Top image credit: American investor Thomas Emanuel Dans poses in Nuuk's old harbor, Greenland, February 6, 2025. (REUTERS/Sarah Meyssonnier)
Meet Trump’s man in Greenland
January 21, 2026
In March of last year, when public outrage prevented Second Lady Usha Vance from attending a dogsled race in Greenland, Thomas Dans took it personally.
“As a sponsor and supporter of this event I encouraged and invited the Second Lady and other senior Administration officials to attend this monumental race,” Dans wrote on X at the time, above a photo of him posing with sled dogs and an American flag. He expressed disappointment at “the negative and hostile reaction — fanned by often false press reports — to the United States supporting Greenland.”
One might conclude from these comments that Dans — a smooth-talking, well-dressed former investor with a passion for the great outdoors — was America’s envoy to Greenland, or at least a U.S. diplomat. But one would be wrong.
Dans is a prototypical example of a notable Trumpian innovation: the MAGA policy entrepreneur. While most administrations prefer to lean on career diplomats with clear roles, President Trump has a penchant for working informally through MAGA-vetted policy influencers. This approach, which sidesteps typical oversight and policy processes, is highly controversial. But it suits Trump, who can use trusted allies to push his personalized, deal-based form of politics. It probably doesn’t hurt that, when it comes to controversial proposals like acquiring Greenland, it also keeps the naysayers at arm’s length.
Dans, who made his career as an investor in 1990s Russia, has embraced his role with gusto. Even before Trump returned to office, Dans organized a trip to Greenland for Donald Trump Jr. and the late conservative media figure Charlie Kirk, in a move that provided an early signal that Trump was serious about his desire to take the island from Denmark. Dans has been a fixture in Greenland policy ever since, through his frequent visits to the island (and the White House) as well as his constant stream of interviews with Greenlandic and foreign media.
Dans declined to comment for this article. Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, did not address Dans’ role but told RS that Trump “leads on all foreign policy.”
“He listens to input from a variety of members of his national security team, but ultimately makes the decision he feels is best for the American people,” Kelly said.
Part of Dans’ enthusiasm for his Greenland gig may stem from necessity. After failing to get a job in the early days of the second Trump administration — a roadblock that several sources linked to his involvement with the controversial Project 2025 — Dans had to blaze his own path.
The Greenland portfolio was a perfect fit. Few MAGA stalwarts could truly claim to know their way around the far north, and an establishment figure might hesitate to follow Trump’s instincts on a policy destined to antagonize NATO. But Dans had the background to deal with a complex Arctic issue — and the MAGA bona fides to prove that he wouldn’t back down from Trump’s fight. (Trump seemingly rewarded Dans in December, naming him the chairman of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission, which advises Congress on scientific research in the far north.)
Still, the effort to acquire Greenland, especially through coercive measures, sits uneasily with some of Dans’ other foreign policy opinions.
Dans is, by all accounts, a skeptic of neoconservatives and their efforts to remake the world in America’s image, according to sources who have spoken to him about his views. And he’s popular among many right-wing restrainers, who consider him an intelligent and likable political operator. But he views Greenland as simply too important to America’s interests to avoid contemplating the use of military force. “He's basically a clear anti-interventionist,” said Curt Mills, the executive director of The American Conservative and an acquaintance of Dans’. “But he seems to have a special exception for this.”
This exception can sometimes make Dans sound like an unreconstructed hawk. “The current status quo is untenable, so things need to change, so they will change,” he told the BBC earlier this month. “Bottom line is, everything is on the table.”
The only way out of the cold is through
Dans may be from Texas, but his instincts always drew him further north. He first became involved in the Arctic in 1990, when he visited the Soviet Union as an exchange student at the Moscow Energy Institute.
He returned to Russia in the mid-1990s and launched a career as an investor during the country’s privatization boom. It was during this period that he came to know many prominent Russians, including Kirill Dmitriev, who now leads Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and often acts as an intermediary for U.S.-Russia talks. (Dans told the Financial Times that Dmitriev is “the Kremlin’s ace in the hole.”)
He later developed a relationship with many in the MAGA movement during the first Trump administration. Using these connections and his decades of experience in the former Soviet sphere, he earned a pair of Arctic-related jobs in 2020 and early 2021. His wide travels throughout Eastern Europe and Central Asia, coupled with his passion for fine suits, give him an air of an “international man of mystery,” as one person who works on Greenland told RS.
