U.S. Adopts the “Naked Man” Doctrine in Greenland

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There is an American oil company currently hauling drilling equipment into eastern Greenland, which sounds considerably worse than it is.

It is still pretty bad.

The distinction requires a short excursion into Greenlandic mineral law. I promise there will eventually be nudity.

Greenland really did grant petroleum exploration rights over Jameson Land—a vast region of eastern Greenland. The licenses predate Greenland’s 2021 decision to stop issuing new oil and gas exploration licenses, so they remain valid. The current license holder, White Flame Energy, has partnered with a Texas company called Greenland Energy, which hopes to earn a majority interest in the project by financing exploration.

An exploration license does exactly what its name suggests: it gives you rights to explore a particular area, under Greenland’s rules. It does not confer a sovereign blessing upon every subsequent thing you might wish to do there. Individual activities require further approvals.

Including drilling.

Including, inconveniently, moving around the equipment with which you intend to drill.

Consequently, Greenland’s government issued a “strong warning” and reminded the drilling companies that they did not have permission to move heavy equipment across Greenland’s fragile ancient tundra containing flora, fauna, and some pissed off muskox.

Of course, people associated with this oil nonsense have connections to Trumpworld. And because our lives now resemble a collaboration between The Apprentice and Gold Rush, Dr. Phil is producing a documentary about the project.

Yes, that guy. The boundaries guy. The "how's that working out for you" guy is now okay with showing up with drills before anyone said yes. If Geraldo Rivera guest stars in this storyline, I am calling dibs on Al Capone’s secret vault hidden beneath the permafrost. I’ve got dead cousins to protect.

Meanwhile, Texas-based Greenland Energy isn’t slowing down to get permission. It estimates that the area could contain an enormous amount of petroleum, potentially worth hundreds of billions of dollars or more. Big oil. Greenland has it. We want it. That’s the takeaway.

However, to understand what happened next, we need to consult the leading American authority on coercive diplomacy and the most brilliant TV show ever written.

The “Naked Man” was first formally introduced on November 24, 2008, in Season Four, Episode Nine of How I Met Your Mother. But like many important developments in American foreign policy, nobody understood its significance at the time. You will thank me later. Maybe.

The episode begins with Robin Scherbatsky on a blind date with a man named Mitch.

Robin is gorgeous.

Mitch is…Mitch.

The evening has not gone well. Robin has hit a dry spell in her dating life. And Mitch is, well…Mitch.

Nevertheless, Mitch has managed to get invited back to Robin’s apartment. This is important. He has not broken in. Robin has invited him upstairs for reasons that only my female readers fully understand.

At some point Robin steps outside to take a phone call.

While she is gone, her roommate, Ted Mosby, arrives home. He walks into the apartment. And there, sitting on the couch, is Mitch.

Completely naked.

Not shirtless.

Not pants unbuttoned in an optimistic hint.

Naked.

Ted looks at him. Mitch looks at Ted.

There are moments when two men encounter one another and immediately understand that one of them is going to have to explain why his penis is dangling on the edge of a sofa.

Mitch explains. This is his signature move.

You see, if a date is going badly and he suspects there is very little chance of sex, he waits until the woman leaves the room. Then he removes all his clothes.

Naturally, Ted asks the only reasonable question: Does that actually work?

According to Mitch, “two out of three times.”

To be clear, the Naked Man is not a pickup line. There is no seduction involved. Mitch simply eliminates several intermediate stages of human courtship and confronts his date with a radically altered set of facts. And nudity.

Mitch has even developed a theory for why this works, and I will share this theory with the utmost caution in case my male readers get any bad ideas.

He calls it “shock and awww.”

Get it? Like “shock and awe.” Yeah, let’s move on.

Mitch’s war/love strategy depends entirely upon scrambling the normal sequences of human interaction. Five minutes earlier, Robin was trying to decide whether she even liked Mitch. Now Robin must decide what to do about the naked man on her couch. Thus, Mitch’s brazenness collapses the normal sequence of female decision-making. Or so his theory goes.

And, stripped of the testicles, there is an actual theory of power buried in there. Mitch has created a new reality and left everyone else to respond to it.

Political scientists have a more respectable term for this: a fait accompli.

I prefer Naked Man.

Because once you recognize the maneuver, Donald Trump starts looking less like a deal maker and more like a man who has spent eighteen years taking foreign-policy advice from CBS reruns.

