Biden's Middle East trip: Following in Trump's footsteps
WATCH: Biden looks poised to betray his campaign promise to sideline Saudi Arabia. Does this really serve America's interests?
Responsible Statecraft
Responsible Statecraft is a publication of analysis, opinion, and news that seeks to promote a positive vision of U.S. foreign policy based on humility, diplomatic engagement, and military restraint. RS also critiques the ideas — and the ideologies and interests behind them — that have mired the United States in counterproductive and endless wars and made the world less secure.
Top photo credit: HAGSHULT, SWEDEN- 7 MAY 2024: Military guards during the US Army exercise Swift Response 24 at the Hagshult base, Småland county, Sweden, during Tuesday. (Shutterstock/Sunshine Seeds)
Trump digs in as Europe sends troops to Greenland
January 16, 2026
Wednesday’s talks between American, Danish, and Greenlandic officials exposed the unbridgeable gulf between President Trump’s territorial ambitions and respect for sovereignty.
Trump now claims the U.S. needs Greenland to support the Golden Dome missile defense initiative. Meanwhile, European leaders are sending a small number of troops to Greenland.
On Wednesday, Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio sat down with Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen and Greenlandic Foreign Minister Vivian Motzfeldt, attempting to find common ground on what has become a surreal crisis.
“There was a fundamental disagreement,” Rasmussen told reporters afterward. Rasmussen said he was unable to change Trump’s position: “It’s clear that the president has this wish of conquering over Greenland.” His Greenlandic counterpart, Vivian Motzfeldt, reiterated her compatriots’ firm stance: “Greenland does not want to be owned by, governed by or part of the United States.”
The meeting, arranged after a week of escalating threats from Trump, was supposed to defuse tensions. Instead, the president is unmoved in his determination to seize Greenland. While the parties agreed to establish a “high-level working group” to continue discussions, this seems to be nothing more than a stalling tactic. The president continues to insist that Greenland must be “in the hands of the U.S…. anything less than that is unacceptable.”
The Golden Dome pretext
With the narrative of “Russian and Chinese ships off the coast” falling apart, the White House has pivoted to a new rationale: the Golden Dome. Trump is now emphasizing that full control of Greenland is “vital” for his proposed multi-layer missile defense system designed to intercept hypersonic and ballistic threats. “NATO should be leading the way for us to get it,” Trump insisted. “IF WE DON’T, RUSSIA OR CHINA WILL, AND THAT IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN!”
Vice President Vance reinforced this position, arguing that “the entire missile defense infrastructure is partially dependent on Greenland.” While there is no denying the strategic value of the island, the U.S. Space Force already operates the Pituffik Space Base with full radar coverage.
Experts dismiss Trump’s claim that annexation is required for Golden Dome to work, arguing that the existing agreements, specifically the 1951 Greenland Defense Agreement, already permit the project’s expansion and any necessary modernization on the island.
The Golden Dome argument appears to be bureaucratic cover for an ideological desire to expand the map. As Rasmussen pointed out, there is zero evidence of Russian or Chinese interest in colonizing the island, rendering the administration’s preemption argument moot.
The $700 billion question
Rubio has been tasked with coming up with a proposal to purchase Greenland, estimated to cost $700 billion. While Rubio tells Congress that the military threats are merely rhetoric to pressure Denmark, the financial offer is being presented as serious.
Danish Foreign Minister Rasmussen shot down the idea with a stinging rebuke of the American social model: “There’s no way that the U.S. will pay for a Scandinavian welfare system and Greenland,” said Rasmussen. “You haven’t introduced a Scandinavian welfare system in your own country.”
Greenland’s answer is just as firm. Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen stated Tuesday, “We choose Denmark. We choose NATO, the Kingdom of Denmark and the EU.” The 34-year old Greenlandic leader is walking a tightrope. As a pro-business leader, Nielsen wants American investment, but he refuses to let Greenland be treated like a prize to be acquired.
When asked for a response to Nielsen’s loyalty to the current order, Trump turned to personal intimidation: “I disagree with him. I don’t know who he is... but that’s going to be a big problem for him.”
All of this just shows the administration’s fundamental misunderstanding, or willful ignorance, of Greenland’s constitutional status. Even if Copenhagen wanted to sell Greenland, it lacks the legal authority. The 2009 Self-Government Act gives Greenlanders the final say on their future.
