Thursday Essay: Did Trump Lose It Over Greenland?

Well, wasn't that an entertaining few days we just had over...

...Greenland?

Really?

Really. 

On Monday and Tuesday, it looked like President Donald Trump was going to take us to war with our own NATO allies, or at least destroy the eight-decade-old alliance while Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping rubbed their hands together with glee.

All over a bunch of rock and ice that neither China nor Russia could ever hope to seize.

At least, that's how more than a few pants-wetting you-know-whos told it. 

I could share a few of the more panic-mongering X posts with you, all from names you'd recognize, but it's nothing but the same stuff/different issue yet again. Last week, Trump was going to send the 3rd Armored Division to occupy Minneapolis. The week before that, he was going to sell Venezuela's oil at below-market rates to Trump Station franchises along the Acela AMTRAK line he wants to tear up and replace with a superhighway that doesn't allow electric vehicles. 

After over 10 years, the hype just doesn't seem worth it any longer.

Besides, you know the well-worn routine. Trump comes in hot on the Issue of the day, guns blazing. The usual fainters retreat to their usual fainting couches, while the usual screechers take to X to post their usual Trump's Gonna Blow Up the World (and This Time We Mean It) takes. But by the time the dust settles, Trump gets most of what he wanted, and without actually blowing anything up. 

"What looks like flailing is a classic Trump-style negotiation sequence," Josh Wolfe noted. "You open with an outrageous demand precisely so your real demand seems reasonable by comparison."

So, no — Trump didn't lose it over Greenland. But the usual TDS sufferers did.

Still, while Trump's substance was spot on, without siding with the TDS crew, let me explain why maybe Trump didn't need to crank the drama dial up to 11 when an eight or nine would probably have sufficed. 

I can't help but think that getting NATO to an agreement could have gone more smoothly because — of all the seemingly impossible and wonderful things Trump does that I voted so hard for — stirring up this much fuss over Greenland wasn’t one of them. 

Then there's the confusion — not to mention the economic fallout — of Trump's seeming willingness to blow up NATO and our trade just to get Greenland. The stock market gave Trump (not to mention my IRA) some serious pushback this week. Investors fled the dollar following Trump's tariff threat on Tuesday, causing the S&P to fall a gulp-inducing 2.1%. Over Greenland. Which few people outside our circle care about.

The thrill of watching Trump do his Trump thing to a bunch of Euroweenies aside, maybe the Fuss-to-Gain ratio was too high. We don't have stockbrokers out on ledges, but they're eating Xanax like popcorn.

On Wednesday, as if on cue, Trump took a softer tone and then announced that the US and NATO "formed the framework of a future deal with respect to Greenland and, in fact, the entire Arctic Region" and called off his threatened tariffs. PJ Media's own Chris Queen has the full story here, including, as Trump put it, details "concerning The Golden Dome as it pertains to Greenland."

And shares bounced right back on the news. Or at least they came back about halfway from Tuesday's losses. I refuse to peek at my portfolio for at least a week. 

It isn't that the markets won't recover, because they're already rebounding. It isn’t that Europe’s so-called elites don’t deserve the razzing Trump gives them, because they do. And it isn’t because Greenland doesn't gain more strategic importance with every fluid ounce of melted Arctic ice, because it does.

So maybe Wednesday's more conciliatory tone could have been Trump's starting point, maybe not. Nobody outside the White House and various European capitals could say for sure, so I try not to judge too harshly. Meanwhile, Trump again invited his critics to overreact, and they never tire of embarrassing themselves every time he does.

While I don't mind that part of the show, on days like Tuesday, I sure wish my broker would share his Xanax.

But the political point we must acknowledge is that the Fuss-to-Gain ratio could make the broader public believe that Trump isn’t focused enough on their problems. And I think that more measured criticism might hold some merit.

Besides — and this is why I'd have preferred a bit less drama — we’ll simply take Greenland if and when the need arises. You see, I need to tell you a not-so-secret: We took Greenland once already, easily and without any fuss. We could do it again.

It all began, as so many things did, when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. 

Denmark declared neutrality when war returned to Europe, but Adolf Hitler didn't care. He ordered the Wehrmacht into Denmark at approximately 0500 on April 9, 1940, and Copenhagen capitulated six hours later.

Yes, six hours.

I don't know how to say "Resistance is futile" in Danish, but the Germans sure do. I bet they had it painted on the sides of their Panzers. 

A year later, Denmark's government-in-exile, represented in Washington by Danish ambassador Henrik Kauffmann, signed the Agreement Relating to the Defense of Greenland, letting us do pretty much whatever we wanted there for the duration of the war, while recognizing Danish sovereignty, albeit mostly in the breach. 

Magnanimous as we were, we returned political control to Denmark after the war, also without any fuss. But we kept our WWII military bases operating throughout the Cold War, even expanded them, and we still have Pituffik Space Base (formerly Thule Air Base) open for business. 

From then, we became maybe somewhat less magnanimous. 

And Another Thing: Anytime you hear anyone say Pituffik Space Base, you should say gesundheit.

You should look up Camp Century sometime. Or better yet, just let me give you a quick rundown right here in the browser tab you already have open. Camp Century — also known as the "City Under the Ice" — was (and I swear I’m not making this up) a nuclear-powered "science" base carved entirely into Greenland’s icecap, starting in 1959. 

Camp Century was a science base, the same way Blofeld's volcano lair in You Only Live Twice was a weekend getaway spot. Officially, it was a research station, but in reality, Camp Century was part of Project Iceworm, a top-secret plan to store 600 nuclear missiles in a 2,500-mile tunnel network protected by all those sheets of ice. 

