As Ben Taub writes in an astounding new piece from this week’s issue, during his first term Trump shared his desire to buy Greenland with his national-security adviser, John Bolton. And Bolton quickly got to work figuring out how to distract the President from pursuing it. A group of advisers, including Fiona Hill, on the National Security Council, worked on a memo, explaining that a treaty with Denmark from 1951 already gave the U.S. military access to Greenland whenever it wanted. “All it had to do was ask,” Taub notes. As for taking it over, the process would be more complicated. “In terms of buying it, one thing that became apparent was that, you know, this is not the nineteenth century anymore,” Bolton told Taub. “There are fifty-seven thousand people in Greenland. They have this feeling that they ought to have a say in their future.”

But there were others in the Administration working to satisfy Trump’s goal—and that work resumed when he returned to office. Taub, who has been reporting extensively in Greenland during the past few years, tells the story of four men, working inside and outside the U.S. government, who have been at the center of a secret, long-running plan to take the territory. Their C.V.s read like the stuff of pure Trumpian central casting.

There’s Chris Cox, the founder of the group Bikers for Trump, who has visited Greenland as an unofficial ambassador for the President, trying to win the hearts and minds of the locals. “We are not looking at you like a tiger looks at a gazelle,” he told one Inuit man, during a visit last year. Two other Americans have been running “influence operations” in the country as well: a former venture capitalist and a pecan farmer named Tom Dans, and a retired Army Special Forces commander named Drew Horn. And then there is Jørgen Boassen, a rare Greenlander who loudly supports Trump, who has spent the past year travelling the world, bankrolled by private benefactors.

Together, these men represent the vanguard of a ludicrous—and deadly serious—plan that has threatened foundational transatlantic agreements, escalated into military maneuvers among allies, and provided further evidence at home and abroad that American foreign policy depends entirely on the whims of the President. “As American primacy fades, the U.S. government has embraced the predatory world view of its traditional opponents,” Taub writes. “Firepower matters more than values or alliances, and everything is in play.”