Vassals, Not Allies

How Trump’s revisionist history is turning democracy into a dependency system

Good morning! Pour the coffee extra strong, because the United States is now juggling an unauthorized war, an oil grab, a naval standoff with Russia, open threats against a NATO ally, and the resurrection of the Big Lie, all while Congress stares at its shoes and Elon Musk retweets nonsense like it’s 2020 again.

We’ll start where the fuse was lit. Donald Trump didn’t just “escalate tensions” with Venezuela; he launched a war. U.S. forces struck Venezuelan targets, seized Nicolás Maduro in a middle-of-the-night operation, and then immediately announced plans to extract up to 50 million barrels of Venezuelan oil, sell it at market price, and place the proceeds under Trump’s personal control “to benefit the people.” Which people, exactly, remains unspecified, though Chevron, ExxonMobil, and ConocoPhillips are conveniently scheduled for White House meetings.

Markets blinked, the Gulf Coast refiners smiled, and oil prices dipped. And the White House behaved as if the president had just discovered a new DLC pack called Imperialism, But Make It Executive Order.

Congress, for its part, reacted the way it always does: with stern statements, furrowed brows, and absolutely no consequences. As The Intercept documents in excruciating detail, lawmakers had months of warning and four separate chances to stop this before it happened. War powers resolutions failed in both chambers. Republicans mostly fell in line; even Democrats mostly complied. Marco Rubio assured Congress repeatedly, even in classified briefings, that there was no plan for war. Those assurances were lies, and lawmakers now admit they knew better or should have. Trump acted first, and Congress discovered its conscience afterward. That abdication didn’t just green-light Venezuela. It sent a much louder signal: nothing will stop him.

Which brings us to the ocean. As Trump talks openly about seizing Venezuelan oil, the U.S. is now shadowing a sanctioned tanker, formerly Bella 1, now rebranded as Marinera, that fled a Coast Guard encounter, re-flagged itself as Russian mid-escape, and is currently being escorted through the North Atlantic by Russian naval assets, including a submarine. Yes, a submarine. Welcome to the shadow fleet era, where oil tankers change their sovereignty like underwear and international law gets shrugged at from the bridge.

The ship is passing through the Greenland–Iceland–UK gap, one of the most sensitive maritime corridors on Earth, the same stretch of ocean NATO relies on to track Russian submarines and missile routes. U.S. surveillance aircraft are circling. Russia is escorting. Everyone is watching. Everyone is pretending this is normal.

It isn’t, and just in case anyone thought the administration might de-escalate, the White House chose this exact moment to remind the world that using the U.S. military to seize Greenland is “always an option.”

European leaders responded with something close to panic, and something even rarer: clarity. France, Germany, Britain, Italy, Poland, Spain, and Denmark issued a joint declaration stating the obvious: Greenland belongs to Greenlanders. Denmark is a NATO ally. Arctic security is transatlantic security. And sovereignty is not optional.

Denmark and Greenland are now urgently seeking talks with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is suddenly very busy explaining that no, no, this isn’t another Venezuela. Please ignore the precedent we just set.

The stakes here are not theoretical. Tim Marshall is not a pundit or a partisan commentator, he is a veteran foreign correspondent and one of the most widely read geopolitical analysts in the world. Marshall spent decades reporting from conflict zones for Sky News and the BBC, covering wars in the Balkans, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe, before becoming best known as the author of Prisoners of Geography, a bestselling book used in universities, military academies, and diplomatic circles to explain how geography shapes power, conflict, and alliances.

When Marshall says that a U.S. seizure of Greenland would destroy NATO, he’s not engaging in hyperbole, he’s describing a structural failure. Article 5 would become a logical impossibility: a NATO member attacking another NATO member, triggering collective defense against itself. No one would go to war with the United States over it, but the alliance would collapse under the contradiction.

That’s the part Trump’s team seems spectacularly uninterested in understanding: American power depends on its allies. On bases in the UK, Germany, Romania. On intelligence stations, ports, airfields, logistics. You don’t get to threaten your own alliance and still keep the infrastructure that makes global power projection possible. You don’t get Greenland without losing everything that makes Greenland strategically useful.

Back in the digital fever swamps, Elon Musk is doing his part to make sure we learn nothing from any of this. He’s now boosting a fresh wave of 2020 election fraud fantasies, 120% turnout in Detroit, ballots scanned “multiple times,” hundreds of thousands of phantom votes, claims that were litigated, audited, debunked, and buried four years ago. But on X, facts are optional and lies get premium distribution. This is happening alongside Trump’s ongoing effort to rewrite January 6 itself, recasting a violent attempt to overturn an election as a misunderstood protest, a patriotic gathering, a nefarious Democratic rebranding, or, in its most cynical form, something that barely happened at all.

Delegitimizing elections pairs neatly with delegitimizing accountability. If the vote was fake, then the insurrection was fake. If January 6 was fake, then Congress has no moral authority. And if votes don’t matter and lawmakers don’t matter, then only force does.

It’s no wonder Trump wants to do away with the Department of Education. Not because it’s inefficient or “woke” or whatever the talking point of the week happens to be. He’s dismantling it because history literacy is an obstacle to authoritarianism.

To pull off the kind of reality inversion Trump is attempting, you don’t just need propaganda, you need epistemic collapse. You need a public that can’t distinguish evidence from vibes, law from slogans, history from memes. Illiteracy becomes a prerequisite rather than a side effect.

And that’s the throughline tying all of this together: the normalization of executive power without constraint. Congress waved through the war, and the courts trail behind. Now our allies are scrambling, and the military is being used as leverage, not defense, and the information ecosystem is being flooded with recycled lies to keep the public disoriented.

Trump didn’t wake up one morning and decide to risk NATO, spark naval standoffs, grab oil, and threaten allies. He did it because no one stopped him when they had the chance. Now the bill is coming due in barrels, bases, alliances, credibility, and inevitably blood.

At this point, it’s hard not to see the pattern for what it is. When elections are rewritten, Congress is sidelined, wars are launched without consent, allies are threatened, education is hollowed out, and truth itself is treated as negotiable, what’s being constructed isn’t leadership, it’s a system of vassalage. Power flows upward to one man, outward through force, and downward through fear, dependency, and erasure of memory.

Which is why that long-overdue essay on vassal states suddenly feels less academic and more urgent. This isn’t about ancient history or distant empires. We are watching the architecture of consent give way to the architecture of control in real time, at home and abroad.

Marz and I are taking a few hours today, wandering the 100 Acre Woods here in Coquille, breathing air that hasn’t been filtered through a feed or a lie. And then I’m coming back to finish it. Because clarity matters, and remembering how power actually works may be one of the few tools we have left.