Greenland: Why and How Much?

I wrote in an earlier post that the operation in Venezuela wasn’t about drugs at all, but the dominance of strategic commodities. On an emotional level it was to establish a “sphere of influence” over the Western Hemisphere. While the stated reasons for snatching Nicolás Maduro were an obvious pretense for the operation, the excuse did map onto reality. Like the Justice department jailing Al Capone for tax evasion, rather than all the other violent stuff he did, just to get him behind bars.

The fracas over Greenland fails this test. The assessment about national security is absurd. The US already has the run of the place with the blessing of both Denmark and Greenland. At the height of the Cold War the US had 10,000 troops in the area across 17 US bases. Now we’ve got fewer than 200 troops on the island. Meddling by the CIA aside, simply beefing up that presence would be more effective and a hell of a lot cheaper than taking the place over. There is little evidence that the newly accessible Arctic Seas are, as the White House claims, “covered with Russian and Chinese ships.” Even if they are, NATO is already drumming up an Arctic Sentry navel force in the area. In short the defense infrastructure is already taken care of.

An old friend who has been kind enough to read my books and argue with me about them, pointed out that if something makes absolutely no sense, just follow the money. Nine times out of ten that will explain it. So amid rumors that oil prices have peaked, is Trump after control of rare earths and other minerals in the area? Probably, but if so then the President of the United States hasn’t thought it through. For one thing, since the Danes have rebuffed Chinese investment in Greenland, Trump can get all the concessions he wants with his standard and endearing style of hectoring and economic bullying.

Second, like the investment plan in Venezuela, few American firms seem interested in signing on to the president’s Greenland scheme. Venezuela may be “uninvestable” but Greenland just isn’t terribly profitable. Unlike oil, rare earths aren’t all that rare - they are just very hard to mine and refine. The margins are thin and the processes very messy. It is very hard to do it at scale without creating an ecological disaster.

Yet Trump still insists that “ownership is very important”. It’s been suggested that all this bluster is Negotiation 101 for the New York Real Estate Asshole. And that’s probably true, but it doesn’t answer the question: Just what is the end game for these negotiations?

In my experience, such as it is, that one out of ten time that following the money doesn’t explain what’s going on – it’s ego. The man is famously obsessed with his legacy, so fixated on the Nobel Prize that Venezuela’s opposition leader, María Corina Machado, offered to share hers with the man to get a little support. S adding Greenland to America’s real estate portfolio would really leave an impression on the ego Take that Andrew Johnson – Alaska is big, but Greenland is bigger. (Trump even has two impeachments to the 17th President’s one.)

SO WHAT’S THIS GOING TO COST US?

Gen X may not be the most idealistic generation, but we are pretty damned practical. So what is this tectonic vanity plate going to cost us? It’s a tricky call because the whole thing is so damned stupid. Coercion and ownership won’t help the country to get anything that we haven’t already got, vis à vis security or commodities concessions. Although the cost of administering Greenland will be pretty high – it currently costs Copenhagen some $650 million per annum.

Harder to quantify, it might cost us NATO, pitting the US against the entire world. Not militarily, exactly, but economically. It well may drive the EU into the market arms of China creating a huge Eurasian market that will outweigh American market heft. One floods that Europe with cheap solar panels and dinky electric cars as well as bails China’s export-driven economic model out of the soup. It will box out US companies while the rest of the world hews to a Beijing standard in AI, big tech and the rest of the next-gen ingenuity that is going to ruin our lives.

So why would Europe crawl into bed with Big Panda? Because unlike President Trump, China’s President Xi actually can stop the war in Ukraine. It just wants to box out the US first.