"Don’t piss us off or we’ll nuke you from fricken Greenland," was Camp Century's official motto that I just made up. 

But it turned out that the local ice sheet shifted around far more than we previously understood, deforming the tunnels and crushing the tracks the missiles were supposed to travel around on. We had to cancel the whole missile scheme in the early '60s and abandoned the base entirely in 1967. But not before we suffered a reactor leak, chemical spills, and other nasty accidents that we left buried there under the ice. If somebody hasn’t written a sci-fi novel about a horde of nuclear-chemical monsters emerging when the ice finally shifts somewhere else, they should.

We did a lot of weird s*** back in the '50s and '60s. I miss that. 

Anyway, we asked for and got permission from Denmark for the nuclear-powered science station, but we kinda-sorta forgot to mention the thousands of soldiers, the doomsday train tunnels, and the 600 nuclear missiles. This, despite Denmark’s prohibition on nuclear weapons stored on Danish territory — including Greenland.

A huge scandal erupted in Denmark when this stuff got declassified during the Clinton administration, but Americans don’t seem to have cared much then, now, or in 1960. 

For the last 80-plus years, the U.S. has done pretty much whatever we liked in Greenland, and neither the Danes nor the Greenlanders had much say about it, no matter how weird and/or foolhardy. 

But the point is this: Should Denmark become hostile or fall under some kind of occupation — which seems unlikely, given Russia’s four-year-long frustration in Ukraine — there’s no doubt we’d occupy Greenland again. 

Still, it's nice that Trump got a formal agreement out of our NATO partners, although one does wonder if they had any more real choice in the matter than Ambassador Kauffmann did in 1941. 

Now that we've gone through the newsy bits and the history lesson, let's look forward.

We can — and should — debate America's continued participation in the NATO alliance. I always come down on the side that Europe is wealthy enough and powerful enough (even if only latently powerful nowadays) to draw us into their wars, and it's better to fight over there than over here. 

I covered this in a previous Thursday Essay, but let me give you a recap.

Of all our presidents, John Adams might have been the most resolute about keeping us out of Europe's wars, specifically the War of the Second Coalition against Revolutionary France that erupted during his administration. But even Adams was forced to wage an undeclared "Quasi-War" against France on the oceans to protect our trade. 

Not long after, in 1812, Britain shut down our trade with Napoleonic France, and the Napoleonic Wars came home to America. The British captured Washington and burned down the White House and the Capitol building. 

Since then, any time some European potentate — whether a Kaiser, a Führer, or a General Secretary of the Communist Party — looked powerful enough to maybe come and fight us over here, we either fought them over there, or initiated a defensive alliance strong enough to keep them at bay.

We didn't forge NATO to defend Europe's interests — we did it to defend ours. That's what the people who spent the Cold War asking "Why should we help defend them?" always seemed to miss.

For the first four decades, our NATO partners generally did their bit, but I must acknowledge that politically, continued participation in NATO is a much more difficult sell than it was during the Soviet threat. The fact that Europe's militaries are barely big enough to hold a decent parade is one reason, but the growing gulf between our cultures might prove to be the deciding factor.

When the British government arrests 12,000 people a year for social media posts, the Germans can barely hold a Christmas market without a jihadi attack, "Mohammed" is the most popular baby name for Belgians, and the French... well, remain so stubbornly French (I kid, I kid), "Why should we help defend them?" becomes a question with real teeth.

So while I've previously always come down on the side of staying in NATO, that conclusion is subject to change along with the facts on the ground.

Also, we can't look at Europe and Greenland in isolation, because they're a shrinking part of a New World Disorder with Communist China serving as the main disruptor. 

When Finland's President, Alexander Stubb, said on Wednesday that Europe can "unequivocally" defend itself without the Americans, a new-to-me X user called Roman Helmet Guy had a cheeky and implausible — but far from impossible — reply:

Europeans are so naive. If Europe breaks from the USA, the USA could very easily decide that the only way to counterbalance China is to break Russia off from China. How? By arming the Russians and letting them have Europe. Russia then becomes a credible rival to China, and Russia and China fight it out for the next 500 years while we Americans just watch from the Western Hemisphere.

There's much more to Roman Helmet Guy's post, but let me add this: If there's anything better than fighting them over there instead of over here, it's getting them to fight one another over there while we watch football and kidnap the occasional South American dictator in peace. 

I've heard crazier ideas. Hell, I've probably come up with a few myself.

And, since we may speak frankly with one another here behind the VIP paywall, the more our old allies act like our old enemies did in the Kremlin, the less I care what becomes of them. Just to be clear, I'm not advocating RHG's position, and I'm reasonably certain it was more of a provocative thought experiment than an actual proposal. Besides, it's awfully difficult to picture Russia as a strong horse these days.

Nevertheless, it's a thought experiment that Europe's elites can't afford to ignore because, as RHG put it, they "haven’t considered at all what it would mean to have the USA as an enemy."

And I believe, for all of his sometimes less-than-graceful bluster — not to mention my stockbroker's increasing Xanax dependency — Trump has a broader and more nuanced view of this New World Disorder than any dozen suave European diplomats, foreign secretaries, or prime ministers.  

Yet securing Greenland is only part of what must be done to contain China's ambitions, and we'll need strong allies to make it happen.

That, however, is an essay for another Thursday.

Stay tuned.

Last Thursday: One Thousand, Four Hundred, and Eighteen Days