What if Trump’s not bluffing about invading that big, beautiful island in the Arctic…?

In some ways, and without wanting to be macabre or malign, the best thing that could have happened with the American attack on Venezuela would have been for it to have failed. Instead, the sheer size of the American forces and the ultra-professional way they prepared for the kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro and his wife has imbued Donald Trump with an intoxicating sense of invincibility.

Or, to put it another way, like a rogue tiger, it has given him a taste for the raw meat of neo-imperial conquest – vast territorial, defence and economic rewards, secured at minimal risk. No wonder some say America itself is becoming the worst version of itself: a rogue state where its unrivalled military prowess is used not as a deterrent against an evil empire, but for its own selfish, reckless and illegal ends.

That brings us to Greenland. It is a vast territory with a population of only about 30,000 adults, defended by Denmark – hardly in the superpower league – and where the principal line of defence appears to be little more than a polite but firm letter signed by the leaders of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain (that last nation being especially notorious for not wanting to pony up money for defence). Against that, Trump can see himself securing the largest expansion in US territory in its 250-year history, plus all those rare earth minerals currently dominated by China, and a strategic asset that grows ever more valuable as the ice sheets retreat and the northern sea routes open up. Who knows what lies beneath all that snow and ice?

You can see why Trump would be tempted, even at the cost of further fracturing – or even collapsing – Nato. He might well think that worth the price, having long regarded the alliance as a drain on Americans, taken for a ride yet again by the Europeans. He does not see why America should go to war with Russia to save, say, Estonia, and believes the US needs only itself for defence. In his calculus, it is a small loss.

The Europeans, meanwhile, have few credible options to retaliate. A trade war would hurt them almost as much as the Americans. They could sell off US bonds to destabilise the dollar, but that would risk another global financial crisis – a danger that also applies to Japan and China. Or they could boycott US arms, without having viable European replacements. None of these options is attractive.

It should never be forgotten that Trump is, at base, a real-estate guy. To him, Greenland simply looks like a vast vacant lot waiting to be developed into some big, beautiful Trump project, where everyone gets to make lots of money – just like his other supposed “deals” in Venezuela and Ukraine, or the aborted Mar-a-Gaza plan for a Palestinian Riviera, which America was also to control. There is a clear pattern here: foreign policy run for commercial purposes, with a distinctly gangsterish edge.

So how would he do it? The same way a gangster might get their hands on a prime site from an unwilling vendor. “Greenland is not for sale,” he hears little Denmark plead. But Trump does not take “no” for an answer. That does not mean he would send in the troops – at least not at first. He has offered to buy Greenland, just as America bought Alaska, or through the Louisiana Purchase in the 19th century. Or, indeed, as happened in 1917 when, again for reasons of national security – the fear of a German takeover – Washington persuaded Denmark to sell the Danish West Indies, now known as the US Virgin Islands, of Jeffrey Epstein fame. Everyone has their price, don’t they?

The White House’s talk of not ruling out military force may simply be a way of persuading the Danes and their European allies to reach some form of arrangement for Greenlandic “free association” with the US, while simultaneously fomenting the local independence movement with promises of supposedly priceless American citizenship and wealth. It has all the hallmarks of a Mafia shakedown. The trick is to make Europeans believe that Nato itself would be finished if the US forced the Greenland issue – and thereby pressure them into a peaceful sweetheart deal to avoid such a catastrophe. Leasebacks that protect nominal sovereignty, as with the recent UK-Mauritius deal over the Chagos Islands, are another possibility. There is plenty of scope for creative solutions.

Trump, however, will simply keep pushing the awkward sitting tenants out of the Greenlandic property until he gets his way. Sanctions, tariffs, threats to withdraw American bases from Europe, siding even more openly with Russia over Ukraine, and spurious environmental guarantees could all be deployed to coerce the Danes, Greenlanders and other Europeans into surrendering the island. And if all else fails – reckless as he is – he could always instruct his chiefs of staff to draw up yet another supposedly brilliant plan for a bloodless coup.

America has always had a tendency to ignore international norms and conventions when it suits it. There was never a liberal golden age in which international law and human rights sat at the heart of US foreign policy – not during the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, and certainly not amid the countless plots to depose or assassinate democratically elected but inconvenient leaders across South and Central America, Africa and Asia. The attitude towards Maduro, Saddam or Gaddafi-style dictators was neatly captured in a quote often attributed to Lyndon B Johnson: “He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch” – until, like Saddam or Noriega, they are not.

The current US president is a bigger, badder and more dangerous expression of that same strain of American exceptionalism, and he is now pushing it too far. America is shedding so many old friends and allies that one day it may wake up in a world confronted by a Chinese-Russian alliance, with Europeans and Indians at best neutral to America’s interests. Superpower though the United States remains, it can still overreach – as it has so often in its never-ending wars. In doing so, it risks forfeiting the dominant position it has enjoyed for more than a century.

By then, one way or another, Donald Trump will be gone. But he may yet be remembered as the man who grabbed that big, beautiful island in the Arctic – naturally renamed “Trumpland”.