Given this resume, Dans seemed poised to get a major foreign policy job in the second Trump administration. But politics is a sensitive business, and Dans found himself involved in the messiest Republican saga of the last presidential election: the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.
Heritage hoped that, by laying out a series of actionable policy proposals and creating a bank of vetted staffers, it could guarantee for itself a fundamental role in shaping a future Trump administration. Instead, the project turned into an easy target for Democrats, who constantly tied the think tank’s most controversial proposals around Trump’s neck. “I have nothing to do with Project 2025,” Trump said in the final presidential debate of the 2024 election. “This was a group of people that got together, they came up with some ideas, I guess some good, some bad, but it makes no difference. I have nothing to do [with it].”
Many of those who participated in Project 2025 managed to distance themselves from the effort and get a job in the Trump administration. But the Dans twins weren’t so lucky. Paul Dans, who ran the project, became synonymous with its failure. And Thomas, who helped craft the initiative’s proposals on Ukraine, got caught in the middle. “The family was made the scapegoat,” Mills argued.
Paul is now attempting to revive his MAGA stock by running against Sen. Lindsey Graham for the Republican Senate nomination in South Carolina. Thomas, for his part, chose to head north.
The ensuing story has played out a bit like a redemption arc in a Tolstoy novel. Through his self-imposed Arctic exile, Dans has emerged as a new man, having built relationships and expertise that quickly cemented him as MAGA’s most qualified Greenland expert. (It helped that Trump had also asked Dans to develop ties with Greenland at the end of his first term, giving him a foothold in the territory.)
Through his organization, American Daybreak, Dans has acted as a public and private cheerleader for U.S.-Greenland unification. His closest Greenlandic ally is a former bricklayer named Jorgen Boassen, who serves as American Daybreak’s Greenland director. Dans has attempted to elevate Boassen as MAGA’s man in Greenland, introducing him to right-wing influencers like Charlie Kirk (prior to Kirk’s assassination) and Scott Presler, and even bringing the Greenlander on a visit to the White House in January. (Boassen told the New York Times that he communicates with Trump officials through Dans.)
Dans has tried a few different strategies to bolster his case for Greenland joining the U.S. He sometimes frames the issue in historical terms, noting the crucial role that American soldiers (including his grandfather) played in defending the island from the Nazis in World War II. Other times he makes the case that Greenlanders have never really had a say in their political autonomy, all while highlighting the risks to the U.S. of Chinese and Russian influence over the island.
But Dans’ reasoning may be less important than his determination to support the Trump administration. “I do not think Dans is comparable to, say, [Secretary of State Marco] Rubio, who is clearly the originator of the Venezuela policy,” Mills said. “I would basically cast Dans as an ideological entrepreneur ready to fill the void.”
And fill the void he has. Just a year into the second Trump administration, Dans has turned his Arctic exile into an attention-grabbing role in Trump’s policy entourage. “This has probably worked out pretty well for him,” Mills said. “He's kind of the eminence grise in the portfolio.”
An ‘echo-chamber’
Dans is far from the only powerful policy influencer in the world of MAGA. Jared Kushner, who played a more official role in the first Trump administration, has acted as an informal U.S. envoy in the Middle East since his father-in-law returned to office. Mark Savaya, a weed kingpin from Detroit, reportedly used his inroads with MAGA to organize a meeting between Trump and the Iraqi prime minister last year, after which Trump appointed Savaya as his envoy to Iraq.
For Trump, this approach makes a lot of sense. The president is skeptical of “deep state” bureaucrats, preferring to rely on people he personally trusts. These informal channels also create some distance between Trump and his most controversial policies, allowing him to maintain ambiguity as to whether these envoys are really acting on his behalf.
In many ways, Dans is an ideal candidate for this approach. “He's one of the few government officials that is still interested in talking to people like me” and even responding to criticisms, said an Arctic researcher who was granted anonymity in order to protect his professional relationships. Mills called him “cerebral” and “unusually nice” for a person working in a “sharp-elbowed business.” Sumantra Maitra, a right-wing realist who advises the Congressional Greenland Caucus, described Dans as a friend and said “his heart is in the right place.”
