What if, as it seems, Denmark has no interest in that extension of American sovereignty? Isn’t it an “and I want a blowjob from Florence Pugh” situation in that case?
The Danes have been very sensitive to perceived threats against their sovereignty over Greenland since well before it became an object of Trump's attention. There was a whole diplomatic brouhaha over a base services contract back in 2015/16 because DoD awarded it to a functionally American firm despite international agreements requiring such contracts to go to Danish/Greenlandic firms.
So maybe direct ownership of Greenland would be strictly superior to current arrangements, but there really is no path from here to there that doesn't completely eviscerate our European alliances in the process.
Oh, that’s not true. Make Greenland an offer, the Danes have no constitutional way to reject if the Greenlanders vote to accept.
It’s the difference between offering you $500,000 to leave your boyfriend versus threatening to club and kidnap you.
The boyfriend might not be pleased that you made the offer, but he knew the girlfriend was already talking about leaving him and he’s not gonna quit his lucrative law firm partnership over it.
It can both be true that we could do it, and that doing it would eviscerate our European alliances. Just about every NATO country has dependencies that they don’t want to see picked off by opportunistic countries. “There’s nothing in the rulebook that says a dog can’t play” works for sports movies; in diplomacy you sometimes need to pass up opportunities that are technically feasible but would alienate countries you might need for more important stuff (as we are seeing now).
And then let me add that speaking as a Dutch voter, you're wrong about voters in countries that begin with an "N." If President Trump came along tomorrow and said, "I'm gonna make Aruba an offer to become part of the Yoonited States" and the Arubans said "yes," the reaction in the rest of the Kingdom of the Netherlands would be somewhere between a shrug and a jig.
That includes the rest of the Dutch Caribbean: the Curaçaoans would ask, "Wait, what, we don't get any love here?"
"he’s not gonna quit his lucrative law firm partnership over it"
To continue with this analogy--if the guy who's already been threatening to leave the firm for years banged another partner's wife, the endgame would be that he finally gets pushed out of the partnership himself.
I can see the benefits of having Greenland sure, but, as Jeff mentioned, weren't we getting 80% of those benefits for free already?
Is that extra 20% really worth straining our alliances and making us look to the world to be like Russia or China? I kind of liked it when we had the moral high ground (and think it was in our interest too).
80%? Maybe, I guess? Before I give the short answer, here are my two longer recent public disquisitions on the subject. (There are others from over a decade ago out there somewhere and private ones for a certain senator from a sunny state.)
"The question is whether the American government values those benefits at a price than Greenlanders (not Danes!) are willing to accept."
No. There is another question - if America values it at a price we're willing to accept (pissing off a close ally and making other countries think twice about trusting us and giving our enemies license to try the same and probably starting a few wars doing so). I'll take a look at what you wrote, but going in, I feel pretty strongly the answer to that is no.
Seriously, there’s a link you could click on to figure out my age. I know what you’re referring to. I am saying that the humor fails because the underlying analogy is the opposite of obvious.
Unlike the Pugh quip! That was funny. Even without me immediately knowing who she is, it was funny!
The Midnight Sky (2020) is a George Clooney movie that Jeff constantly (for him) makes fun of. I believe he wrote a whole post about it a few years ago. It's a running gag with him like
I mean, if they would sell it to us for less than, say, $500B I think we should take that deal. But they do not seem to want to sell it at all, so, it's kind of moot. I'd like the north shores of the Great Lakes, too, but they aren't available!
Well, put yourself in the position of a Greenlandic voter. $300k per man, woman, and child, cut as checks directly to the family? $500k? $800k? All of those offers sum to an order of magnitude less than the price you stated and I don't think anyone believes that the Greenlanders wouldn't think very seriously about them.
Of course, we never made an actual offer, because [FILL IN BLANK]. A $100k number did leak, but that seems to have been a genuine leak and not an attempt at eight-dimensional negotiation.
