The Observer view: Donald Trump's imperial bullying must be nipped in the bud

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

70% : Trump sees a lucrative opportunity - and by absorbing Greenland's vast territory, a chance to make America even greater, again.
59% : Donald Trump, the US president-elect, fits this latter category.
56% : This is how Trump operates.
54% : But it is also possible Trump means what he says.
54% : States that declined the invitation, such as Iran, Vietnam and Nicaragua, paid a high price.
53% : It's entirely possible that Trump, pumped with hype, hot air and testosterone in the lead-up to his 20 January inauguration, is being gratuitously disruptive.
51% : If so, Trump will be following a well-trodden, discredited path.
49% : The crass activities of Trump's sycophantic office boy, businessman Elon Musk, are all of a piece with this strategy of anti-democratic disruption and destabilisation.
48% : Trump claims the protectionist, high-tariff America First policies he espouses were the reason why the US, at the height of the Gilded Age in the 1890s, was, in his words, "probably the wealthiest it ever was because it was a system of tariffs".
43% : By backing far-right parties in Germany and France, imposing his ignorant opinions on British politics and picking gratuitous fights with the EU, all the while hiding behind the fuzzy screen of unaccountable, fact-free social media, Musk advances a Trump agenda that is fundamentally about control.
40% : Control of politicians and political discourse, control of open debate and communication, control of territory, trade and wealth, to be achieved through transactional deal-making, crude barter, intimidation, humiliation, subversion and, ultimately, through threats of force.
36% : When Trump threatens to subjugate Canada, a Nato ally, by force, unilaterally annex Greenland, the autonomous territory of a friendly EU state, and override Panama's sovereignty for bogus security reasons, most people assume he is not serious and his remarks carry little real significance.
29% : Like Denmark and Panama (where Trump would like to get his hands on the canal), Canada has robustly rejected his turgid annexation fantasies.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.