It’s not about “spheres of influence.” It’s about balls of influence.

The year of the fire horse is set to lead the way into the second quarter of the 21^st century. If the current geopolitical buildup does not represent an ominous window of chaos then nothing does, as Trump threatens to go scorched earth on the permafrost of Greenland among other places. One can’t go shopping at the Mercator projection every day in this new age of defense-based irredentism, but time is running out for Trump as the midterms approach to curtail his power. With a host of potential conflicts set to erupt, you could be forgiven for thinking the other three horses of the apocalypse aren’t far behind.

Following the piracy of the Caribbean and Maduro’s eviction from the presidential suite, former hotelier Trump has turned to naval-gazing off the coast of Greenland to scout America’s next national security acquisition. It’s all part of the Monroe Doctrine, a somewhat legitimizing appellation cited by Trump and hardly challenged by the Washington consensus. Closer examination reveals that it is actually a clear misappropriation of the founding father’s legacy.

The whole point of President Monroe’s insistence that Europeans not interfere in the Americas and vice versa was to function as a balance of powers mechanism. It did not mean free rein within one’s own domain, indeed Monroe was a strategic isolationist who argued that intervention was only justified where U.S. assets and interests were directly threatened. The Europeans had nothing to do with Venezuela, and so far the country’s only crimes seem to be leaving the IMF plantation and selling their oil to the Chinese.

Monroe was a rather honorable man and veteran of the Revolutionary War. As a politician, he supported expansionism, albeit through diplomacy. Before becoming president, he had been involved in the peaceful acquisitions of Louisiana and Florida, though it helped that Napoleon wanted to sell and both territories naturally bordered the United States.

These days, the only wall Trump is building is the BRICS alliance of countries that was born precisely out of a need for solidarity in the face of Western hegemony. Last week Putin and Brazilian president Lula discussed the crisis in Venezuela at some length, though it’s difficult to imagine what consolations Putin could extend. After all, it was the Russians at the Alaska Summit who proposed the spheres of influence concept to the Trump administration. Trump has evidently warmed to the idea, without fully taking the hint on Ukraine. If the administration was to actually adhere to the Monroe Doctrine, it would mean leaving Ukraine, ignoring Iran, defunding Israel, abandoning Taiwan and withdrawing troops from Germany.

Suffice it to say, the American empire is a sprawling entity whose tendrils spread wherever there are resources and willing regional supplicants. As Putin once surmised, “America does not need allies, it needs vassals.” America’s dogma of national security always absorbs more territory and people but never relinquishes anything, not even Guantanamo Bay after all these years or the “floating island of garbage” Puerto Rico.  To hear such national security alarmism over a few enemy submarines must be sickening for the Russians, who have a much better case for the defense-by-annexation argument. The most common way Russia has been invaded throughout the ages – be it by the Mongols, the Turks, or the Germans – has been through Ukraine.

The other country typically downwind from Trump’s verbal spraying, China, felt obliged this week to officially deny having any designs on Greenland. China has already had its moments of rapid territorial expansion in the last century: East Turkestan in 1949 and Tibet in 1951. Combined with the earlier conquests of Tibetan Amdo and Kham and the total land area is roughly equal to two Greenlands. Incidentally, the flag of Greenland could be viewed by superstitious Chinese as an homage to Chairman Mao, whose moniker Red Sun was so ascribed because everything revolved around him in Communist China. Thanks to Mao, the sun rises at 10:20 am for some Uyghurs in the West of the country, almost as if they were in the Arctic Circle in winter. It wasn’t enough that their land was dehumanizingly renamed Xinjiang (New Frontier) – they also have to set their watches to the time of the control freaks in Beijing.

All the territories ever ruled by China

President-for-life Xi Jinping hosted Canada’s managing director Mark Carney this past week, renegotiating trade in the shadow of Trump’s cowboy diplomacy. Money talks and bullshit walks – agricultural goods to China and visa-free travel in exchange for impressive Chinese EVs that will flood the American continent. There won’t be much that Trump can do about it. China builds – America bombs, as the Sinophiles often say, sometimes adding that China buys oil whereas America steals it. It’s difficult to argue against this aphorism, indeed America is no longer what it used to be and is compensating for living above its means, being prodigal abroad but burdened domestically by a growing alien underclass as well as a ruling class that isn’t exactly Founding Fathers material.

