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The United States is a global superpower, and its military trains for war in every domain. During my years as a military educator, I saw American officers wrestle with any number of scenarios designed to challenge their thinking and force them to adapt to surprises. One case we never considered, however, was how to betray and attack our own allies. We did not ask what to do if the president becomes a threatening megalomaniac who tells one of our oldest friends, Norway, that because the Nobel Committee in Oslo refuses to give him a trophy, he no longer feels “an obligation to think purely of Peace” and can instead turn his mind toward planning to wage war against NATO.

As my colleague Anne Applebaum wrote today, Donald Trump’s threatening message to the Norwegian prime minister should, in any responsible democracy, force the rest of the U.S. political system to act to control him. The president is talking about an invasion that would require “citizens of a treaty ally,” as she put it, “to become American against their will,” all because he “now genuinely lives in a different reality.” And yet neither Congress nor the sycophants in the White House seem willing to stop him.

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The strategic importance of Greenland is growing, and NATO has underinvested in Arctic security. But President Trump, intent on ownership, is rebuffing deals with Europe to solve the problem.

As the struggle for control of Greenland intensifies — and with it, the question of whether the Atlantic alliance will suffer a mortal wound — two raw geopolitical realities have come into focus.

The first is that all the members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization underinvested in Arctic security for years, as melting glaciers, aggressive Chinese and Russian navies and critical undersea communications cables made one of earth’s coldest landscapes ripe for renewed superpower conflict.

The second is that President Trump has no intention of seeking a common solution to this long-brewing problem.

Instead, he has deliberately opened what could become the largest rift in the nearly 77-year history of the alliance, one that led the German vice chancellor to declare over the weekend that European nations “must not allow ourselves to be blackmailed” by the largest power in the group.

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Donald Trump now genuinely lives in a different reality, one in which neither grammar nor history nor the normal rules of human interaction now affect him. Also, he really is maniacally, unhealthily obsessive about the Nobel Prize. The Norwegian Nobel Committee, not the Norwegian government and certainly not the Danish government, determines the winner of that prize. Yet Trump now not only blames Norway for failing to give it to him, but is using it as a justification for an invasion of Greenland.

Think about where this is leading. One possibility, anticipated this morning by financial markets, is a damaging trade war. Another is an American military occupation of Greenland. Try to imagine it: The U.S. Marines arrive in Nuuk, the island’s capital. Perhaps they kill some Danes; perhaps some American soldiers die too. And then what? If the invaders were Russians, they would arrest all of the politicians, put gangsters in charge, shoot people on the street for speaking Danish, change school curricula, and carry out a fake referendum to rubber-stamp the conquest. Is that the American plan too? If not, then what is it? This would not be the occupation of Iraq, which was difficult enough. U.S. troops would need to force Greenlanders, citizens of a treaty ally, to become American against their will.

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