But Trump’s policy on Greenland also reveals some serious downsides of the informal envoy approach. One is a profound lack of organization. In a normal policy process, officials from across the State Department and intelligence community would have the opportunity to coordinate on and critique such a consequential proposal. This process is slow-moving, and it lets spoilers slow things down. But it also helps the administration prepare to defend the policy and process its potential repercussions, like, say, the rapidly evolving trade war between the U.S. and Europe that Trump kicked off with a tweet over the weekend.
This points to the more fundamental flaw in this approach: By maintaining a small, informal group of policymakers, Trump’s team has insulated itself from dissenting voices, leaving few checks on more outlandish proposals, like threats to seize the island by force. “There is a lack of external voices which would balance some of the instincts within the administration, which risks being in sort of an echo-chamber,” Maitra said. (Maitra added that he supports deeper U.S. engagement with Greenland but opposes annexation.)
This approach has allowed the administration to ignore the fact that, in both Greenland and the U.S., the idea of taking over Greenland is quite unpopular. "The Congress is not going to accept it,” Maitra argued, noting that many lawmakers want deeper cooperation with Greenland but few want to actually take over the island. “The American people are not going to accept dead Americans and dead Danes over a patch of ice-filled land," he said.
A more traditional policy approach might have surfaced these issues and reminded Trump that he can pursue nearly all of his goals in Greenland without having to take it from Denmark. After all, the Danish government has already pledged to invest $6 billion in Greenland’s security and said it would allow the U.S. to expand its military presence there, according to Pavel Devyatkin, a senior associate at the Arctic Institute and a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute, which publishes RS. “It's not [in America’s] interest because there's no military threat from Greenland,” Devyatkin argued.
But none of these ideas seem to have broken through into Trump’s circle of trust. In fact, the administration appears to be doubling down. Last week, Trump’s team signaled the importance of the issue by moving a planned meeting with Danish officials from the State Department to the White House, where Vice President J.D. Vance stepped in to lead the discussions.
The decision to elevate Vance’s role in Greenland drew blowback from European officials, who view the vice president as hostile to their interests, according to the Washington Post. But Dans argued that Vance, after joining his wife on a visit to an American base in Greenland last year, has earned a big role in the policy. Vance is “the one who originally carried the torch” to Greenland, Dans told the Post, adding that the vice president therefore “deserves a share of the honor in whatever happens.”
One can’t help but wonder whether Dans hopes that some of that honor could trickle down to him, too. While Dans may not be the most powerful driver of the Greenland push, he is its most persistent advocate. That simple fact could well be enough to cement his place at the heart of Trump’s most provocative foreign policy initiative — and perhaps even land him a job as an administrator of America’s largest territorial acquisition since the Louisiana Purchase.
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Top image credit: President Donald Trump delivers remarks at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, following Operation Absolute Resolve in Venezuela leading to the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Saturday, January 3, 2026. (Official White House Photo by Molly Riley)
The new Trump Doctrine: Strategic domination and denial
January 21, 2026
The new year started with a flurry of strategic signals, as on January 3 the Trump administration launched the opening salvos of what appears to be a decisive new campaign to reclaim its influence in Latin America, demarcate its areas of political interests, and create new spheres of military and economic denial vis-à-vis China and Russia.
In its relatively more assertive approach to global competition, the United States has thus far put less premium on demarcating elements of ideological influence and more on what might be perceived as calculated spheres of strategic disruption and denial.
The White House’s relatively succinct 2025 National Security Strategy mentions denial explicitly three times, beginning with, “We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere.” Then, the United States “will build a military capable of denying aggression anywhere in the First Island Chain,” while “reinforcing U.S. and allies’ capacity to deny any attempt to seize Taiwan or achieve a balance of forces so unfavorable to us as to make defending that island impossible.” Spheres of strategic denial are now the central organizing principle of the 47th president’s foreign policy.
This strategy reflects a sobering reassessment of U.S. overcommitment abroad shaped by two decades of managing elusive objectives in the Middle East as Beijing quietly accumulated leverage along critical chokepoints — steadily expanding its investments across Latin America and the BRICS, advancing its Polar Silk Road ambitions, deepening civilian and military engagement throughout Africa and Asia, and securing dominance over rare earth mineral processing and supply chains.
