ROGER KIMBALL: The Case For Annexing Greenland.
Anyway, the talk in Trump world about Greenland has given mouthpieces like Jake Tapper a case of the sads. After Katie Miller’s post, Tapper anxiously pestered her husband Stephen Miller about Greenland. “Can you,” quoth Tapper, “rule out that the US is ever going to try to take Greenland by force?” “Greenland should be part of the United States,” replied Miller. He then offered him a lesson in realpolitik. “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he said. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” Has Miller been reading his Thucydides (see Book 5.89)? Miller then asked an interesting question: by what right does Denmark have Greenland? Is it because Erik the Red founded a settlement there around AD 1000? I think the Danes will have to do better than that.
And besides, Jake Tapper can rest easy. Trump will not be sending in a Delta Force squadron to seize Greenland. That’s not how things will evolve. How will they evolve? Trump wrote about it in The Art of the Deal. There will be tears and some foot stamping by the Danes and other members of the EU. But Greenland will soon come under the orbit of the United States. Maybe Trump will make the sort of deal that Arthur Guinness struck when, in 1759, he leased St. James’s Gate for his brewery for £45 per year for 9,000 years.
I am sure a tidy sum will change hands over Greenland. Maybe Trump will also extend some face-saving tokens. But Greenland is essential to America’s, and Europe’s, security in the region. Therefore, notwithstanding the Jakes and the Margarets of the world, Greenland will be ours.
My take is that Trump has written off Europe, and expects it to go Islamist, and is fortifying North America against that prospect.
