Coming home to roost

The conversation surrounding former President Donald Trump’s cavalier and intransigent insistence on acquiring Greenland because “the US needs it for national security” is a stark, almost clinical, illustration of a long-brewing hypocrisy.

The discussion is tempered, academic, even amused. It focuses on the historical inaccuracy of his claims, the diplomatic faux pas, the logistical absurdity. What it overwhelmingly fails to confront is the profound, existential ugliness of the principle: a powerful state casually asserting a right to the sovereign territory of a weaker ally based on sheer might and perceived necessity. This casual assertion is the echo of a doctrine the United States has enforced globally for decades, and now, in a twist of poetic justice, its logical endpoint is being murmured not in some distant, embattled capital, but in the halls of Washington, aimed at its own allies. The chickens, as it were, are coming home to roost.

Imagine the cataclysmic uproar if the Russian president were to publicly demand a slice of Finland or Norway, citing national security and insisting that he will do it the easy way or the hard way, just like President Trump’s declaration at the WEF Davos.

The editorials would scream of neo-imperialism, emergency UN sessions would convene, sanctions would be drafted, and the very foundations of the “rules-based international order” would be declared under siege. Yet, this is precisely the logic Russia employs regarding Ukraine—a logic that, stripped of its own moral failings, stems from a rational security perspective Moscow has articulated for decades. They point to broken promises of NATO non-expansion, to the creeping military infrastructure toward their borders, and declare it an existential threat. The war that has ensued is monstrous in its execution, but its core ignition lies in this principle of great-power spheres of influence, a principle the United States has authored and enforced in its own hemisphere for two centuries. Similarly, China’s absolute insistence on Taiwan is, from a purely strategic viewpoint, as understandable as the US would find a Chinese military base in Baja California. Taiwan is, for Beijing, an unsinkable aircraft carrier pointed at its heart. This does not justify aggression, but it illuminates the blinding double standard: when America speaks of “national security,” it is treated as a serious, albeit clumsy, doctrine. When rivals do so, it is pure, unvarnished aggression.

There is, admittedly, a mischievous and dark part of the mind that wishes to see the poetic justice of Trump acting on his whims, of seeing the United States not just muse about Greenland but forcibly annex Canada too. It is a fantasy of karmic retribution, where the architect of so many interventions finally turns the gun on its own workshop. Since the dawn of its hegemony, America has “come for” so many: for Vietnam and Cambodia, for Iraq under false pretenses, for Libya into ruin, for Afghanistan into a generation of war, and incessantly for Iran and Venezuela through crippling sanctions and covert schemes. And through it all, the chorus from its allies was often silence, or worse, enthusiastic support. They said nothing, because they were not Vietnamese, or Iraqi, or Libyan. They participated in the accumulation of a massive karmic debt, believing the ledger of power would never be presented to them. The principle was always that others could be destabilised, that their sovereignty was conditional, that their human lives were collateral in the grand game of interests.

Now, the conversation has shifted. The unthinkable is being thought aloud in Washington: taking what one wants from democratic allies because it is needed. The reaction is not moral outrage, but bureaucratic correction. This is the ultimate reveal. It demonstrates that the so-called rules-based order was never truly about rules, but about whose rules.

The allies’ moral compass, which remained stubbornly dormant during the bombardment of Fallujah or the drone strikes in Waziristan, is not malfunctioning; it was simply programmed to only activate when the transgressor is not a friend. The violent crackdowns on protest in nations like Iran are met with thundering condemnation and threats of action—even as, simultaneously, pro-Palestinian protests on Western campuses are cleared by police, and a former CIA director can jokingly toast foreign agents within protest movements abroad. Imagine the reciprocal statement from a Russian intelligence chief. The hypocrisy is not just deafening; it is the very engine of global cynicism.

This moment, therefore, is the cautionary tale, the shock therapy for the complicit. The poetic tragedy is not that Trump might actually seize Greenland—the tragedy is that the conversation is so banal. It is the sound of a system recognising its own reflection in a distorting mirror and choosing to critique the angle of the glass rather than the grotesque image it reveals.

The warning shot is this: when you normalise the doctrine of “might makes right” and “security über alles” for yourself and your patron, you do not contain that doctrine. You legitimise it. You arm every rival and adversary with your own philosophical weaponry. You teach the world that sovereignty is not sacred; it is a privilege of the sufficiently powerful. And when the patron’s gaze, restless and insatiable, eventually turns toward you, you find you have no language of principle left with which to object. You have already sold it, trade by trade, intervention by intervention, for a share of the spoils or a quiet life.

The chickens coming home to roost are not literally invasion fleets heading for Copenhagen or Ottawa. They are the erosion of the very moral and legal barriers that once seemed, however imperfectly, to protect the weak from the strong. “First they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out…” The modern, geopolitical corollary is: “First we came for the Iraqis, and you did not speak out. Then we came for the Libyans, and you cheered. Then we mused about coming for you, and you could only stammer about mineral rights and parliamentary procedure.” The ultimate injustice is that the lesson, delivered in this almost academic, tempered tone, will likely be missed.

The allies will fret about the inaccuracy of the claim, not the venom of the principle. And in doing so, they will prove that the most enduring legacy of this hegemony may not be its victories, but the hollow, amoral world it has taught everyone, including itself, to accept. The silence they once offered for the suffering of distant millions has matured into a sophisticated, diplomatic quietude in the face of their own potential subjugation. That is the true, chilling poetry of this moment. That is the harvest, finally, coming home to roost.

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