Congress fractures
The crisis has bled into Congress. On the expansionist right, Senator Randy Fine (R-Fla.) has introduced a legal framework for Greenland to be recognized as the 51st state. “Greenland is not a distant outpost we can afford to ignore — it is a vital national security asset,” Fine declared, arguing that control of the island equals control of Arctic shipping lanes.
In response, Representative Jimmy Gomez (D-CA) introduced the “Greenland Sovereignty Protection Act.” This bill would block federal funds from being used to “invade, annex, purchase, or otherwise acquire” the island. The bill would also prohibit funding for troop surges or influence campaigns aimed at affecting Greenlandic opinion. Gomez warned that threatening allies “weakens international law and puts NATO at risk.”
Republicans aren’t united on this. Representative Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) joked, “Psst, Denmark… Tell this administration the Epstein files are in Greenland… they’ll lose all interest.” Senators Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) and Representatives Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Don Bacon (R-Neb.) introduced a Sense of Congress bill affirming the U.S.’ partnership with Denmark and Greenland and recognizing America’s responsibility to comply with treaty obligations and solve any disputes peacefully.
Sen. Murkowski and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H). introduced the “NATO Unity Protection Act” to prohibit the use of DoD or State Department funds to blockade, occupy, annex or otherwise assert control over the sovereign territory of a NATO member state. Even House Speaker Mike Johnson tried to cool things off, stating, “All this stuff about military action... I don’t think anybody’s seriously considering that. And in the Congress, we’re certainly not.”
Europe's symbolic stand
The Danish government has confirmed that Danish soldiers would shoot back if invaded. Denmark allocated $6.5 billion last year to boost its military presence in the Arctic. After Trump brushed off Denmark’s defenses as “two dogsleds,” the Danish Armed Forces and European allies announced increases in their military presence in Greenland.
To send a message, a group of European countries is sending a small, symbolic force to Greenland. Germany has sent a 13-person reconnaissance team; France has redeployed 15 soldiers; Sweden is sending officers; Norway, the Netherlands and the UK have contributed single-digit personnel. The White House has stated that European troops in Greenland won’t change Trump’s mind.
These forces, barely 30 personnel in total, obviously cannot defeat the 200 U.S. troops already stationed at Pituffik, let alone any reinforcements. Rather, their purpose is political. As one French diplomat noted, “We’ll show the U.S. that NATO is present.” With European troops on the ground, any U.S. incursion becomes an attack on Germany, France, and the UK simultaneously.
The rhetoric from European capitals is apocalyptic. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and EU Defense Commissioner Andrius Kubilius have warned that American military action against a NATO member state would mean the end of the alliance. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk went even further, stating that such an attack would be “the end of the world as we know it.”
What happens next
The “high-level working group” will convene in Copenhagen next month, but expectations are minimal. The administration seems committed to acquisition despite the diplomatic dead end. There is a clear off-ramp, but it requires the White House to accept that sovereignty is not a transaction.
Legitimate security concerns regarding the Golden Dome can be addressed through the 1951 Defense Agreement, which has served U.S. interests for 75 years. As for critical minerals, the U.S. should pursue access through commercial diplomacy and joint ventures that respect Greenland’s high environmental standards.
The handful of European soldiers now stationed in Greenland won’t stop American military action if Trump decides to attack. But their presence raises a question every American should ponder: How did we become the threat our own allies need protection from?
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Top image credit: VideoFlow via shutterstock.com
Congress should walk Trump's talk on arms industry stock buybacks
January 16, 2026
The Trump administration’s new executive order to curb arms industry stock buybacks — which boost returns for shareholders — has no teeth, but U.S. lawmakers could and should take advantage.
The White House issued an Executive Order on Jan. 7 to prevent contractors “from putting stock buybacks and excessive corporate distributions ahead of production capacity, innovation, and on-time delivery for America’s military." The order empowers the Defense Secretary to "take steps to ensure that future contracts prohibit stock buybacks and corporate distributions during periods of underperformance, non-compliance, insufficient prioritization or investment, or insufficient production speed."
The administration is right to call attention to military contractors getting rich on the taxpayer’s dime, but Congress has the constitutional authority to regulate commerce and control federal funding, not the president.
He could certainly encourage voluntary compliance with the order by recommending that Congress cancel or withhold contracts from firms delivering what it considers excessive stock buybacks, shareholder dividends, and executive compensation. But President Trump proposed a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget on the same day he released his executive order, and he remains committed to a “peace through strength” agenda partly characterized by the expensive pursuits of military and technological dominance. The $1.5 trillion budget proposal is reason enough for military contractors to call the president’s bluff.