Yeah, I remember the 100k offer. My reaction at the time was, why not a million? With 50,000ish Greenlanders you are still only at 50 billion. And it’s a million dollars! It is hard to turn down in a way that $100,000 is not. It is not unreasonable for the US to put the 50 billion bucks on the table and for Denmark to hold a referendum. But it’s clearly about more than the practical considerations for Denmark/the EU/the rest of NATO/many Greenlanders, at this point. So I doubt you could get Denmark to agree to it, even if their official stance is that Greenlanders are self-deterministic.
Yeah. I think I at least understand your argument for buying/bribing it. I'm glad we agree that we never should have even implied the potential of taking it by force.
I don't think it came up in the discussion below, which I appreciate, but would American voters accept cutting a $300K check to every Greenlander? Or $100K for that matter. What about us, the citizens? What about American First? This would have to go through Congress. I don't think you can give this kind of lavish gift to foreigners with nothing for the existing citizenry. That would be politically repellent. I hope at least, and I suspect.
I believe my base assumption is correct: America is a democracy and Americans greatly detest foreign aid. Therefore, the politics of it are extremely dicey. Whether this would be seen and resented as foreign aid would be the issue. I don't know how you give a $400K cash award to every Greenlander, and not have huge number of Americans ask, "Where's mine?" You would have to give very tangible cash awards to Americans, not some claim that this is worth so many bazillion dollars and will benefit our national security and economy. I don't know what that would be, but it would have to be significant.
The link to my post goes through and values all the benefits to Americans. The payments would be certainly not a gift. Congress might still say no, of course.
Oh, why not, here's a plug! You can find the bestest best calculation, the most beautifully perfect calculation ever, of Greenland's value to the United States at:
Even if we accept that premise for the sake of argument, I don't think having "bring Greenland into America's sphere of influence" associated with a man as reliable as a mercury cuirass would be beneficial to future efforts to that end.
Oh, well, yes, I can't refute that. Your response is akin to Ed West's complaint in November 2024 that President-elect Trump's victory just consigned us to a thousand more years of woke.
If you look at a pattern that is clearly emerging - that is Canada, Greenland, Venezuela, now Cuba - it doesn't seem to be about national security at all. It seems to me to be about Trump acquiring real estate and putting his name on it.
Unfortunately, the slavish-sycophant penalty is generally imposed by the other side, and is therefore too easily dismissed as rank partisanship. Seems like everyone's afraid to be the one standing next to the kiddie pool and shouting, "You guys are clowns!" Because they know the clowns will start hucking jello. So then you're left with the shit-smeared Twister game that MAGA's playing, and maybe it made sense back when it was just regular Twister, but joining now? Fuck that.
I guess what I'm saying is that we need a more organized center...
Oh yeah I forgot about Greenland. Cuba might be the next thing we can’t live without(or at least without attacking). Someone really shouldn’t have given this guy a globe and that book about McKinley. My fantasy is that Trump will focus his foreign policy energy on that bit of sand between Egypt and Sudan that nobody wants.
Unfortunately the idea of needing to subdue Cuba has at least one almost-WW3 incident behind it, so their hostile regime is a bit different from Greenland's allied one.
True, though I don’t see why we can’t have a modus vivendi with Cuba, I don’t think they pose any threat. That incident happened more than 60 years ago, and was really between the US and USSR. It was resolved when the Soviets agreed to withdraw their missiles, in exchange for US missiles out of Turkey. I don’t really see Russia sending its nukes over there nowadays(?) The rationale that we can attack countries because they may ally with enemies is exactly what Putin used to attack Ukraine.
You know when a kid starts to care about that Happy Meal toy again? When he sees his little brother playing with it, and suddenly needs it very badly again. What I'm saying is, the reason nobody's talking about the-country-that-rhymes-with-Schmeenland is that they're hoping he'll forget about it. At least until he's done playing with Cuba.
I don't know why you felt like you had to bothsides things to end an otherwise fine piece. And really, who tf is Robin DiAngelo, and to the extent that anyone besides racist MAGAts would raise their hands, have any of them cared for the past half decade, at least?
