The Mad Stamp Collector

Our Foreign Policy as Fable

The boy grew up in a happy neighborhood, among good friends. People shared what they had, and looked after one another. When a neighbor needed a hand with a chore, others

were there to help. If someone wanted to borrow a tool, or anything else, it was readily provided. The boy never knew anything else.

The boy liked to greet the mailman, and he took an interest in stamps. One of his neighbors, a teenager, invited the boy to come look at his own collection. The boy was delighted. “Here,” said the teenager, handing the boy the album, “borrow for it as long as you like.” And so the boy took it home. He kept it for years, for decades. As the boy and the teenager grew into manhood, the borrowed stamp collection was a sign of friendship.

As the boy aged, however, his interest in stamps grew into an obsession. He ceased to enjoy the stamps, to think about their beauty and their history. He simply wanted to possess them. He began to say puzzling things to the neighbor about the collection. Rather than seeing the loan as a sign of friendship, he seemed resent that the neighbor had any claim on the stamps at all.

One night he broke into his neighbor’s house with a gun. When the neighbor awoke, he pointed the gun and said: “You see that I can invade your house. If the stamp collection had been here instead of in my house, I could have stolen it. From now on that stamp collection is mine, and you have to admit it.”

What had the mad stamp collector done? He has the stamp collection, but of course he had it before. He wants everyone to say that now it is his possession, but no one does, least of all his neighbor. He has lost the neighborhood, and all the more important forms of cooperation. He sits at home and turns pages of the album. He writes his name in big letters on its cover.

Though the stamp collector is too mad to see it, he has destroyed the foundations of his own life. Until the night of the break-in, he could have borrowed anything he wanted from that neighbor, or from anyone on the block. Now every house is closed to him, and he no longer has friends, nor will ever have any. He has nothing except for his madness.

•••

The fable of the mad stamp collector is the story of American foreign policy. It expresses the president’s approach to Greenland, Denmark, and our allies in general. There is nothing in Greenland, or for that matter on the territory of other American allies, that we could not have, if we asked. That is the nature of old, trusting relationships, and the order represented by the NATO alliance.

As matters stand right now, the United States has the use of the territory of Greenland. We have had a military base at Pituffik for decades. We now station about two hundred troops there; if we wanted to station thousands instead of hundreds, we could do so. We did during the cold war. If American companies are interested in the Greenland’s natural resources, they can sign contracts.

If we believe, as the president and vice-president keep saying, that there is a Russian or Chinese threat to the island, then we could station more troops there, or invite the Danes or any other ally to do so. Or we could ask the Danes to build another base on another part of the island. Or we could do something meaningful about Arctic security, instead of denying global warming and letting Russia build all the icebreakers.

The Danes have been among the closest allies of the United States for three quarters of a century. The base at Pituffik is a sign of that friendship. When the Americans realized in 1951 that they had urgent need of that site of Greenland for nuclear defense, the Danes readily agreed. This was one of the crucial moments in the history of NATO, the alliance that both nations had helped to found two years before.

It is the NATO alliance that enables the American presence on Greenland, and it is the NATO alliance that the United States threatens when it threatens its ally Denmark. So long as the United States and Denmark are promised to defend one another from attack, Greenland is defended by both of them, and indeed by all of the other NATO allies. If the NATO alliance ceases to exist, then Greenland immediately becomes much less secure -- and, for that matter, so does every other member of the alliance, including the United States. Nothing could strengthen Russia and China more than the end of NATO.

Trump, the mad stamp collector, has everything he could possibly want, except the ability to appreciate any of it, or be appreciative of the work that others do to create it. He can gain nothing for the United States by insisting on owning Greenland, but he can lose everything which has helped to make Americans safer and more prosperous. He can lose the neighborhood.

It might seem odd to describe all of this as a fable -- and I am sorry to Greenlanders for having compared their island to stamp collection. But the fabular form is far more honest than pretending that Trump has a notion of the United States and its interests. He just wants to see a flag in the snow. He just wants his name on the album. There is nothing more than the madness, and that is where we must begin.