Consider the White House ballroom. Trump wanted a colossal ballroom because he was experiencing a bit of um…size insecurity. So instead of asking for permission from the people who can consent to such an ambitious project, he stripped the East Wing.

Then Americans were forced to respond to the naked carnage.

A federal appeals court has since halted above-ground construction and ruled that the ballroom cannot proceed without congressional authorization. I guess you could call that a meaningful victory for the separation of powers, except for the small fact that the White House still looks like ancient Rome after the Visigoths arrived.

That is the advantage of the Naked Man Doctrine. Do the thing first. Then watch everyone else scramble to undo the thing and get clothes back on the deranged, naked Emperor.

Trump has increasingly applied the same philosophy beyond his own backyard. The Trump regime bombed Venezuela without the usual Congressional courtship. They essentially altered the political reality and left everyone else to debate the legality and consequences afterward.

Action first.

Authority later.

Never ask permission.

This is an old philosophy wearing a very long red tie.

Might makes right is considerably older than Mitch or the Trump regime. Humans appear to have discovered it shortly after inventing the club.

Plato was already arguing about the idea in The Republic, where Thrasymachus proposes that justice is simply whatever serves “the stronger.” The powerful make the rules, call those rules justice, and possess the useful advantage of being powerful enough to enforce their definition.

But the great ancient case study comes from Thucydides. In 416 BCE, imperial Athens sailed to the small, beautiful island of Melos during the Peloponnesian War. Melos wanted to remain neutral. Athens wanted submission.

The Melians tried talking about justice.

The Athenians found this adorable.

They informed Melos, in one of history’s colder bro summaries of international relations, that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

Athens had the ships and the soldiers. Therefore, Athens believed it had the right.

Of course, Melos disagreed.

So Athens besieged the island, killed its adult men, and enslaved its women and children.

This philosophy has resurfaced under more dignified names ever since. Empires have called it necessity. Colonizers called it civilization. Great powers call it spheres of influence. Feminists called it the patriarchy. Political theorists eventually gave us realpolitik, which at least had the courtesy to put on a suit.

The underlying temptation remains wonderfully simple:

I can, therefore I will.

There is, however, a small historical footnote to the Athenians’ Naked Man Doctrine swagger. Not long after informing Melos that power was the only reality worth discussing, Athens decided to demonstrate this principle somewhere else.

Unfortunately for Athens, it chose Sicily.

Fools!

My people have always had a remarkably sophisticated understanding of power. Other civilizations wrote treatises. Sicilians bred cousins.

So in 415 BCE, Athens launched the Sicilian Expedition, sending an enormous military force to conquer Syracuse and expand its empire westward. The Athenians arrived with ships, soldiers, and the confidence of men who had recently explained to a much smaller island that the strong may do whatever they please.

Syracuse disagreed. Spectacularly.

The expedition became one of the ancient world’s great military catastrophes. Athens lost much of its fleet and army, thousands of surviving soldiers were captured, and the disaster helped set the empire on the road toward defeat.

Which means Thucydides gives us a remarkably satisfying sequence:

Athens: The strong do what they can.

Sicily: Yeah? Have you met my little friend?

*Small historical footnote: I realize historians generally attribute the Athenian defeat to strategy, logistics, leadership failures, and Syracusan resistance. But my family knows what happened. They came to Sicily acting like they owned the place. And we told them to leave the gun, and take the cannoli.

That’s the Naked Man Doctrine’s central weakness: Might makes right only until you take your pants off in the wrong neighborhood.

The strong act because they can. The law, the legislature, the ally, the smaller country, the horrified homeowner standing in the doorway — all of them are left with the same choice Robin faced when met with a naked man’s butt crack sweating on her sofa.

Now what?

But Naked Man Doctrine is not only a joke about impulsivity. It is power exercised through presumption.

The ballroom: I have already demolished it.

Venezuela: We have already bombed them.

Greenland: The equipment is already here.

The boundary has not technically disappeared. It has simply become everyone else’s responsibility to enforce it. And enforcement is tiring. It requires lawsuits, coalitions, votes, sanctions, diplomatic confrontations, and sometimes throwing a drink in a creepy naked man’s face.

Which brings me back to Mitch. Because there is something I neglected to tell you. Something rather important. Ted wondered whether the Naked Man actually worked. And I did not give you an answer because I didn’t want to sound like Andrew Tate.

(Gulp) It did.

Robin came back into the apartment. She found Mitch sitting there completely naked. And Robin looked at the situation he had created and essentially thought:

What the hell.

