A Look Back at the War That Is About to Begin
(Note: this a conservative writing tongue in cheek for the WSJ)
Historians differ about the real origins of World War III. Some think its roots lay in the disastrous U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan in the early 2000s, which weakened American authority in the world, emboldened rivals, and sapped domestic support for assertive military projection overseas. Some cite Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the first major land offensive in Europe since World War II, breaking an 80-year taboo on armed conflict for territorial advantage. Some argue that the rise of China from the 1990s onward made conflict more or less inevitable, the world falling again into the Thucydides Trap of an emerging power posing an existential threat to the strategic hegemon.
But there’s general agreement about the crucial precipitating factor that led to the third global conflict in a little over a century: the brief and—or so it seemed initially—stunningly successful U.S. victory in the Battle of Greenland in early 2026.
It wasn’t much of a battle, to be sure. President Trump, fresh off his swift and effective intervention in early January to topple and bring to trial in the U.S. Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and his wife (who were later pardoned by President JD Vance and now run a chain of retail cocaine stores based in Palm Beach, Fla.), doubled down on his “Donroe corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine.
He insisted that the U.S. needed to annex Greenland for its own security and that of the wider Western Hemisphere and initially sought to pressure Denmark, the Arctic island’s sovereign authority, to sell it. Deploying his favorite diplomatic tool, import tariffs, Mr. Trump—not unreasonably—expected the Europeans to cave, as they typically did when confronted with the reality that decades of dependency and complacency had left them powerless in the face of strength.
But the Danes, a proud people whose soldiers had fought and died alongside Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, refused. When Mr. Trump ordered U.S. forces to seize the island, Denmark enlisted a handful of nations to help with the resistance—a coalition of the willing, but not very able.
WSJ