Greenland, Again

Another dumb idea by Trump that threatens global order

Donald Trump has, once again, floated the idea of the United States taking “ownership and control of Greenland”. This comes after his kidding-on-the-square about Canada becoming the 51st state and revisiting the transfer of the Panama Canal to Panamanian sovereignty.

I’m so tired. I’m so damn tired.

One of the best ways to appreciate the policy beats and messaging of the Trump administration is to understand it as a reality show-cum-variety show. That is, Trump is the producer and star, and every beat and sketch has to revolve around Trump—Trump should not only be the main character, but the pivotal character; whenever Trump’s not on screen, all the other characters should be asking “Where’s Trump?”, and so on. The presidency affords many instance for anyone to be at the center of most dramas, but when the narrative drifts or the camera pans away, Trump understands that a display of temper or flippancy can bring it back.

(In the long run, this dynamic is why Trump and Elon Musk will not be able to coexist. Trump’s simply incapable of sharing the stage with someone who has as big a yen for the dramatic as he does, and as president, clad in immense power, he can always play the winning hand, or trump, if you will.)

Anyway, I’m tired because we are late into the run of the Trump Show, and as we begin the ninth season (or tenth, depending on when you say it began), it’s clear that Trump is running out of material. Longtime readers will recall that the Greenland grab is something he’s discussed before. Indeed, there’s now a small cottage industry of Greenland-splainers, like this fine one by Regin Winther Poulsen, eager to show why the island is now more than a cartographic curiosity:

But for those following Arctic politics, Trump’s interest wasn’t a surprise. Geopolitics in the Arctic has become increasingly fraught in the last decade, as Greenland has been of increasing interest to the superpowers—especially the United States and China. There are three main reasons for this interest, said Rasmus Leander Nielsen, an associate professor at the Center of Arctic Political Science and Economics at the University of Greenland: The melting ice will create new commercially valuable sailing routes from the east; Greenland maintains security importance to the United States as the site of its northernmost military base at Thule; and finally, Greenland could become a crucial rare-earth mineral source.

Of course, all of this is, how can I put it, stupid. The United States doesn’t need to own Greenland to have access to its resources or its geostrategic implications (the United States, after all, has long had bases in the region). There are complicated local issues about rare-earths and uranium mining, which local populations—mistreated and abused, like all Indigenous populations—have objected to restarting, and there’s the usual range of concerns about Chinese investments. But if the United States wants to mine rare-earths and other resources, it can get that closer to home, and if it wants to block Chinese influence in Greenland, maybe it can use sweeteners rather than blunt force.

We’re at the point where Trump, concerned with annexing Canada, grabbing Greenland, raising tariffs, worrying about Chinese influence, and thinking about an isthmian canal, is about to go full nineteenth-century Republican. Literally, as I’ve written before about Trump’s earlier Greenland attempt:

From his love of tariffs to his racial view of the world, Donald Trump is the nineteenth-century ueresident America never had. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal offered another piece of evidence suggesting that the 45th president is a man out of time: the president, it turns out, has frequently mused aloud about buying Greenland from Denmark. (Greenland, although largely self-governing, is alongside Denmark and the Faroe Islands one of the three constituent countries of the Kingdom of Denmark.)

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And all of this, of course, doesn’t consider what would happen if, by some unlikely set of events, such a deal were concluded. Just imagine a world of great-power competition in which Russia, India, and China engaged in a new, suddenly-legitimate scramble for colonies.

Five years on, of course, the world is actually perilously close to reinventing scrambles for territory, from the Middle East to Ukraine to elsewhere. American presidents pushing against this norm may think they’re being Smart and Tuff, but nobody benefits more from the status quo than the country that invented the status quo. Producing a world in which territorial borders are up for revision at the whims of the strongest countries is apt to produce a world in which U.S. commitments to partner and ally security either produce an increasingly expensive drain on resources or one in which the U.S. pulls back to the most core areas—which might be purely hemispheric for this administration. Either way, the damage to U.S. interests will be immense. As I wrote, again, five years ago:

The notion of buying Greenland, then, isn’t a silly idea, no matter how lightly the president may have proposed it. It’s a dangerous and a telling one that suggests that the president’s impulse to treat everything as a real estate deal means that he’s constantly tempted to bring back some of the worst habits of international relations.

I’m tired of explaining this because none of this is rocket surgery and yet I’m watching the world’s most powerful country steadily kick away the foundations of global stability and its own power. Some of those kicks are more powerful than others, but all of them are pushing in the same, dangerous direction. You might observe, rightly, that lots of other countries, particularly Russia, are knocking on those pillars as well, but that’s hardly a reason to join them. Saying stupid stuff about Canada, Panama, and Greenland may be a great way to steal a scene, but the thing is that this isn’t a television show and the cumulative effects are corrosive.

The good news is that international relations experts will be in a lot more demand over the next 20 years. The bad news is that international relations experts will be in a lot more demand over the next 20 years.