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Paper short abstract

While Trump’s designs on Greenland signify an “anti-policy” for rejecting foreign policy guidelines, the move is not arbitrary. It is guided by the idea of the “sovereign individual” replete with tropes of nineteenth century imperial racism and of the radical men’s rights movement’s masculinism.

Paper long abstract

President Trump’s designs on Greenland exemplify “anti-policy” as it abandons the traditional rules of state policymaking and the liberal international order. It involves inefficient use of economic and political capital. It hardly advances the national interests, and it alienates allies. Further, it reflects impulsive behavior rather than shrewd expert planning. However, the absence of traditional policymaking does not mean his designs on Greenland and elsewhere are non-sensical. In Trump’s discursive world, traditional foreign policy models are replaced with such simple tropes as the racism of late nineteenth century imperialism and the vulgar masculinism of the radical wing of the men’s rights movements. These tropes rely on naturalistic metaphors to premise a fascist world (dis)order valuing action for action’s sake. This paper will firstly describe the Trump team’s public justification for acquiring Greenland to show how it fails as sound policy. It will secondly show that a more compelling explanation is found in discourses of the natural man for whom state regulation and social norms signify unjust impositions on the sovereign (male) individual. This interpretation leads to deeper narratives drawing on Europe’s scramble for Africa after the 1884 Berlin conference and to the men playing the Great Game of imperial expansion. This resulted in characters like Cecil Rhodes who, guided by social Darwinism, similarly pursued expansion for expansion’s sake and challenged any oversight on his ambitions. We should similarly look to the logics of male exceptionalism bespoken by the likes of alleged human trafficker and manosphere leader Andrew Tate.