TOC Ready Room 26 January 2026: The Greenland Caper; dawn of tomorrow in Iran

What’s wrong and right with a brave new world.

J.E. Dyer, a retired Naval Intelligence officer, blogs as The Optimistic Conservative, January 26, 2026

U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 2nd Class Felix Garza Jr. (Via Wikimedia Commons)

There is much to say about many things, and probably not much time to say it.  Too much changes too fast now for us to keep up with everything.

But it’s worth pausing for reflection on what happened this past week with Greenland, because it has such significance for many other developments and topics around the world.  The bottom line up front:  President Trump just demonstrated that global security arrangements can be negotiated, without being constrained by whatever strictures the opponents of the objective can find and turn into ironclad limits on freedom of action.

NATO and EU officials spent the last week declaring that Greenland’s status is not up for negotiation, because of international norms and values, and any attempt to negotiate at Trump’s behest would proceed over their dead bodies.

They then folded their still-living bodies more promptly than a poly-rayon suit from the $99.99 Big & Tall Shop.  Trump emerged at Davos, as if the European officials hadn’t spoken at all, with the framework of an agreement on Greenland that did the one thing it absolutely had to do:  exclude China and Russia from the territory.

Rather than discuss numerous points at length, I will keep this short and quote comments I posted at another forum.  They emphasize the points we need to take on board in our thinking on this.  There’s a lot of distraction from the “Golden Dome” angle, though it’s indeed a valid angle.  But it’s not the most important angle for viewing America’s Greenland priorities.

Without delay, here’s the quoted passage.

Our old faithfuls are no longer a good guide to what we can expect, and how it will happen.

[Bret] Stephens [in the New York Times; “An Unhinged President on the Magic Mountain” ] is a good guide to what the GOP’s “foreign policy realists” think.  No question about that.  But he just keeps being wrong.

NATO instantly folded like an accordion after its counter-unhingement display on Greenland at Davos.  Though I had sympathy for the posture (if not on all counts), I already knew their trenchant verbiage would evaporate, and Trump would win this one.

He did win.  Critics are saying that since the US could already have had access to Greenland, to base military forces there, Trump didn’t win anything we didn’t already have.

But he won the point that matters.  He proved that, contrary to the declarations throughout NATO and the EU, Greenland is negotiable.

He’s also getting a commitment from Europe that China and Russia will not be admitted to Greenland, in any form.  That, and not the “Golden Dome” aspect, is the big prize on points.  Russia and China don’t get to buy there, partner there, develop infrastructure there, or have any way to put Wagner in Greenland and pull a Saharan Africa coup on it.

If Denmark or the other European nations let Russia or China gain such a wedge, Trump will use Greenland’s now-proven negotiability to stop it – and not leave it in Europe’s hands any longer to keep the gate.  I suspect he’s going to go ahead and conclude a “compact of free association” with Greenland as the basis for establishing US interests there, which he can reasonably do under existing conditions, without having to go through Copenhagen. Such a compact is what we have with the Marshall Islands.  (It was signed on RMI independence during Reagan’s tenure in office.  I’ve written about it before as a model for expanding our influence in Oceania, and in relation to RMI’s status as a flag-of-convenience nation for shipping.)  It makes us the guarantor of RMI’s defense, and could do the same in a compact with Greenland.

Trump wasn’t unhinged; he knew how to read his opponents on this matter.  Stephens didn’t.  The outcome isn’t unhinged either.  Nothing will change for how Greenlanders live.  The US has gained a location whose defenses WE will guarantee for the National Missile Defense (NMD) element of Golden Dome, on the Atlantic side.  (The locations on the Pacific side are in Alaska and California.  I’ve written about that before too:  the gaping hole in our NMD on the Atlantic side, which the missiles in Poland and radar in Czech Republic were supposed to close, back when Obama cancelled them in 2009.  Trump is finally putting an actual plan in motion to close that gap.  The original plan would have been positioned by 2015 to protect Europe a lot better than putting the Atlantic NMD in Greenland will.)

So why did Trump do this in a way that was certain to make a lot of people hysterical?  My read:  he wanted it to go ahead and happen.  If he had left it to incremental negotiation within NATO, NATO – abetted by the EU – could have strung that out for years.  China and Russia could have intervened in the negotiating process, through influence in the capitals of Europe, and polluted it with all kinds of diplomatic hostage-taking and time-wasting.  Trump wanted to force the negotiability point and gain the prize of China/Russia exclusion, and he got what he wanted because he used an abrupt, ultimatum-based approach.