Against this backdrop, the Trump administration’s pursuit of Venezuela’s oil resources and even the desire to acquire Greenland signal a far more decisive realignment of American strategic posture. The United States appears increasingly intent on using discrete yet disruptive military action rather than prolonged interventions while restricting its rivals’ access to key regions, resources, technologies, and governance mechanisms. Its modus operandi is to secure advantage without costly military entanglements or the fatigue of colonial or quasi-imperial overreach, all the while challenging the post–World War II international institutional architecture.
Short of overt kinetic confrontation, by exploiting vulnerabilities in technological ecosystems, economic supply chains, outer space infrastructure, and even the normative frameworks that govern international law and diplomacy, the United States is showing that it can rival in influence by diffusing and contesting its competitors’ once-thought unassailable dominance.
Spheres of denial therefore operate by upending the status quo ante or ‘business as usual’ through an obstacle course that challenges China’s and Russia’s security commitments to their presumed allies and partners, narrowing their options for maneuver or foreclosing alternatives altogether and raising the costs of the challengers’ participation.
The denial strategy can prove effective, but it risks breaching faith in the international system itself, already significantly fragmented by global interdependence, and further eroding any residual consensus on international rules, norms, and laws. Bypassing established norms and agreements, sidelining or coercing allies, and weakening multilateral cooperation could make America’s partners less willing to align on defense, intelligence sharing, or economic policy — the very pillars the United States relies upon to project power abroad.
Each maneuver and obstruction carries a subtle diplomatic message from America’s friends and enemies alike: a prendre acte — “I shall take note of this and bring it up against you in the future.”
Political thought has long cautioned against zero-sum obstruction as corrosive to the normative foundations of social order and, if left unchecked, precipitates institutional collapse.
The Thucydidean premise that “might is right” found an echo in Stephen Miller’s recent public statements. In a January 2026 interview with CNN, Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser, declared that the world is governed by “strength, by force, by power,” calling these the “iron laws of the world.” Taken to their logical conclusion, as Thucydides observed in the “History of the Peloponnesian War” — “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”
As global competition intensifies, the contours of state-sanctioned influence have become both more diffuse and more contested.
China’s steady rise and expansion of its maritime clout, digital infrastructure footprint, and its investment in critical technologies such as semiconductor manufacturing, artificial intelligence, and satellite networks is an exorbitant challenge to U.S. interests. Here control, or denial of access can shape both economic development and military capacity.
Equally formidable is Europe’s still sizable energy dependence on Russia — with Hungary, Slovakia, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium among the largest importers — as well as its technology reliance on both the United States and China, further limiting the continent's strategic autonomy.
The Arctic region and U.S. overtures to Greenland, too, are an assertion of a sphere of denial to China and Russia, respectively. The region, once an item of curiosity on a transatlantic flight and somewhat peripheral in geopolitical terms, has become a theater for competing claims to vast natural resource deposits, control over prospective shipping lanes, and exclusive economic zones.
The Trump administration’s pursuit of sovereign control over Greenland has become a paradigmatic global security issue, framed as essential to strengthening America’s military posture against intercontinental threats, particularly Russia’s assertion of maritime boundaries and the restoration of its Arctic military facilities, as well as China’s research, military, and commercial ambitions in the region. In a conversation with Fox News host Maria Bartiromo at the 2026 Davos meeting, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reiterated Greenland’s strategic necessity for the Golden Dome shield while warning allies against panic and overreach.
Weakening its rivals by expanding U.S. influence, intensifying competition over regions and resources, and denying them military and technological advantages, will require careful balancing between deterrence and escalation. While this approach — if executed with diligence, humility, and requisite restraint — can yield substantial strategic and material advantages, it also risks entrenching normative paralysis.
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Top image credit: Milos Ruzicka via shutterstock.com
We are sleepwalking into nuclear catastrophe
January 20, 2026
In May of his first year as president, John F. Kennedy met with Israeli President David Ben-Gurion to discuss Israel’s nuclear program and the new nuclear power plant at Dimona.
Writing about the so-called “nuclear summit” in “A State at Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion,” Israeli historian Tom Segev states that during this meeting, “Ben-Gurion did not get much from the president, who left no doubt that he would not permit Israel to develop nuclear weapons.”
