Our Foreign Policy
Try not to think about it.
Right now the United States is facing two major foreign-policy crises:
1. Greenland.
2. Where King Charles III will go to the bathroom.
I will take these crises one at a time.
Greenland is a large island or possibly iceberg off the coast of Canada that President Trump would like to conquer acquire legally. Why? Strategy, that’s why.
Geographically, Greenland happens to be located in a strategically critical location, namely, right next to outer space. In fact the United States already has a Space Force base in Greenland, which is named (Google this if you don’t believe me) “Pituffik Space Base.” The base gets its name from the Inuit word “pituffik,” meaning “sound of a seal farting.” Here’s Vice President Vance on an official visit there last March, during which he and Mrs. Vance officially observed base personnel participating in squinting exercises.
The other strategic reason we want to legally acquire Greenland is natural resources. Greenland has an abundant supply of certain rare and highly desirable natural resources that we are sorely lacking in the United States, specifically the state of Indiana, as detailed in this article:
Speaking of the Hoosiers: I want to digress for a moment here to congratulate them on winning the national professional college football championship with their plucky team of 31-year-old student-athletes. I also want to sincerely apologize for an error I made in an early version of last week’s Substack, in which I carelessly referred to their school as “The University of Indiana.” As many Hoosiers immediately let me know, that is not the correct name. The correct name — please make a note of it — is “The Indiana University of Indiana.”
But getting back to Greenland: Technically it belongs to Denmark, a Scandinavian nation also known as Norway, or, more familiarly, “Sweden.” The Trump administration’s position is that Denmark should let us have Greenland, on the grounds that (a) we want it, and (b) nobody currently lives there except for the inhabitants.
Unfortunately, Denmark doesn’t want to give Greenland up. This means it could come down to an armed conflict between the two nations, which most experts believe would last approximately as long as an Arby’s commercial, because Denmark is not a major military power, as we see in this recent photo of the entire Danish army, taken during a pastry break:
The Greenland dispute has worsened the relationship between the United States and our NATO allies in Europe, which was already pretty bad because the Europeans hate America for creating this insane metastasizing Frankenstein-monster tipping culture wherein you’re expected to pay a minimum 22 percent gratuity on every financial transaction you enter into, including with vending machines. So a forcible U.S. takeover of Greenland could be the “final straw” that results in the complete collapse of NATO, thus clearing the path for increased Russian and Chinese aggression, which in turn could ultimately spiral into a global thermonuclear war. Fortunately, that’s a worst-case scenario that probably won’t happen. In the reassuring words of one high-level U.S. State Department official who asked to remain anonymous (Marco Rubio): “I personally am moving to New Zealand.”
For now, all we can do about Greenland, as Americans, is hope that President Trump, as is his wont, gets distracted by some other bee in his strategic bonnet, such as constructing a casino on the lunar surface. Meanwhile, we also need to be aware of the other looming foreign-policy crisis, which, as I mentioned earlier, is where King Charles III will go to the bathroom.
I found out about this crisis from an online magazine I subscribe to called PRO, which stands for “Portable Restroom Operator.” PRO, in its own words, covers “portable restroom, mobile wash station, and temporary sanitation and waste-disposal news for industry leaders.” I am not, despite what you may have heard, a leader in the portable-restroom industry, but over the years I have found PRO to be consistently more entertaining than many publications that are actually trying to be entertaining. For example, here’s a headline, which I am not making up, from the January issue:
That’s right: A publication devoted to portable toilets is inviting its readers to... Dive in!
But PRO is not just entertaining: It’s also informative. Each month it has a roundup of portable-restroom news, and this was the lead item for January:
This item linked to an article in a UK newspaper, the Daily Star, concerning King Charles III’s upcoming April visit to the White House. The article quotes Will Scharf, who is the White House staff secretary and an assistant to President Trump, as stating that because the White House doesn’t currently have a ballroom capable of handling big events, when the king visits, “more likely than not, he will be hosted in a tent on the South Lawn with porta-potties.” Scharf said this “is not a good look for the United States of America.” He contrasted it with the accommodations provided for President and Mrs. Trump in September when they visited King Charles and Queen Camilla in Windsor Castle, which as you can see was an extremely fun time for everybody.
These are the facial expressions of people who know they can “let their hair down” and enjoy themselves because they have access to high-class toilets. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for guests at large White House gatherings, who, to judge from the statements of presidential assistant Scharf, are probably, during peak demand times, peeing in the rosebushes.
The good news is, this situation will change drastically once construction is complete on the president’s massive new White House East Wing strategic ballroom, which will have the capacity to host a major state dinner and a tractor pull at the same time, and which will obviously have great toilets, toilets that will be the envy of the rest of the world, toilets that will have the power, if the need arises, to suck down a mature sheep. The bad news is, for now we have a situation wherein, to quote the Daily Star, the reigning monarch of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, attending a formal dinner in his honor, “could be using a bathroom a bit like this”:
This is worrisome. If something goes wrong — if Charles gets stuck in there, or if, God forbid, Pete Hegseth some drunken guest decides to tip His Royal Majesty over — we could find ourselves at war with both Denmark and Britain. This is something we should all be thinking about, although I personally intend to stop here.
Speaking of tipping, it’s time for all of you brilliant yet at the same time physically attractive paying subscribers to express yourselves.
Wouldn’t King Charles actually need a Port-a-Throne?!?!
Did you know that there is a real portable toilet company called Ameri-Can. Seems to me they should change their name to America-Can't. As in, you can't make this shit up.