What's more, the defense industrial base cannot absorb a $500 billion plus up to the Pentagon budget. It’s a small industry with a limited number of major players and workers. Should Congress approve a $500 billion increase in a single fiscal year — through the reconciliation process, if at all — it would further cement existing incentives for contractors to develop poorly designed, unreliable, and overly expensive weapon systems. The Pentagon would hastily award lucrative contracts to firms eager to answer the president’s call for a greater rush to production.
The president’s executive order will likely amount to a flashy political stunt, but lawmakers can take meaningful action against shareholder-first business practices in an industry so reliant on government contracts. The most obvious action is to reduce weapons purchases, making it cost-prohibitive for contractors to continue prioritizing shareholders over everything.
Short of a reduction in weapons procurement spending, it would be bold for lawmakers to challenge contractors’ financial positions by instituting caps on authorized but unissued stock, what’s traditionally known as “treasury stock.” If a publicly traded military contractor was limited to owning a certain percentage of its own stock, its board would have lesser ability to manipulate common stock prices during downturns caused by poor contract performance or geopolitical tumult.
Lawmakers could further narrow the applicability of these caps by limiting them to contractors that generate a certain percentage of their revenues from government contracts.
Another option is for Congress to further reduce the tax advantage of repurchasing stock instead of issuing dividends to investors. Buybacks are relatively tax efficient because they are tax deferred. Investors pay capital gains when they sell the stock, whereas dividends are taxed as income. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 established a 1% excise tax on stock buybacks exceeding $1 million, which the Joint Committee on Taxation estimated will generate $74 billion in revenue from fiscal years 2022 to 2031. At the time, there was Democratic support for an excise tax of 4%, which would vastly reduce the tax incentive for contractors to repurchase shares.
Realistically, the most viable path for Congress to rein in arms industry stock buybacks is to be specific about its expectations for military contractors — and most importantly, issue penalties when contractors fail to meet those expectations. As previously mentioned, the government can refuse contracts to companies already behind schedule and over budget on existing programs. If firms risk future ineligibility for Pentagon contracts, it might encourage them to share honest cost estimates during the bidding phase — when contractors so often underestimate cost projections to win contracts.
Congress can also disqualify firms from future contracts if they repeatedly refuse to provide the Pentagon with the cost information necessary for the department to negotiate fair prices, particularly with sole-source suppliers. Data denials are a well-documented, persistent issue in the arms industry, yet contractors continue to get away with them.
At the end of the day, talk is cheap, but meaningful legislative action can change contractors’ financial incentives long-term. This is critical to holding firms accountable to their contractual commitments and the president to his word, especially given the administration’s recent investment in L3Harris.
Partial government ownership can offer public officials greater opportunity to cash in on government contracts, as reduced risk boosts a firm’s valuation. But it can also shift a firm’s focus away from shareholder returns and toward investment, should the government effectively leverage its financial stake — which ideally comes with board representation and voting rights.
Should it choose to take it, Congress has an important opportunity to shape the outcome of these partnerships and to curb industry buybacks more generally.
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Top photo credit (Gemini AI)
In this scenario Trump's oil play could actually help Venezuelans
January 16, 2026
“We’re going to run the country,” President Trump said regarding Venezuela at a press conference just hours after Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s capture in a U.S. military raid in Caracas.
To do so, the Trump administration has begun taking charge of Venezuelan oil shipments and selling them directly in international oil markets. The U.S. plans to make sure that these revenues are used only to buy imports from American companies.
Whether this will at some point transform into a net benefit for the Venezuelan people depends on the granular details of the plan, which currently we know little about.
The broader outlines of the vision are of course enough to make the blood of any Latin American nationalist boil. It has not been since the early 20th century that the United States has sought to play such a direct role in running the economies of countries in the region. One could hardly imagine a darker irony for Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution, which had vowed to retake sovereign control of the country’s oil wealth, than to have the president of the United States and executives from major oil companies deciding how to divvy up the country’s oil without the presence of any Venezuela representative.
Yet when all is said and done, the economics from this arrangement have the potential to bring sizable gains to Venezuela and to fuel an economic recovery — if the system is set up with consideration for the short-term implementation risks.
What is most meaningful economically in this arrangement is that it lifts the ban on Venezuelan oil trade with the United States imposed by Trump during his first term in 2019. Just as the economic losses from losing access to U.S. oil markets were huge, the economic gains from regaining it are sizable.