President Kennedy was alarmed by the prospect of a world in which more states came to possess nuclear weapons and saw Israel’s acquisition of nuclear arms as particularly problematic. He reasoned that if we could not convince our allies not to develop these weapons, there was little hope of convincing those with whom we had less friendly relations.
Kennedy’s fear of nuclear proliferation only grew after the terrifying events of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, which demonstrated to him just how easily human civilization could end should nuclear weapons be used in a war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. A world with “15 or 20 or 25 nations” that are nuclear armed would necessarily become ever more dangerous, Kennedy stated in his famous 1963 American University commencement address. This diagnosis would become the fundamental rationale for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which was negotiated in the years after Kennedy’s death and signed by key states in 1968, entering into force in 1970.
Kennedy recognized that to get a commitment from non-nuclear armed states to maintain their non-nuclear weapons state status, states with nuclear weapons would have to give something in return, namely access to nuclear energy for peaceful purposes and the promise of eventual disarmament. This idea of a “grand bargain” would eventually turn into the three pillars of the NPT. Five states that had acquired nuclear weapons up to that point (U.S., USSR, U.K., France, and China) would get to keep their nuclear arsenals, while agreeing to negotiate “in good faith” towards not just nuclear but general disarmament. Everyone else would forgo the ability to obtain nuclear weapons. Peaceful use of nuclear energy would be available to all.
The NPT has now been in existence for over 55 years and has garnered an impressive membership of 191 States, with five states — four of which happen to be the other nuclear-armed states — outside of the treaty regime at this time: India, Israel, North Korea, and Pakistan (plus South Sudan). Israel did develop nuclear weapons after Kennedy’s death, with its first nuclear weapon becoming operational by 1967, prior to the negotiations of the NPT. India and Pakistan became nuclear powers in 1974 and 1998, respectively, and their recurrent conflicts have threatened the whole world ever since.
Only North Korea has reached nuclear-armed status since, when it tested an atomic bomb in 2006. Having been an NPT States Party, North Korea left the treaty in 2004 after learning the following lesson from Saddam Hussein’s toppling in 2003: Get nuclear weapons or face the prospect of a regime change war, that is, unless you toe the line drawn by the United States and its friends.
That message has only grown stronger since that time, including in Libya and Syria. But the message from the recent Venezuela invasion is even more clear: No national or international laws of any kind need apply. We will do as we please. Law is for whiners and wimps.
The 11th Review Conference of the NPT will take place April 27-May 22 of this year at the U.N. headquarters in New York City. This gathering occurs every five years, and this year’s conference promises to be particularly contentious amid so much conflict around the world. The last two review conferences in 2015 and 2022 (the latter was postponed from 2020 due to COVID) did not produce an agreed-upon substantive outcome document.
A third failure in a row could set the treaty back in a serious way, potentially unleashing both vertical and horizontal proliferation. In fact, recent articles in Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy encouraged Japan to develop its own nuclear weapons, with the former also recommending that Germany and Canada join the nuclear club, while the latter threw South Korea in the mix.
The threats to the NPT are many, from states and publics that are more skeptical of nuclear energy, which once upon a time was going to be “too cheap to meter,” to the lack of any meaningful progress on disarmament on the part of the five nuclear weapons states party to the treaty. Now there’s even a new arms race afoot. And at no time has the message been clearer to all non-nuclear weapons states: you are either with us or you better have nuclear weapons. If you belong to neither category, we will find you, take your leader in the middle of the night, and take your oil.
But the idea that all countries would be in one of two camps and that all who don’t support the U.S. agenda should have nuclear weapons, is of course preposterous. A world with “15 or 20 or 25 nations” that are nuclear armed would lead to nuclear war and nuclear annihilation faster than we could imagine. But that is exactly where we are heading if the lawlessness is left unchecked and the U.N. continues to be sidelined and emasculated.
In fact, the true lesson of the many decades of the NPT is that non-proliferation without earnest disarmament on the part of the nuclear weapons states and without a solemn commitment to international law does not work. Further weakening of the U.N. Charter, as we have seen play out in Venezuela, will surely make matters worse. Only sober efforts at diplomacy and negotiation, including by extending and re-negotiating the New START Treaty between the U.S. and Russia, can save us from ourselves.
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