There was a time, not that long ago, when US vice presidents went abroad to build alliances, offer aid, and pose beside war memorials in well-cut suits. JD Vance, who has more in common with a malfunctioning customer service chatbot than with Dean Acheson, went to Greenland instead. What he wanted there was what Trump wants: access to the island’s mineral wealth and a permanent US military footprint. What he got was an icy rebuke from the Danish foreign minister, a photo-op turned cold shoulder on the tarmac, and a nickname—the most unwelcome tourist in the world—that will stick like frostbite.
Vance arrived at Pituffik Space Base (formerly Thule), part of the American military’s Arctic perimeter, and announced to no one in particular, “It’s cold as s— here! Nobody told me.” Nobody told him because, presumably, he does not listen. He was barely off the plane before he began insulting Denmark’s stewardship of Greenland, accusing Copenhagen of underinvesting in the island’s security. It was a textbook display of imperial hubris: a US vice president, not on a diplomatic mission but on a reconnaissance tour of the next potential acquisition, barking directives like a petty colonial administrator.
The Danish response was swift and withering. Lars Løkke Rasmussen, the foreign minister, said, “This is not how you speak to close allies.” Even Mette Frederiksen, the prime minister, who rarely indulges in overt confrontation, made clear that Vance’s comments had put a strain on relations. She will travel to Greenland next week to undo what he has done, to remind the Kalaallit that their fate is not, after all, in the hands of Ohio’s answer to Joseph McCarthy.
Trump’s second term was always going to be more chaotic than the first. What’s striking is the speed at which its dysfunction is now on display. Vance was not only rebuked abroad but humiliated at home after it emerged that his team had allowed a journalist to sit in on a security briefing about Russian military activity. One official, speaking off the record, called the breach “unprecedented.” Another used the word “shambolic.” Vance claimed ignorance, his default mode.
It’s hard to think of a precedent. Dan Quayle was mocked for his spelling. Dick Cheney for his war crimes. Mike Pence at least kept the show running. Vance is something else: a man who confuses belligerence with strategy, whose public statements increasingly resemble the bottom half of a Daily Wire article.
Imperial Nostalgia
Greenland was not a random choice. The Trump administration has long treated the island less as a country than as a mineral reserve with Inuit window dressing. In 2019, Trump tried to buy it. When Denmark said no, he cancelled a state visit. For Vance, who styles himself as the heir to Trumpism’s frontier machismo, Greenland offered a chance to appear tough on China, assertive in the Arctic, and dismissive of Europe. Instead, he came across like a man who’d wandered into the wrong room at NATO headquarters and started lecturing the janitor.
There are calls for him to resign. The Observer went so far as to argue that the only honourable course left to him is to step down. But Vance has never been one for honour. His bestselling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, was a lament for a broken working class that somehow managed to blame everything but capitalism. His political career has followed the same trajectory: sentimental nationalism as a cover for corporate power.
In Greenland, he met a people who’ve endured centuries of colonial abuse. They didn’t need his help. They needed him to leave.
Terminal Power
What makes Vance’s performance more than just another diplomatic gaffe is the way it encapsulates the delusions of a dying empire. The United States, still staggering from internal decay, political dysfunction, and economic dislocation, now sends emissaries like Vance to the edges of the map not to project strength, but to rehearse fantasies of power long lost. The Cold War infrastructure remains—the radar arrays, the treaties, the bases buried under ice—but the moral authority is gone. What remains is brute force, badly managed. When Trump was first elected, commentators spoke of an “America First” doctrine. But this is not isolationism, it’s grasping imperialism in its terminal phase: erratic, paranoid, incoherent.
Greenland is a case in point. A semi-autonomous territory whose people have never forgotten Danish colonialism, it now finds itself the target of a different kind of extraction economy, one powered by rare earth minerals, melting ice, and strategic paranoia. For Trumpists like Vance, the Arctic is less a region than a resource; Greenland, not a nation, but a geopolitical asset to be acquired. That Trump once tried to buy it was treated as a joke. It should have been taken as a warning.
Vance’s trip, then, was not a rogue stunt but part of a broader pattern: the staging of imperial nostalgia for a domestic audience. His message was not for Greenlanders, or even for Danes—it was for the base, the core voters of the new Republican Party, who dream not of democracy but of dominance, who miss the days when the US could invade countries without explanation and be applauded for it. Vance offered them the image of the swaggering American abroad. Instead, they got a man in an ill-fitting parka, squinting into the wind, unsure whether he’d been invited.
In this, too, there is an echo of decline. The American century was built not just on military supremacy but on myth-making, the belief that history was on their side. That myth is collapsing. And so the empire lashes out, sending its clowns and ideologues to the frontiers, not to lead, but to posture. JD Vance is not a deviation from the script. He is the final act.
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