Thunderdome: Greenland Edition

All readers welcome. Follow the rules.

I don’t want to clog up the Wednesday thread with a Greenland discussion, but I think some of you would like to have it.

Remember the rules: you can criticize public figures and you can criticize me, but you must treat all other readers with Victorian levels of courtesy.

I’d like to start with a link to a justification for some sort of Greenland strategy:

The Unfortunate Greenland Kerfuffle

If you don’t want to read that, at least take a look at this map and a few paragraphs to follow:

Why Greenland? Well because Moscow bases almost all of their strategic military assets on the Kola Peninsula next to Finland. This is where the Russian ICBM silos, submarine bases, and their strategic bombers are.

If you look at the flight path (ballistic or powered) from Kola to anywhere on the lower 48, then everything goes over Greenland… If you want to intercept a ballistic missile, the best point to do so is at the apogee, at the top of the flight path. The shortest route for an interceptor to get to an apogee is from directly below the apogee.

That’s where Greenland is.

So, without stating what should happen here, this is **why** the Trump administration says they **need** Greenland for national security.

The other thing that is happening is that the Northern Passage through the Arctic is opening up, and soon there will be Chinese cargo ships sailing through the Arctic to Rotterdam. It’s faster than the Suez and the ships aren’t limited to Suezmax size so China and EU trade is going to accelerate a lot.

This means Chinese submarines will also be venturing under the Arctic into the Northern Atlantic, IF THEY AREN’T ALREADY DOING SO.

Hence, the North East coast of Greenland serves not 1 but 2 critical strategic security objectives of US national security.

If this wasn’t clear to you, please understand that the Mercator global map projection is for children and journalists only. It is not a useful guide to where any countries or territories actually are in the real world that we live in.

“Okay,” you reply, “all of that is well and good, there should be some United States defense assets in Greenland. But we already have forces based there, and we have an established relationship with Denmark, the colonial owner of Greenland.” Emphasis is mine, of course, and I’ll come back to it. But why does the USA need to do anything when we already have a friendly ally in charge of the island?

To get the answer to that, you have to read the National Security Strategy. Since ACF is a full-service operation, however, I’ll excerpt the important paragraph:

Over the long term, it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European. As such, it is an open question whether they will view their place in the world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way as those who signed the NATO charter.

What is meant by that? It’s here:

That’s 2050. By 2075, Islam will be the world’s largest religion, and Europe could be 50% Muslim. There is no reason to suppose that an Islamic Europe would be particularly friendly to the United States. Even if they bore the USA no ill will, they would have no reason to allow a military or defensive presence within their borders. And that scenario completely ignores another fact: Nigeria alone will have more population than the non-Islamic segment of the European Union within as little as 30 years. By 2100, Nigeria will be more populous than the EU and Russia and the “Stans” combined. History suggests that population shifts of that nature are always accompanied by expansionist behavior. Africa is about to begin affecting the West instead of merely being affected by it.

“Alright,” you reply, “but why do we have to do something this unpleasant now to address a situation that won’t be truly dire for 25-50 more years?” My response is that somehow, to everyone’s utter and complete consternation, we finally have a leader who is thinking about the future in Chinese terms. In the past, the West gave up ownership of crucial infrastructure and positioning like the Panama Canal or Hong Kong to entities who had the patience and discipline to think long term. It’s time to start thinking long term ourselves. The fact that it’s an 81-year-old reality-TV star doing the long-term thinking is neither here nor there. It’s being done.

So that’s the argument for a Greenland acquisition. The argument against it comes in many forms: but here’s my personal favorite: If we don’t want to be targeted by Russian hypersonic missiles, maybe we should stop financing a war against Russia. If we don’t want to be targeted by Chinese nuclear missiles, maybe we should stop pledging American blood and treasure for the defense of Jensen Huang and TSMC. Let’s mind our own business, which means removing our efforts from Ukraine, negotiating a Chinese unification on pleasant terms, and not Anschluss-ing Greenland to defend against countries that should have no quarrel with us.

