Trump’s Greenland gambit is a sideshow the forces of freedom don’t need

We’re not loving President Donald Trump’s Greenland sideshow, and Wednesday’s White House talks don’t improve the plot.

After meeting with Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Greenland Foreign Minister Vivian Motzfeldt, Lars Rasmussen, Denmark’s foreign minister, ruefully remarked that his nation and the United States have a “fundamental disagreement” over Greenland; Motzfeldt says the same.

Hours before the sitdown, Trump again announced that our country “needs Greenland,” though every sign is that the Danes are beyond happy to let Washington add bases there, join in exploiting rare-earth deposits and pretty much anything America might need Greenland for.

Growling at the Danes won’t yield any better, and it’d be beyond nuts for Trump to actually use force — a guarantee that Democrats would win the House this fall, for starters, and maybe even gift them the Senate.

Fine, it’s very hard to read if the prez is in any way serious; maybe this is just his typical all-relationships-be-damned Trump “maximalist” negotiating tactic.

But it raises fears he’d blow up the Western alliance needlessly — and for all Europe’s modern errors, that alliance is one of history’s great successes. Abandoning it (what, to retreat to the American “sphere”?) is tantamount to handing the world’s future to freedom’s enemies.

Rasmussen and Motzfeldt left the meeting for some serious chain-smoking; if this keeps up, we might join them.