There’s still a part of me that just can’t shake my incredulity toward the notion of taking Donald Trump seriously as a politician. Even as concrete steps are taken toward the conquest of Greenland, there’s still a part of me that cannot accept that this isn’t a gigantic farce, that the curtain will come up at any moment and it will be revealed to me that I am not living in a distortion of ordinary space-time, that nobody I love or respect is actually taking this cartoonishly transparent criminal con-man clown, or his asinine “policy proposals” seriously.

I see the headlines and I get the same feeling I get when someone is talking down to me: Wait, you actually expect me to take this seriously? I’m supposed to explain why the United States doesn’t need to conquer Greenland? To an adult?

On the surface of things, it all looks very stupid. But it may very well be very sinister. Here’s what I think Trump is up to.

The United States is extremely unlikely to actually acquire Greenland; it is as much of a fantasy as the acquisition of Canada as the 51st state — something else I doubt Republicans would actually be eager to see come to pass, since it would be a boon to Democrats. But just like the Canada insults, the Greenland idiocy has the practical effect of further fraying — but not yet breaking — ties between the United States and its European allies. It helps to legitimize the textbook dictator’s rationale — Putin’s rationale — for aggressive territorial expansion: the vague appeal to ‘national security interests’, too general to argue meaningfully about. The United States also voted last year at the United Nations for the first time with Russia, China, and North Korea, but against the rest of the developed world, when we declined to identify Russia as the aggressor in its war against Ukraine.

All of the small steps like these will eventually make it seem to everyone like a natural, logical, inevitable outcome for the United States when we ultimately realign with Russia — and Israel, and Saudi Arabia (two countries Trump treats like American states) — against the European Union, China, Iran, and the United Nations — in a post-liberal world order that re-divides the world into regional power blocs, as it was prior to World War II. I think that is what Trump wants. Stephen Miller remarked the other day that Trump is in pursuit of a ‘new world order.’ That is what he means.

It’s an audacious speculation, but I can’t think of anything else that makes everything cohere. Without this lens, Trump’s actions individually look like either complete madness, or else some can be explained but others are left with gigantic question marks hanging over them. I don’t think he has a master plan in mind — that is not in his nature — but I think he has a rough general idea (“a concept of a plan”?) of what he wants: to cut off Old Europe and the United Nations like necrotic appendages, to reassert the right of the strong to rule the weak, to cast off the United States’s global ambitions like ballast, but greatly increase its presence in the Western Hemisphere, including a greater willingness to send the military to places like Venezuela — or, say, Mexico — and to openly be friends with cooperative dictators, like when deported criminal migrants were sent to a brutal prison in El Salvador. The ethos of this order will be something like: if the US wants to go into Venezuela and knock out its head of state, the US can go into Venezuela and knock out its head of state. If Russia wants to seize Ukraine, Russia can seize Ukraine. If Israel wants to demolish Gaza and rebuild it, Israel can demolish Gaza and rebuild it. The rest is just the protests of losers and the weak.

We can argue all day about many aspects of all of this: the extent to which the United States has always been like this but didn’t like to admit it, the extent to which superpower status has crippled the United States’s ability to make good decisions, the extent to which the United Nations really is a moribund institution. Sometimes unilateral, aggressive decisions even have good outcomes. I don’t feel the way same way about each of the three examples I listed above: I do not cry any tears for Nicolas Maduro, my political sympathy toward the Palestinians is somewhat limited, Putin’s Ukraine incursion is deplorable. Moreover, it is rational to side with Saudi Arabia against Iran. Reasonable people can disagree about how to view those examples, and I am not casting the status quo as simply desirable, nor the impulse to move past it as sinister. But Trump’s solution to our foreign policy mess is essentially for the United States to act more like Russia (and less like Europe). That’s not improvement: that’s degeneration.

But it is only a matter of time until Republicans start articulating this goal explicitly. Many of them still don’t realize what it is they’re groping toward: the end of the post-war liberal order. Stephen Miller’s ‘new world order’ rhetoric is merely a foretaste of the meal to come. Liberals, as has been the case for the last decade, aren’t prepared to fight back.