As funny as it is to mock the Greenland thing now that we're stuck in an even stupider Trump thing, it was serious for a while, at least in the sense of doing long-term damage to the US's relationship with Denmark in particular and Europe and NATO more generally. If the best counterweight you have to that is some academic crank from the past, why even bother bringing it up?
The people who took publicly DiAngelo seriously within the Democratic Party were definitely of lower ranking than the president. The first episode of Abbot Elementary made fun of DiAngelo. It's not like Joe Biden was having her over to the White House.
In certain professions and industries, Robin DiAngelo was a very big deal. I'm not entirely sure it is 100% "safe" to go around criticizing her even now, in some circles. Which should be embarrassing for them
Well, believing/liking Robin DiAngelo is not at all equivalent to antagonizing our allies by threatening to militarily take over a peaceful country that is already doing what we want. But it is (or ought to be) embarrassing, imo.
Honestly, it’s difficult to think of analogues for the monumentally stupid things that Trump does!
I believe it's called making conversation. :) The analogy works on the embarrassment side, but it is not a perfect analogy. So, I agree with you that it's not a 1:1 analogy. I agree with Maurer that DiAngelo fans should be embarrassed.
Trump incapable of humiliation? The man's a narcissist*. His whole thing is that any defeat is an utter humiliation and the only solution is to go scorched earth on the people involved. Like how he seems to have run for president as some weird form of revenge after Obama took the piss out of him in public.
[*Source: no medical or psychological training at all, just parroting the words of my betters]
I know there was this one niche corner of the "All in for Greenland" crowd that was trying to form a movement to get 60,000 of their fellow travelers to move to Greenland so they would have the votes to in any referendum to vote to join the US. I'm really bummed we apparently won't be getting monthly updates from those patriotic souls willing to freeze to death for Trump.
It’s frustrating that Greenland is quite reluctant about opening up mining concerns. But the Arctic is getting more and more accessible so Greenland is becoming more and more of a defense lynchpin. Yet, that doesn’t justify annexation what with the US and Greenland having agreements that enable America to set up basically as many installations as we like there.
Presumably they were mollified (for now) by the strategic framework reached with the Nato chief two months ago?
You can criticize the framework or argue it didn't fully resolve the issue (both valid), but that's not exactly the same as forgetting about Greenland or admitting it was never vital (long term, it definitely is).
(raises hand)
I thought extending American sovereignty over Greenland was a good idea before 2019 and I still do today
(ducks)
What if, as it seems, Denmark has no interest in that extension of American sovereignty? Isn’t it an “and I want a blowjob from Florence Pugh” situation in that case?
Well, we’re rich, handsome, and charming. None of which we properly used in the attempted seduction.
In other words, yes, we could have gotten that blowjob if we hadn’t been so boorish about it.
The Danes have been very sensitive to perceived threats against their sovereignty over Greenland since well before it became an object of Trump's attention. There was a whole diplomatic brouhaha over a base services contract back in 2015/16 because DoD awarded it to a functionally American firm despite international agreements requiring such contracts to go to Danish/Greenlandic firms.
So maybe direct ownership of Greenland would be strictly superior to current arrangements, but there really is no path from here to there that doesn't completely eviscerate our European alliances in the process.
Oh, that’s not true. Make Greenland an offer, the Danes have no constitutional way to reject if the Greenlanders vote to accept.
It’s the difference between offering you $500,000 to leave your boyfriend versus threatening to club and kidnap you.
The boyfriend might not be pleased that you made the offer, but he knew the girlfriend was already talking about leaving him and he’s not gonna quit his lucrative law firm partnership over it.
It can both be true that we could do it, and that doing it would eviscerate our European alliances. Just about every NATO country has dependencies that they don’t want to see picked off by opportunistic countries. “There’s nothing in the rulebook that says a dog can’t play” works for sports movies; in diplomacy you sometimes need to pass up opportunities that are technically feasible but would alienate countries you might need for more important stuff (as we are seeing now).
Let me say that I am really enjoying this!
