Senator Mark Kelly, a retired US Navy captain, said something that ought to be so uncontroversial it could be printed on the back of a mess hall napkin: service personnel must obey lawful orders, and must refuse unlawful ones.
For that, Pete Hegseth has gone after him on a charge so flimsy it’s basically a mood. Undermining discipline. Encouraging disloyalty. The usual authoritarian trick of treating the law itself as subversion, because it’s inconvenient to the people trying to turn power into a personal possession.
Kelly didn’t urge mutiny. He reminded people that the armed forces aren’t a private militia. They don’t belong to the President. They belong to the Constitution. The entire point of military discipline in a democracy is that it’s bounded by legality. Otherwise you’re just hiring muscle.
And Kelly’s warning isn’t abstract. It’s timely.
Trump has openly talked about taking Greenland and has refused to rule out force. Greenland isn’t a spare bit of ice you can pick up at the till on the way out. It is part of the Kingdom of Denmark. Denmark is a sovereign state and a NATO ally. If the United States sent troops to seize control of Greenland, it wouldn’t be a “deal”. It would be an armed attack on allied territory.
That is exactly the sort of scenario where unlawful orders become plausible. Under international law, you don’t get to use force against another state’s territory unless you’re acting in self defence after an armed attack, or you have UN Security Council authorisation. Greenland doesn’t meet those conditions. There’s no credible self defence argument. There’s no UN mandate. So an invasion would almost certainly be unlawful, and the orders that flow from it would be unlawful too. That is not radical. That is the baseline rule that stops the world descending into permanent gangsterism.
So if Trump ever tries it, there are two paths, and both are dangerous.
If he gets away with it, Greenland becomes, in effect, a loyalty test. Not a military operation, a loyalty test. It proves the system will do what it’s told even when it’s plainly unlawful, even when it shatters alliances, even when it blows up the rules America claims to defend. Once you’ve demonstrated you can use force illegally abroad without consequences, the domestic lesson is obvious: the guardrails don’t work. At that point, elections stop looking like a sacred civic ritual and start looking like an obstacle. Not because there’s a constitutional button marked “cancel democracy”, but because you can hollow elections out without abolishing them. Intimidate opponents. Delegitimise the result in advance. Weaponise enforcement. Turn voting into theatre where the outcome is not allowed to be surprising.
If the military refuses, that’s the system working, but it doesn’t end the threat. It changes it.
The refusal would not look like Hollywood. No dramatic mutiny. It would look like procedure. Senior commanders demanding written orders, legal authority, rules of engagement. JAG lawyers crawling over the plan like ants on a dropped ice cream. Everything slows down. Everything becomes formal. That’s how professionals resist unlawful actions. They create friction, they demand lawful justification, and if pushed far enough they resign rather than carry the can for someone else’s lawlessness.
But then comes the predictable political move. The refusal becomes the story. Not the illegality of attacking an ally, but the supposed betrayal by generals, judges, civil servants, “globalists”, the deep state. The President casts himself as the victim of sabotage, and that manufactured outrage becomes the justification for emergency politics at home.
And here’s the uncomfortable part that people don’t like admitting. The US military is not designed to ride in and save democracy from a rogue President. It is designed to stay out of domestic politics. It is legally constrained from acting as a police force. And if the federal government itself is the problem, the President is still Commander in Chief. There is no neat constitutional mechanism where the army politely taps him on the shoulder and says, sorry mate, you’ve gone a bit rogue, hand over the keys.
So if things tip into domestic disorder, the “enforcers” aren’t likely to be the army. They’re more likely to be federal law enforcement agencies, tactical units under Homeland Security, and whichever parts of the National Guard can be pulled into federal control. Add to that a darker but well-worn pattern: political intimidation carried out by armed activists who don’t need official uniforms, just encouragement, indulgence, and selective prosecution. The state doesn’t always have to do the violence itself. Sometimes it just has to look the other way.
Which means Greenland matters even if no troops ever land.
It’s a stress test of the entire American system. If the President can threaten an ally’s territory and the response is to punish the senator who reminded everyone what lawful orders are, then you’re not watching a debate about discipline. You’re watching the early stages of a regime trying to make legality sound like disloyalty.
And once a country starts treating the rule of law as a nuisance, elections don’t need to be cancelled on paper. They just stop being the thing that decides who governs.
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