The elites in Davos this week were treated to a confused screed of hyperbole and contradiction from Trump, who is living proof that God didn’t invent war to teach Americans geography, as someone once quipped. Trump’s speech writer may be America First, but for the boss to mention out of control spending at a time when offering up to a million dollars to every Greenlander was comical, let alone recently advocating for a $1.5 trillion dollar military budget. The rhetoric against his northern neighbors has only slightly cooled, alas it is all part of his well-worked good cop bad cop routine, hoping to gain enough leverage to at least end up with two subordinate lapdog regimes, as it were, on either side of the Labrador Sea.

The Europeans meanwhile, enthralled as always, continue to be led by a gynocentric coven of careerists who suffer from main character syndrome: Ursula von der Leyen, Kaja Kallas, Giorgia Meloni and Mette Frederiksen. If in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king, then among this crowd even the Austrian painter would rule. Trump represents such a figure of dominance and fortitude who runs rings around his European counterparts. Sometimes they even humiliate themselves, as with Keir Starmer and his rent-boy scandal, or Emmanuel Macron, who continues to threaten war on Putin but can’t defend against wife Brigitte’s backhand. At Davos, the Bonapartist looked more like Napoleon Dynamite than a statesman, sporting cartoonish aviator sunglasses. Chronic sloucher and Greenland Field Marshall, Friedrich Merz, left with his tail between his legs as soon as Trump threatened sanctions for sending troops to Greenland. Amid reckless militarization, disastrous energy policies and ballooning welfare state costs, Merz recently told the German people (the most industrious in Europe) that they ought to commit to “greater economic output… through more work.”

One of the stranger additions to the European theatre of late is Canadian parliamentarian Chrystia Freeland, who abandoned her constituency to go and serve as economic advisor to Zelensky, pro bono, we are told. Freeland’s grandfather was a prominent Nazi collaborator, so the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree in this case. She’ll now have to keep a lookout for falling hazelnuts, which, for those who don’t speak Russian, is a reference to the Oreshnik.

One of the few silver linings on the European horizon is the Neue Rechte movement led by identitarian figure Martin Sellner. His imprudent younger years have given way to strategic activism both online and in the city squares of Austria and Germany. Sellner is the architect of the very successful #Remigration campaign, which is now gaining traction in the Anglosphere. The slogan may be new, but the concept is centuries old and goes back, funnily enough, to American president James Monroe. This not so well-known doctrine of Monroe arguably makes him the patron saint of such efforts to repatriate non-Whites to their homelands. Monroe was so enthused in promoting the return of freed Blacks to Africa that Liberia’s capital city bears his name. Monrovia was founded in 1822 but only managed to get paved roads in the 2010s and is now focused on installing running water for the entire city. Perhaps America’s ongoing problem with the Somalis, amplified very strongly by Trump, could be a pretext for something similar, and maybe even a Denaturalization Act.

Upon reflection of Trump’s first year back in office, as chaotic as it was, it’s somewhat difficult to ascertain what his motivations and priorities are at this stage of his life. They say Jews never retire and that appears to be a habit that has rubbed off on him. Like his sons, Trump is a vainglorious headhunter, only he can now mount that Nobel Prize medal on his wall, even if second-hand. One also can’t exclude the possibility of a psychosexual motive, just as Henry Kissinger once proclaimed.

The neocon clique that Trump seems to gravitate toward evidently knows how to better manipulate him and convert the America First ideal into the Global Leadership agenda. Trump has shredded enough international law in the last year to supply his next ticker-tape military parade, while some claim that he has morphed into his former nemesis, John McCain. Trump appears to have been desensitized to death and extrajudicial killings, which started with the Iranian general but is now aimed at civilians in fishing vessels. Trump has the blood of around 100 security personnel on his hands – liquidated in the kidnapping of Maduro, including 32 Cuban officers who came back in boxes barely larger than cigar cases, leading to speculation of what horrific new American weapon was unleashed for the first time.

In addition to the narcissism and psychopathy known to be self-selecting traits among politicians and elite businessmen, there is something more going on that explains Trump’s ruthless aggression, deal-making and occasional subterfuge. Rather than drawing spurious associations to such conservative prudes as James Monroe, we need to go back to the era of ancient European rulers, of which Trump is a throwback. The Old Norse King Frode comes to mind – a semi-mythical figure whose questionable methods were in the service of greater goods. One saga holds that upon conquering a Slavonic nation he asked for all thieves and murderers to step forward so that they may be appointed to exalted positions, only to promptly hang them in the gallows. It’s unreasonable to think that high-trust European societies could have evolved without breaking a few eggs. Europe is now in the return orbit of its civilizational trajectory and, frankly speaking, its cultural satellite across the Atlantic may be its last hope.