WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump has been blunt and consistent in recent weeks. Greenland matters because security matters.
The reasoning is straightforward. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s near-daily attempts to intimidate Taiwan, including military aircraft incursions and rehearsals of naval blockades, have reinforced a basic truth of geopolitics. Strategic territory cannot be left in the hands of actors that lack the capacity to defend it.
The United States can defend Greenland. Denmark cannot.
Denmark is a capable ally, but it is also a small country of roughly six million people with limited military reach. Greenland, by contrast, sits at the center of an increasingly contested Arctic theater involving missile defense, early-warning systems, shipping lanes, and great-power rivalry. As Russia militarizes the polar north and China pushes into the Arctic, Greenland is no longer a remote ice sheet. It is a frontline.
The same logic applies in the Middle East, particularly in Judea-Samaria.
What October 7 demonstrated with horrifying clarity is that Israel must retain exclusive security control of the entire region. The idea that security can be outsourced to weak or fragmented authorities has repeatedly proven catastrophic.
Security is not a slogan. It is a capability.
It requires intelligence dominance, rapid response, air control, logistics, and the political will to act decisively when threats emerge. Israel possesses those capabilities. The Palestinian Authority does not. It never has.
Even today, it is the Israel Defense Forces, not the Palestinian Authority, that prevent Judea-Samaria from collapsing into the kind of terrorist-controlled enclave seen in Gaza. Israeli forces disrupt terror cells, intercept weapons shipments, and prevent mass-casualty attacks aimed not only at Israelis inside the Green Line, but also at Jewish families living in Judea-Samaria itself.
Without Israel’s presence, those communities would be defenseless. This is not ideology. It is observable reality.
American conservatives should have no difficulty understanding this argument. Conservatism has long emphasized that borders must be defensible, that security precedes diplomacy, and that weakness invites aggression. The lesson of Ukraine is unmistakable. When adversaries believe territory is weakly defended, they move.
Outsourcing security to authorities that lack the will or ability to enforce it is not moral. It is reckless.
Geography reinforces the case. Judea-Samaria’s ridgelines dominate Israel’s population centers. Its aquifers supply critical water resources. Its transportation networks, labor markets, and economic flows move westward into Israel, not eastward across the Jordan River.
The notion that Judea-Samaria somehow belongs with the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan ignores every strategic and geographic reality on the ground. Jordan is a separate state east of the Jordan River with its own internal challenges. It has neither the desire nor the capacity to absorb or secure the territory.
Equally misguided is the idea that the Palestinian Authority can play a constructive role in the region’s future.
Mahmoud Abbas and the PA have long been given a free pass by the United Nations and much of the international community despite a documented record of harboring and protecting terrorists. The PA maintains one of the largest per-capita security forces in the world, estimated at more than 60,000 men, many of whom have been armed and trained by the United States.
Yet instead of fulfilling their obligations under the Oslo Accords to arrest and extradite terrorists, the PA pays salaries to terrorists and their families, glorifies violence, and shelters fugitives so Israel cannot apprehend them.
This is not a failure of resources. It is a failure of intent.
Neither Jordan nor the Palestinian Authority can be trusted with the future of Judea-Samaria.
President Trump’s remarks about Greenland are not about conquest. They are about responsibility. Power carries obligations, and the first obligation of any sovereign authority is defense.
The same realism that recognizes China’s threat to Taiwan and Russia’s brutality in Ukraine applies equally in the Middle East. Pretending that security can be subcontracted to weak or hostile entities is how regions collapse and wars begin.
Judea-Samaria in hostile hands would not produce peace. It would create a massive terrorist base overlooking Israel’s heartland, just as abandoning strategic territory elsewhere invites adversaries to exploit it.
History does not punish strength. It punishes denial.
Nations that survive are the ones that secure what they must, when they must. Those who hesitate learn the lesson later, at a far higher cost. Americans who care about Israel’s future should stand with Israelis working to remove the Palestinian Authority from Judea-Samaria and end the dangerous limbo that has trapped the region for far too long.
Moshe Phillips is the national chairman of Americans For A Safe Israel, a leading pro-Israel advocacy and education organization.