And then let me add that speaking as a Dutch voter, you're wrong about voters in countries that begin with an "N." If President Trump came along tomorrow and said, "I'm gonna make Aruba an offer to become part of the Yoonited States" and the Arubans said "yes," the reaction in the rest of the Kingdom of the Netherlands would be somewhere between a shrug and a jig.
That includes the rest of the Dutch Caribbean: the Curaçaoans would ask, "Wait, what, we don't get any love here?"
(Say, what is a jig, anyway?)
"he’s not gonna quit his lucrative law firm partnership over it"
To continue with this analogy--if the guy who's already been threatening to leave the firm for years banged another partner's wife, the endgame would be that he finally gets pushed out of the partnership himself.
Hahahahahahah!
Unless the guy doing the banging is the firm's major rainmaker, right?
Very interesting. I've never considered this perspective
Oh, and Denmark isn’t the object of the seduction! Denmark is the husband we’re attempting to jilt.
Didn't know who Florence Pugh was but, having Googled her, I can't argue.
Darn it! I didn't want to think about Florence Pugh today!
I can see the benefits of having Greenland sure, but, as Jeff mentioned, weren't we getting 80% of those benefits for free already?
Is that extra 20% really worth straining our alliances and making us look to the world to be like Russia or China? I kind of liked it when we had the moral high ground (and think it was in our interest too).
Greenland looks very big on a map, me want big tracts of land.
80%? Maybe, I guess? Before I give the short answer, here are my two longer recent public disquisitions on the subject. (There are others from over a decade ago out there somewhere and private ones for a certain senator from a sunny state.)
https://www.noelmaurer.com/p/the-price-of-greenland
https://www.noelmaurer.com/p/buying-greenland-a-practical-guide
The short answer is that I can't judge proportions, but sovereignty gives three benefits we don't currently have:
(a) The right to subsoil royalties;
(b) The right to ban exports;
(c) Insurance against future Greenlandic perfidy.
The question is whether the American government values those benefits at a price than Greenlanders (not Danes!) are willing to accept.
"The question is whether the American government values those benefits at a price than Greenlanders (not Danes!) are willing to accept."
No. There is another question - if America values it at a price we're willing to accept (pissing off a close ally and making other countries think twice about trusting us and giving our enemies license to try the same and probably starting a few wars doing so). I'll take a look at what you wrote, but going in, I feel pretty strongly the answer to that is no.
There's always someone who thought New Coke tasted better than Classic Coke.....
True! But still sort of losing you on the analogy.
Oh wait. You seem young. The introduction of New Coke (a new flavor) was a Huge controversy in the mid 1980's. The new flavor failed.....
Are you talking to me? Young? Hahahahahah
Seriously, there’s a link you could click on to figure out my age. I know what you’re referring to. I am saying that the humor fails because the underlying analogy is the opposite of obvious.
Unlike the Pugh quip! That was funny. Even without me immediately knowing who she is, it was funny!
This Ludditte will take the loss and move on!
Thanks for being kind!
Jeff's readers are the best!
I'm willing to bet that I'm a bigger Luddite than you are ...
But yes, they are, and there is absolutely nothing at all self-serving about us pointing out the obvious.
Ok. Let's try this. I actually liked the movie "Midnight Sky" and the ending to "Game of Thrones."
My weak point?
There's always going to be an opposing viewpoint.
I am agnostic on Greenland.....
Remind me what Midnight Sky is again? The one with Tom Cruise in the empty Times Square? Or was that Vanilla Sky?
The Midnight Sky (2020) is a George Clooney movie that Jeff constantly (for him) makes fun of. I believe he wrote a whole post about it a few years ago. It's a running gag with him like
"Is thing whatever worse than
The Midnight Sky?"
Hope this helps.....
I mean, if they would sell it to us for less than, say, $500B I think we should take that deal. But they do not seem to want to sell it at all, so, it's kind of moot. I'd like the north shores of the Great Lakes, too, but they aren't available!
Well, put yourself in the position of a Greenlandic voter. $300k per man, woman, and child, cut as checks directly to the family? $500k? $800k? All of those offers sum to an order of magnitude less than the price you stated and I don't think anyone believes that the Greenlanders wouldn't think very seriously about them.
