Today Greenland, Tomorrow Mt. Rushmore!

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

Several days ago in a blog posting entitled "An Imperial Presidency?" I discussed the President-Elect's noises about the US acquiring Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal.    The United States either buying or seizing control of Canada is little more than an hallucinatory pipe dream.  Canadians are an independent people who would never submit to US ownership, and especially an ownership engineered by that particular US politician.   The Panama Canal, too, seems like it would take a lot more diplomacy and effort than a notoriously undiplomatic person such as the incoming President would ever be able to muster, and Panama and much of the rest of the world would also have a very strong interest in maintaining the situation exactly as it already is.

But Greenland seems to be the real target of the land grab hysteria that the next administration is trying to foment.

In a television appearance on Sunday, Robert O'Brien, a former National Security Adviser in the in-coming President's first administration and a shameless "yes man" for his former boss, made his case for the US controlling Greenland.  O'Brien said that as climate change progresses and the planet warms, Greenland would become a major transportation route south from the Arctic to the North America, making it strategically more important.  O'Brien argued that with Denmark, the country that oversees Greenland, facing down Russia in Europe, it would likely be incapable of defending Greenland.   O'Brien posited that the US would have to step in and protect Greenland - and the US should not defend Greenland for free.  Hence, it should be sold to the US so that we could adequately protect it as a part of our country.

O'Brien also posited that since the native population of Greenland is closely related to that of Alaska, it should be merged into one state with Alaska.

To some extent, the United States is already protecting Greenland.  The US has had a military presence on Greenland since World War II, and Thule Air Force Base - which, as of April of 2023, is now called Pituffik Space Base - is still operational and now run by the US Space Force.

It is doubtful that the new President is overly concerned with the threat of Russian aggression against Greenland when he clearly isn't bothered by Russian aggression against Ukraine.   The more likely motivation for his strong interest in acquiring Greenland is simply its immense size, and size is very important to the man making all of the noise.  Greenland is almost 9,000 square miles larger than the entire area of the Louisiana Purchase, and it's addition to the United States would be the largest US land acquisition in history - and, no doubt in the new President's eyes, would elevate him in historical stature at least up to the level of Thomas Jefferson.

Today Greenland, tomorrow Mt. Rushmore!

It's all about him and his legacy.  Since he will never achieve greatness by donning a military uniform and rushing off to lead his nation in a war - like Volodymyr Zelensky - his next best option is to bully a small European nation into betraying a trust and selling off a huge chunk of its kingdom to a raving egomaniac.

He understands the art of bullying and making deals, and that would make the large man with the tiny hands and bad combover a truly great American, you betcha it would!