Our president Donald J Trump is vowing to annex Greenland. “Annex” meaning to take and to hold permanently. By hook or by crook, he literally wants it to be part of the United States. He wants this despite the furious objection of its 57,000 current residents and its longtime owner the Kingdom of Denmark.
Give me a break, you say. Denmark is a founding member of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and Trump would never mess with a fellow member of the most successful mutual defense pact in the modern history of the world. Would he? Aside from the pained laughter and head shaking the notion caused when announced, most observers now believe President Trump is dead serious.
Nowadays, the usual way for countries to expand or contract is by armed conflict. Vladimir Putin, no doubt deeply regrets his czarist predecessors having sold Alaska. Perhaps in consolation, Putin is willing to wage war to incorporate all or most of Ukraine back into Mother Russia. Hopefully no one in the Trump administration is pondering an invasion of Greenland, although with this crew, you never know.
Unlike his musings about cancelling the 2026 mid-term elections or running for a third term in the White House in 2028, this time Trump is serious. Too bad about Denmark. Too bad about the will of the Greenlandic people, and too bad about the objections of most of the United States Congress, and 75% of the American people.
To get critics objecting of this bold-faced robbery to concede, President Trump is now threatening to impose a 10%-25% tariff on any nation opposing our usurpation of Greenland. An ugly trade war with Europe looms.
Why does the United States even need title to Greenland? We currently have a treaty dating back to 1951 that gives the United States any access we think we need to build bases or harbors to ensure Greenland and the Arctic remain as a bulwark against Russian or Chinese expansion. Most of the bases are empty, deemed unnecessary after the Cold War. They could easily be restarted. The same treaty allows for the exploitation of the infinite cache of raw materials, waiting beneath Greenland’s melting ice cap.
Occupy Greenland used to be a joke. No longer. Now the idea poses a threat to the NATO Alliance, which, since the end of World War II has represented security and safety for the Western world. What is motivating Trump’s discordant geography is his sense of his own mortality.
Trump wants to leave behind an indelible reminder that he alone in the 21st Century could redraw the maps of the world to include the planet’s largest island as part of the territory of the United States of America. A 51st state? Whether we want it or not.
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