article 5 — the provision that member states will join together to repel an act outside aggression made against any one of them — if that bad actor is also a member? The demise of NATO, of course, has long been one of Vladimir Putin’s top geopolitical goals. No doubt rooting for Trump to pull a Caracas on Nuuk, Greenland’s largest city, or simply charge the purchase of the island on a Trump gold card, so he can sit back and watch the dominoes fall. Speaking of Vlad, former Trump National Security adviser for Russian and European affairs Fiona Hill told a congressional panel in October 2019 that Russia had approached the Trump administration about “some very strange swap arrangement between Venezuela and Ukraine.” Doesn’t seem so strange now, does it? And there’s more, potentially much more. Cuba has been a thorn in the side of the United States since the late dictator Fidel Castro seized power in 1959. To stay in business, it has also relied on Venezuelan oil, which now seems to be back under the direct control of the United States, kind of. Trump said Sunday that he would compel oil companies to spend billions to fix Venezuela’s oil infrastructure “and start making money” for the U.S. By Wednesday, that had morphed into an all-we-can-drink situation, with the U.S. making money off Venezuelan oil “indefinitely.” By stepping on Cuba’s fuel line, the thinking goes, the post-Castro regime is sure to fall. “I’d be concerned,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, said of Havanah’s government. What’s the justification for all of this “Donroe Doctrine,” offer-they-can’t-refuse nonsense? Trump’s domestic policy adviser and in-house thug, Stephen Miller, told CNN’s Jake Tapper that “we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” Asked Wednesday if there were any limits on his power, Trump, the convicted tax cheat who was found liable of having sexually assaulted a journalist and whose name appears in the Epstein files with stunning frequency, replied, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” So, where is our imperialist commander in chief going with all this? If we’re looking at a bully-based tripartite global order, with the United States running the Americas, Putin running roughshod in Europe and China taking over Taiwan, the rest of Asia and whatever else it wants, we’re in territory no one could have imagined since World War II.Trump’s domestic policy adviser and in-house thug Stephen Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper that “we live in a world, in the real world…that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” As if to drive the might-makes-right point home, Miller’s wife Katie posted a map of Greenland with an American flag overlay to her X account. The caption read, “SOON”. So, where are these wannabe imperialists going with all this? If we’re looking at a bully-based tripartite global order, with the United States running the Americas, Putin running roughshod in Europe, and China taking over Taiwan, Asia, and whatever else it wants, we’re in territory no one could have imagined since World War II. To be clear, that’s potentially the end of the great military alliances such as NATO, SEATO and ANZUS, that were put in place to keep World War III from ever coming to pass. And here I’d thought Trump was elected over the high price of eggs. Jack Ohman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and columnist who also writes at https://substack.com/@jackohman. |