Of course, we never made an actual offer, because [FILL IN BLANK]. A $100k number did leak, but that seems to have been a genuine leak and not an attempt at eight-dimensional negotiation.
Yeah, I remember the 100k offer. My reaction at the time was, why not a million? With 50,000ish Greenlanders you are still only at 50 billion. And it’s a million dollars! It is hard to turn down in a way that $100,000 is not. It is not unreasonable for the US to put the 50 billion bucks on the table and for Denmark to hold a referendum. But it’s clearly about more than the practical considerations for Denmark/the EU/the rest of NATO/many Greenlanders, at this point. So I doubt you could get Denmark to agree to it, even if their official stance is that Greenlanders are self-deterministic.
At this point, you might be right! You weren't before the President shot his mouth off about military options, however. Sigh.
Yeah. I think I at least understand your argument for buying/bribing it. I'm glad we agree that we never should have even implied the potential of taking it by force.
I don't think it came up in the discussion below, which I appreciate, but would American voters accept cutting a $300K check to every Greenlander? Or $100K for that matter. What about us, the citizens? What about American First? This would have to go through Congress. I don't think you can give this kind of lavish gift to foreigners with nothing for the existing citizenry. That would be politically repellent. I hope at least, and I suspect.
Here’s the post, if you missed it. The short version is that your base assumption is incorrect.
Dammit, I sound boring. https://www.noelmaurer.com/p/the-price-of-greenland
I believe my base assumption is correct: America is a democracy and Americans greatly detest foreign aid. Therefore, the politics of it are extremely dicey. Whether this would be seen and resented as foreign aid would be the issue. I don't know how you give a $400K cash award to every Greenlander, and not have huge number of Americans ask, "Where's mine?" You would have to give very tangible cash awards to Americans, not some claim that this is worth so many bazillion dollars and will benefit our national security and economy. I don't know what that would be, but it would have to be significant.
The link to my post goes through and values all the benefits to Americans. The payments would be certainly not a gift. Congress might still say no, of course.
Oh, why not, here's a plug! You can find the bestest best calculation, the most beautifully perfect calculation ever, of Greenland's value to the United States at:
https://www.noelmaurer.com/p/the-price-of-greenland
Even if we accept that premise for the sake of argument, I don't think having "bring Greenland into America's sphere of influence" associated with a man as reliable as a mercury cuirass would be beneficial to future efforts to that end.
Oh, well, yes, I can't refute that. Your response is akin to Ed West's complaint in November 2024 that President-elect Trump's victory just consigned us to a thousand more years of woke.
I think of it as woke consigned us to four (eight?) more years of Trump. Different sides of the same coin I guess
Wow, those reply guys defending Trump on Greenland sounded like complete losers.
I'm so sorry!
You know how to stop Presidential over-reach?
"I, Peter H. Dinklage, do solemnly swear, that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States.."
Democrat: "Am I allowed to laugh at that? What do my friends say?"
Republican: "Effing hilarious!"
Ah, the Angry Elf!
If you look at a pattern that is clearly emerging - that is Canada, Greenland, Venezuela, now Cuba - it doesn't seem to be about national security at all. It seems to me to be about Trump acquiring real estate and putting his name on it.
I mean, a guy's gotta get that Nobel Peace Prize somehow . . . .
Unfortunately, the slavish-sycophant penalty is generally imposed by the other side, and is therefore too easily dismissed as rank partisanship. Seems like everyone's afraid to be the one standing next to the kiddie pool and shouting, "You guys are clowns!" Because they know the clowns will start hucking jello. So then you're left with the shit-smeared Twister game that MAGA's playing, and maybe it made sense back when it was just regular Twister, but joining now? Fuck that.
I guess what I'm saying is that we need a more organized center...
We also need more use of the word "hucking".
Huck yeah, we do!
Oh yeah I forgot about Greenland. Cuba might be the next thing we can’t live without(or at least without attacking). Someone really shouldn’t have given this guy a globe and that book about McKinley. My fantasy is that Trump will focus his foreign policy energy on that bit of sand between Egypt and Sudan that nobody wants.