I think that’s the most adult version of the argument against Greenland. If your argument is “The Danes have a right to it,” then you are de facto arguing the moral superiority of colonialism, and we should go ahead and retake everything from the Philippines to our 25% of Berlin. Also, the Dutch get South Africa back. 21st Century Western thinking is entirely, utterly anti-colonial. So Denmark has zero right to Greenland. If Trump wants to give each one of the 51,800 Inuits on Greenland a cool million dollars in exchange for the country… that’s entirely legitimate and would be far more defensible, morally speaking, than the Danish pied a terre. Under no circumstances should he pay Denmark for the island. Denmark has no moral right to colonize and sell.

If your argument is — and I’ve had this made to me by a Euro — that the Danes “have been there for 300 years”, then I’m afraid this argument supports everything from bringing slavery back to a British re-acquisition of Singapore. Let me tell you something else with a lot more historical legitimacy than European ownership of Greenland: women not voting. In all seriousness, there’s no legitimate “We were there first!” claim here. If anything, it’s disgraceful that Denmark hasn’t already given Greenland up to independence, the way Queen Elizabeth presided over the complete dismantling of the British Empire and the reduction of her home country to a little rump state the size of Michigan where the most popular baby name is Mohammed.

If your argument against the Greenland acquisition is “We can’t afford it”, then I’ll reply that the purchase of Greenland would be cheaper, on the net, than the proxy war in Ukraine. Greenland wouldn’t even be in the top 5 American companies, worth-wise. And Greenland is rich in both rare earths and uranium, both of which can be mined without the sort of general chaos that accompanies oil extraction.

If your argument against the Greenland acquisition is “It would destroy NATO”, then I have to respond with, “So what?” The purpose of NATO was to defend Western Europe against a Soviet Bloc that had the tanks, the men, and the will to run from Berlin to Dublin. Putin-era Russia is not the USSR. It’s hard to imagine Poland or Germany ever being at actual risk from Russian expansionism. Let’s be adults here. Russia’s problem is not that they don’t have enough land for their people. Quite the opposite. NATO should have been disbanded 25 years ago, and the individual European countries should have paid for their own defenses instead of sending the tab to the USA so they could instead spend the money “wir schaffen das”-ing their way into making Europe the opposite of Surf City, namely: two migrant boys for every European girl.

I haven’t covered all of the arguments for and against the Greenland move, of course, and I’m surely guilty of straw- and steel-manning each of the ones I did cover, to some extent at least.

Were I in the President’s shoes, and dignified neutrality on the global stage were not an option, I think I’d be tempted to offer the following deal:

• Denmark surrenders Greenland to the USA

• Every Inuit on the island is given US citizenship and a $500,000 tax-free account in a United States bank. This means that most Inuit households automatically join the top 10% of American wealth holders. Alternately, you give them a million-dollar account that can only be withdrawn 5% or 10% a year, if you’re worried about the sudden side effects of making an entire nation rich. Their existing land ownership is legitimized and documented.

• Greenland is managed like a territory, with the locals electing a Governor and also able to vote in Presidential elections.

• The USA sells mining rights and uses the revenue from those rights to ensure continued welfare and healthcare operations for the Inuit in Greenland.

• Any American citizen can move to Greenland if they like. I can’t imagine there will be a huge rush to get there.

• Denmark receives 99-year leases of certain land tracts and nothing else. Insofar as Greenland is current a net recipient of aid and welfare from Denmark, this is a win for them, and allows them to better balance their budget. Well, maybe they can have some extra F-35s or something. But anything else is basically “Reparations For Colonies”, which is repugnant to a European, of course.

And that’s the plan! Alright, ACF, feel free to roast me for being naive, jingoistic, a stupid hick, or whatever else you think applies to someone who would suggest the above.