The devil, as always, is in the details. Yet if, as Venezuelan authorities have insisted, the plan ensures that the Venezuelan economy receives its legal share of the proceeds from oil sales, then those proceeds will fuel a much-needed economic recovery.
Many of the executives that Trump called to his meeting last Friday expressed skepticism about investing in Venezuela’s oil sector. This is not surprising: recovering Venezuela’s oil production will take money and the country is still subject to significant political uncertainty — some of it generated by the authorities in Caracas, some of it generated by Trump himself.
Yet the dynamics of the meeting were also deeply familiar to those of us accustomed to studying private sector–government relations in personalist regimes like Trump’s. The political subtext was that oil majors were asking Trump for guarantees for their investments, guarantees that Trump seems all but ready to give. And, when you think of it, it is hard to imagine a better scenario for Venezuela’s oil industry than having the U.S. government roll out financial guarantees (ultimately funded by U.S. taxpayers) to subsidize the recovery of Venezuela’s oil production.
But while Trump’s oil plan could bring substantial economic benefits to Venezuela in the long term, it also carries sizable short-term risks. This is because any attempt to implement the White House idea that the U.S. will run Venezuela could bring the country’s battered economy to a standstill, causing a major foreign exchange and food supply crisis.
Venezuela’s oil revenues fell to zero when President Trump imposed a blockade on oil exports to third countries in December. According to recent reports, Venezuela received $500 million from the first oil sales on Wednesday through direct sales to private banks, in a system similar to that which had been used in the past for revenues obtained through the authorization granted by the Biden administration to Chevron to sell Venezuelan oil.
Trump’s requirement that proceeds from the sale of Venezuelan oil be used to fund imports from the United States - which apparently is not being enforced in this first sale - adds a layer of complexity. In Venezuela, non-oil imports are carried out by the private sector. There is no way to carry out Trump’s plan for the administration of foreign exchange in Venezuela without setting up exchange controls which are administratively complex, economically inefficient, and highly vulnerable to arbitrage and corruption.
The delays associated with setting up this plan pose a serious risk to the Venezuelan economy. Inventories of food and essential items are dangerously low. Unless the country is provided with an immediate mechanism to carry out essential imports, there will be a short-term economic collapse in production. As sources of foreign exchange dry up, the currency’s depreciation could accelerate rapidly, and Venezuela could very likely enter once again into hyperinflation, derailing any plan for political and economic stabilization.
In order to avoid this crisis, the U.S. government must take several decisions rapidly.
The first is to provide a source of foreign exchange with which Venezuelan authorities can fund essential imports in the near-term. One possibility is to continue to allow rapid disbursement of oil proceeds to Venezuelan authorities. Other funds exist and are also readily available. Venezuela has more than $10 billion in liquid offshore deposits (including gold reserves at the Bank of England, Special Drawing Rights at the International Monetary Fund, and PDVSA deposits in Portugal) which it has been blocked from accessing because of sanctions and the non-recognition of the Maduro government.
Washington should also discard any plan for a complex system of administrative allocation of foreign exchange in Venezuela. It would be absurd for the United States to force Venezuela to adopt administrative controls that the country ditched years ago. If the U.S. wants to make sure that American companies benefit from access to Venezuelan markets, it should propose an agreement with Venezuelan authorities for Venezuela to commit to zero tariffs on imports from the United States. The U.S. should reciprocate by lowering tariffs on Venezuelan oil sold through the government deposit funds.
Recognition of Venezuelan authorities will also be essential to allow an International Monetary Fund mission into the country. Together with the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and CAF, it should put together a multilateral assistance program within the next six months to support the country’s medium-term economic recovery. The World Food Program and non-governmental organizations should play a key role in ensuring a rapid flow of near-term food and humanitarian assistance.
Many Venezuelans would have liked to see a different economic transition, one accompanied by political change and by the assumption of power by a popularly elected government that represents the will of the Venezuelan people with the authority and international respect to take sovereign decisions. Maduro was clearly unpopular and there is little doubt that the opposition would win a free and fair election if it was held today — as it clearly won the 2024 presidential election that Maduro brazenly stole.
But countries rarely get the transitions that they hope for. Today, the most viable road to building a democratic and prosperous future for Venezuelans requires first stabilizing the country and the economy, avoiding an economic crisis, and paving the way for Venezuela to take advantage of the sizable benefits for its people from restoring its trade with the United States.
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