Folks will decide how they feel about that.  But that’s what just happened.  I could wish, and often do, that Trump would approach diplomacy on Gaza in the same manner.  I can see on some points why he doesn’t, but if he’s not going to, I’d really rather dispense with the services of Witkoff and Barrack, who both behave like idiots.  I think he finds them useful because their appearance of idiocy forces his foreign counterparts to refer to him, and read his intentions directly, rather than having an FP establishment setting up shop and running its own self-directed enterprise in the locations affected.

In informal discussion, one doesn’t always spare the characterizations.  At any rate, other than some screen caps of X-posts, I don’t need to add anything to this.

A word on Iran

I do have some screen caps to add on what’s going on in Iran.  I’m hopeful that we are going to assist the Iranian people with suppression of the regime’s capability to wage the bloodthirsty campaign we have seen so far.

This set of posts helps clarify why I think we can be of such assistance.  It’s in large part because the regime has little capacity to control the streets and impose order without slaughtering the people.  It lacks the infantry/urban fighting infrastructure for mass-level crowd control.

See: https://x.com/OptimisticCon/status/2015258392252805207

See: https://x.com/OptimisticCon/status/2015153442789232748

There’s a two-fold problem, one element being that the tools for such exercise of military force are more in the national army (“Artesh”) than in the IRGC.  Deploying the national army to suppress the people is likely to be problematic in a number of locations.  The troops aren’t regime loyalists, and may not be zealous in executing their orders.

But it’s also significant that Iran simply doesn’t have the modern tradition of such fighting, and isn’t well armed for it.  The country subsists between mountainous hinterlands to the East and West, and large bodies of water North and South.  Conventional land attacks from outside its borders have been rare for some 300 years now.  Modern Iran hasn’t gone looking for conventional combat campaigns abroad, and has had little need to operate large formations of infantry, tanks, and support forces, engaging in what we think of as maneuver warfare.

Iran’s conventional military emphasis is more on missile and artillery development, air defense, and largely asymmetric use of naval forces.  Add to these the IRGC focus on paramilitary and special operations (mostly abroad), and none of them is well suited to stabilization, or intimidating and controlling the people, without simply killing them.  So the regime has focused, with gruesome and morally corrosive effect, on simply killing them.

In this situation, I believe it will pay off to hit selected IRGC targets hard, and cut off command/control links between the IRGC and the regime leadership and leave them a shambles.  There is literally no morally conventional, or “moderate,” option for the regime to gain an ordered, reasonable-seeming form of control over the civic spaces.  And the worse the terrible crackdown gets, the less there is any regime-led “Iran” to go back to, or even forward toward a recovery.

Regime-led Iran is already gone as a stable entity endurable to the people. That cord is cut. The stasis of weary endurance no longer exists.  The regime’s limited options are horrific, and as the hours tick by I think even many in the IRGC will find themselves sickened and unable to keep doubling down on them.

So it is not too big a stretch to assist Iranians in a regime-change they, and not we, are leading.  What they do next must be their choice.  It’s they who must win this fight:  not just take control of their own streets, but unify for a national effort to support an interim governing arrangement and navigate forward to a new existence, with no element of the dying regime clinging to power.

America’s best role is to shelter them with space and time to do that.  Outside interference from Russia and China needs to be firmly shouldered out.  The regime must not be left with a base of its own in Iran, reconstitutable through such foreign connections.  Cutting the mullahs off from economic resources is also a high-payoff method, but care should be taken to destroy as little as possible of the infrastructure the people and their next government will need for recovery.

It’s essential to understand that an extended “war” isn’t necessary.  The radical Iranian regime’s hold is already close to the breaking point.  There is no percentage in trying to work with it.  There’s no upside whatsoever to doing that.  The Iranian people will put together an aftermath so much better than any possible extension of the regime’s power, it’s unconscionable to see the current, grotesquely sanguinary situation in any other light.

A few from X on the USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) transit from the South China Sea to CENTCOM.  I think we’ve been playing coy with where the carrier is since her reassignment to CENTCOM was announced on 14 January 2026.  That’s a good thing, and with the assistance of an overeager and rumor-clogged fan-stream at X, we’ve been doing pretty well.

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January 29, 2026 | Comments »

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