Robert O’Brien’s tenure as Donald Trump’s White House national security advisor was a difficult one, stemming from the fact that O’Brien didn’t seem to fully appreciate the precise nature of his responsibilities.

The New York Times published a rather extraordinary report in early 2020, for example, noting that when O’Brien convened National Security Council meetings, he had a habit of starting the gatherings by distributing printouts of Trump’s latest tweets. The Times’ report, which wasn’t independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, added that the move amounted to “an implicit challenge” for those in attendance: Their job was to “find ways of justifying, enacting or explaining Mr. Trump’s policy, not to advise the president on what it should be.”

For the better part of the last century, the White House National Security Council existed to offer presidents advice and information. In the Trump era, the model was flipped: O’Brien told NSC members what the then-president already believed and directed them to offer support for the positions Trump had already adopted.

Four years later, the president-elect, for reasons unknown, decided that the United States should own Greenland, prompting O’Brien to do the same thing he did four years ago. The Hill reported:

Former national security adviser Robert O’Brien said in a Sunday interview that Denmark should let the U.S. “buy” Greenland if it cannot defend the self-governing country, noting the territory will become increasingly important in the coming years. In an interview on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures,” O’Brien described Greenland as a “highway from the Arctic all the way to North America” and noted that the autonomous country, which is part of the Kingdom of Denmark, will become increasingly important as the climate warms in the coming years.

O’Brien got the ball rolling on Saturday with a thread published to social media, insisting that Trump is “100% right again,” this time about Greenland. “If our great ally Denmark can’t commit to defending the Island, the US will have to step in, as [the president-elect] said,” he added.

A day later, on Fox News, O’Brien went further. “[Greenland is] strategically very important to the Arctic, which is going to be the critical battleground of the future because, as the climate gets warmer, the Arctic is going to be a pathway that maybe even cuts down on the usage of the Panama Canal,” he argued, suggesting that some Republicans only accept the reality of climate change when trying to expand the United States’ territorial boundaries.

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“Denmark is now on the front lines of the war against Russia and China. They’re like the Baltic states. They’re like Poland because of their vast territory in Greenland. And so they have got to defend Greenland,” O’Brien added. “And if they can’t defend it, we’re going to have to, and we’re not going to do it for free.”

In case that weren’t quite enough, the former White House national security advisor went on to say in the same on-air interview that if Denmark is reluctant to pay the United States to defend Greenland, he had an alternative in mind. “They can let us buy Greenland from [Denmark], and Greenland can become part of Alaska,” O’Brien said. “I mean, the native people in Greenland are very closely related to the people of Alaska, and we will make it a part of Alaska.”

He did not appear to be kidding.

I won’t pretend to know why Trump became fixated on U.S. ownership of Greenland — which still isn’t for sale — or how this odd preoccupation will be resolved. But with three weeks remaining before the Republican’s inauguration, it’s hardly reassuring to see his former White House national security advisor on national television making veiled threats against a NATO ally.