Unfortunately the idea of needing to subdue Cuba has at least one almost-WW3 incident behind it, so their hostile regime is a bit different from Greenland's allied one.
True, though I don’t see why we can’t have a modus vivendi with Cuba, I don’t think they pose any threat. That incident happened more than 60 years ago, and was really between the US and USSR. It was resolved when the Soviets agreed to withdraw their missiles, in exchange for US missiles out of Turkey. I don’t really see Russia sending its nukes over there nowadays(?) The rationale that we can attack countries because they may ally with enemies is exactly what Putin used to attack Ukraine.
You know when a kid starts to care about that Happy Meal toy again? When he sees his little brother playing with it, and suddenly needs it very badly again. What I'm saying is, the reason nobody's talking about the-country-that-rhymes-with-Schmeenland is that they're hoping he'll forget about it. At least until he's done playing with Cuba.
I don't know why you felt like you had to bothsides things to end an otherwise fine piece. And really, who tf is Robin DiAngelo, and to the extent that anyone besides racist MAGAts would raise their hands, have any of them cared for the past half decade, at least?
As funny as it is to mock the Greenland thing now that we're stuck in an even stupider Trump thing, it was serious for a while, at least in the sense of doing long-term damage to the US's relationship with Denmark in particular and Europe and NATO more generally. If the best counterweight you have to that is some academic crank from the past, why even bother bringing it up?
The people who took publicly DiAngelo seriously within the Democratic Party were definitely of lower ranking than the president. The first episode of Abbot Elementary made fun of DiAngelo. It's not like Joe Biden was having her over to the White House.
In certain professions and industries, Robin DiAngelo was a very big deal. I'm not entirely sure it is 100% "safe" to go around criticizing her even now, in some circles. Which should be embarrassing for them
Sorry, but I just don't accept the equivalence.
Well, believing/liking Robin DiAngelo is not at all equivalent to antagonizing our allies by threatening to militarily take over a peaceful country that is already doing what we want. But it is (or ought to be) embarrassing, imo.
Honestly, it’s difficult to think of analogues for the monumentally stupid things that Trump does!
Which is the point behind my original comment, if you see what I mean: why bothsides it?
I believe it's called making conversation. :) The analogy works on the embarrassment side, but it is not a perfect analogy. So, I agree with you that it's not a 1:1 analogy. I agree with Maurer that DiAngelo fans should be embarrassed.
Noted. Clearly, we're not going to budge each other, so let's end it here.
Wait, there are new episodes of The Neighborhood?
Hahahahahahah
We'll need the Greenland shipping lanes now, just to replace the Straits of Hormuz..
I blame it on Gerardus Mercator.
And that Trump doesn’t know how to read.
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/den001.asp#b1
"I'm bored! I want a thing! Give me a new thing, 'cause I am booooored with these things!
-80 year old man, alleged leader of free world.
Trump incapable of humiliation? The man's a narcissist*. His whole thing is that any defeat is an utter humiliation and the only solution is to go scorched earth on the people involved. Like how he seems to have run for president as some weird form of revenge after Obama took the piss out of him in public.
[*Source: no medical or psychological training at all, just parroting the words of my betters]
I know there was this one niche corner of the "All in for Greenland" crowd that was trying to form a movement to get 60,000 of their fellow travelers to move to Greenland so they would have the votes to in any referendum to vote to join the US. I'm really bummed we apparently won't be getting monthly updates from those patriotic souls willing to freeze to death for Trump.
It’s frustrating that Greenland is quite reluctant about opening up mining concerns. But the Arctic is getting more and more accessible so Greenland is becoming more and more of a defense lynchpin. Yet, that doesn’t justify annexation what with the US and Greenland having agreements that enable America to set up basically as many installations as we like there.
Presumably they were mollified (for now) by the strategic framework reached with the Nato chief two months ago?
You can criticize the framework or argue it didn't fully resolve the issue (both valid), but that's not exactly the same as forgetting about Greenland or admitting it was never vital (long term, it definitely is).