She slept with him. The Naked Man worked.

And suddenly this is considerably less funny. Mitch claims it works “two out of three times.” The man has data. That is why he keeps taking his pants off whenever his date leaves the room.

That is the lesson of the Naked Man Doctrine. We tend to imagine violations of boundaries as evidence that the person violating them does not understand where the boundary is. Often he understands perfectly.

He has simply learned that boundaries are negotiable when nobody enforces them.

I bolded that one for my Canadian and Greenland readers. (All three of you.) Trump told us his governing philosophy long before Greenland, the ballroom, and a Venezuelan coup:

“When you’re a star, they let you do it.”

Then came the line everyone remembers: Grab ’em by the pussy.

The second sentence told us something revolting about Donald Trump’s attitude toward women. The first told us something more expansive about his understanding of power.

They let you.

That is the whole Naked Man Doctrine in a nutshell. Might does not have to make you morally right. Might only has to make everyone else behave as though you have the right and they would prefer to de-escalate by ignoring your sweaty balls in their face.

Shock. Awe. Acquiescence.

And every successful Naked Man makes the next Naked Man more likely. If demolishing first works, demolish first. If threatening an ally works, threaten the next one harder. If a narrow permission can be stretched into a broader one without meaningful consequence, stop asking for the broader permission.

Take off your pants. Let your dick hang out. And see what happens. It can work.

Until it doesn’t.

There is, fortunately, another half of the How I Met Your Mother experiment. The show’s comical player, Barney Stinson, decides to try the Naked Man.

He undresses.

His date returns.

She assesses the evidence before her.

She kicks him out…Naked. Barney must do the walk of shame back to his apartment while covering up his naked shameful bits. No prolonged negotiations. No working group. No bipartisan commission convened to determine whether Barney’s penis has acquired customary rights under the lease.

Ba-bye, naked man.

That is also the Naked Man Doctrine. Or rather, that is what happens when the doctrine encounters a boundary.

Which brings us to Iran — where manhood shrivels.

Trump approached Iran with what military pundits called a repeat of “shock and awe.” Of course, Hegseth swore this was nothing like the 2003 Iraq “Shock and Awe” assault. Sure.

Mitch would have seen his signature move. Hit hard enough. Move fast enough. Demonstrate such overwhelming superiority that the other side concludes resistance is pointless.

In other words, America brought the military equivalent of dropping its trousers on the first date.

There was only one problem. It had not gotten to know its date.

Iran could not match the United States weapon for weapon, but it did not need to. Iran controlled the Strait of Hormuz. Which meant Iran controlled shipping, oil, insurance costs, energy markets, leverage, and the whole shebang of consent.

Iran did not respond like Robin or Venezuela. Iran responded like Barney’s date.

Months later, Hormuz retains leverage, and shipping has been disrupted. Washington is now negotiating over consequences that shock and awe was supposed to prevent, while the rest of the world sees the U.S. as a giant bag of naked dicks.

The Naked Man had miscalculated. Not because he lacked might. Because he assumed might was the only kind of power that mattered.

And now we are back in Greenland. An American oil venture has exploration rights. It does not yet have permission to drill the proposed well. The logistical approval for the equipment movement had expired. The equipment came anyway.

Greenland issued a strong warning. Denmark backs Greenland, and European allies have made clear that Greenland’s future belongs to Greenland and Denmark, not to whichever larger country happens to covet it most.

Because the truly dangerous thing about Naked Man Doctrine is that it sometimes works.

Sometimes the host decides making a scene is too much trouble. Sometimes the court arrives after the building is gone and gives permission. Sometimes the institution looks at the cost of resistance and accommodates the new reality instead.

And every time that happens, the naked man learns exactly the wrong lesson. The couch becomes negotiable. Then the apartment. Then the building. Eventually he stops behaving like a guest who has pushed his luck.

He begins behaving like the owner.

Greenland has spent years telling Donald Trump that it is not for sale. No means no. It should not have to explain that an exploration license is not ownership, that permission for one activity is not permission for the next, or that arriving with the equipment does not magically manufacture consent.

Mitch claimed the Naked Man worked two out of three times. America would be wise to remember that percentage.

Because once the naked man starts confusing tolerance with entitlement, there is really only one useful diplomatic response left.

PUT YOUR FUCKING PANTS BACK ON AND GET OUT.

Carlyn Beccia is an award-winning author and illustrator of 13 books. The Grim Historian is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.