Aggressive and confrontational
Trump is not messing around: he’s already bullying Denmark to underline his rude demands that it give him Greenland.
Donald Trump had a fiery phone call with Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen over his demands to buy Greenland, according to senior European officials.
Speaking to the Financial Times, officials said that Trump, then still president-elect, spoke with Frederiksen for 45 minutes last week, during which he was described [as] aggressive and confrontational about Frederiksen’s refusal to sell Greenland to the US.
He doesn’t get to order any head of state to give the state to him. Who does he think he is?
The Financial Times reports that according to five current and former senior European officials who were briefed on the call, the conversation “was horrendous”. One person said: “He was very firm. It was a cold shower. Before, it was hard to take it seriously. But I do think it is serious and potentially very dangerous.”
He was very firm the way the guy with a gun standing in your living room is very firm. He was very firm the way any violent macho bully is very firm.
Another person who was briefed on the call told the outlet: “The intent was very clear. They want it. The Danes are now in crisis mode.” Someone else said: “The Danes are utterly freaked out by this.”
According to one former Danish official, the call was a “very tough conversation” in which Trump “threatened specific measures against Denmark such as targeted tariffs”.
Trump has previously said that the US needs to control Greenland and has refused to rule out using US military force to take over the territory. During a press conference a few weeks ago, Trump said that the US needed Greenland “for economic security”. The 836,300-sq-mile (2,166,007-sq-km) Arctic island is thought to be rich in oil and gas, as well as various raw materials for green technology.
So he wants to steal them.
This comes at a bad time politically among Greenlanders themselves. There’s political resentment of Denmark among Greenland’s mostly rural Inuit population of around 50,000. So there’s an ambient fear that some Greelanders might come to conflate the US’s interest in Greenland with their own desire to see the island’s “liberation” from Denmark. But it’s much more likely (if you ask me) that if the US took over, it would do nothing but exploit the island and neglect its inhabitants, whereas Denmark, in spite of its unpopularity on the ground, heavily subsidizes Greenland, and I can’t seem to find any egregious examples of mistreatment or exploitation of late. (More than half the island’s billion-dollar budget comes from Danish government subsidies, and the island has a robust level of self-governance.)
I often find myself conflicted about independence movements. I’m all for decolonization, like any good liberal. But among various independence movements of late around the world (Quebec, Scotland, various Spanish territories, etc), when I try to look at the pros and cons on either side, I get a sense that sometimes the pro-independence side’s arguments are heavy on emotional appeals and romantic attachment to tribal identity, and weak on the likely practical, pragmatic outcomes for the territories in question. That’s not always the case, of course. Sometimes a smaller state within a larger body has a legitimate claim that their membership within the larger nation is exploitative, and it merits a breakup in order for its people to achieve the quality of life and rights that they deserve.
But it often isn’t. I don’t believe for one second that Quebec would be better off as a separate nation from Canada. As for Scotland, I’m less certain, but I’m still tilting towards the remain side of the equation. As for Britain’s exit from the wider E.U., I spent a few months in the UK recently and I was stunned at how badly Brexit had damaged the economy. Britain is plainly poorer and worse off, five years on. Blatantly, shockingly so.
As for Greenland, given that it’s heavily subsidized by Denmark and its economy is otherwise nothing but fishing, eco-tourism, and housing and support for scientific researchers (I suspect the National Geographic Society alone pays half the hotel bills in the capital city of Nuuk), the economic benefit of remaining is obvious.
What would it mean for Greenland to be “fully independent” of Denmark anyways? The Greenlanders are already “self-governing”, having been granted home rule decades ago. What specific benefits of further autonomy are they lacking so badly that they want to forego their biggest economic subsidy to obtain them?
But economic factors aren’t the only ones that matter when it comes to such decisions. Indeed, as global geopolitics and climate strife rapidly plunge the planet into chaos, national security becomes a big issue, too. On this front, the idea of Greenland going it alone is nonsense. Bleeding heart me wants what’s best for the people on the island, but I’m sorry, going it alone is not in their best interests right now. At all. The year 2025 is not the time for a tiny population of Inuit fishers to go solo at the helm of an island at the centre of a simmering global confict. That’s pure romance. The people of Greenland simply will not independently control the fate of that land in today’s geopolitical climate. Bigger countries will take what they want from it, one way or another.
So the question, then, is who should formally control Greenland, for the best benefit of its people first and foremost, and then for the benefit of our current geopolitcal crisis, since at the moment the island certainly needs the protection of a strong benefactor.
What’s the benefit of Greenland becoming a US territory as opposed to a Danish one? I suppose one argument in favour of the US is that Denmark is smaller, weaker, and closer to Russia, and therefore more susceptible to being taken over by it if all-out World War Three broke out. But that seems a simplistic way of looking at it. Real life isn’t the board game Risk.
More to the point, what do Trump’s Americans think are the benefits of Greenland becoming a direct territory of the US rather than simply remaining a territory of its close NATO ally Denmark?
That I can’t seem to figure out. The cost of seizing it by force, to the US’s image as a benevolent superpower, can’t possibly be worth it. You lose so much political goodwill when you start stomping all over the globe. (It brings to mind the t-shirt Homer Simpson wore while strutting along Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana Beach: it depicted Uncle Sam taking an angry bite out of the north pole of the planet like a cheeseburger, with the words “TRY AND STOP US”. Eerily apt! The Simpsons always predicted the future.)
I don’t know. I’m trying my best to give the Trump Administration the benefit of the doubt, to scrape the edges of my cranium to be absolutely sure I’m not missing anything. And I’m coming up with bupkis. These people just plain fucking stupid, so breathtakingly, unexpectedly stupid they’ve got the whole world in a panic, straining to see if they might have missed something.
Nah. We haven’t.
*and yes, I’m well aware that Alaska is closer to Russia than Denmark is. But the Continental US is not. Russia has never invaded North America, whereas it is already in the midst of invading Europe.
The stupid plus determined & obstinate is terrifying.
“I want it, so give it to me or I’ll take .”