Chocolate tricks: On his maiden visit to Greenland, the icy Atlantic island the United States covets for what it calls “security reasons,” Jeff Landry, the American special envoy and also governor of the state of Louisiana, played Pied Piper. He met with Greenland’s youthful prime minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, again pitching the line that Greenland, a semi-autonomous province of Denmark, would be a much better place if run by an American real-estate tycoon–turned president. He then took to the streets of Nuuk, the island’s small capital, bearing chocolates for kids and a promise of more goodies if they ever made it to Baton Rouge, which somehow they would if only the island belonged to the USA. Dressed for his city promenade in combat camouflage, he was, in effect, playing the role of a benevolent and patronizing plantation owner eager to take over a neighbor’s cotton fields, by force if necessary. He even brought along his personal physician to support the White House claim that Greenland cannot take care of its sick. Mussolini and Hitler used similar strategies in Albania and Austria, offering symbolic gifts if these countries would only perceive the greater good borne by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. They resisted the pied pipering of that era and were invaded as a result. Sweets aside, Greenland now risks a similar fate. But more troubling perhaps is the inappropriate and condescending approach to which Washington seems wed. Regrettably, this president’s men have no historical memory. They cannot look back to a time when American troops, seen by most Europeans as liberators, handed out bushels of chocolate bars to eager children who swarmed their advancing tanks toward the end of World War II. In those days, Hershey bar–handouts stood for American goodness and decency. No longer.