Failing to rule
something out isn’t the same as ruling it in, and it’s perfectly possible
that Trump thinks that leaving the threat of military action hanging over
Greenland and Panama will ‘encourage’ Denmark and Panama to cave in without any
need to resort to actual use of force.
He is probably
serious about wanting to take control of Greenland, but that doesn’t make him
unique in US history. Other presidents have also had designs on the territory
and various land swaps have been envisaged in the past, including his own suggestion
of giving Puerto Rico to Denmark as well as the 1940’s suggestion of swapping
it for land in Alaska and the 1910 proposal to exchange it for some islands in
the Philippines (so that Denmark could, in turn, swap them for a chunk of what
is now Germany). The UK doesn’t exactly have clean hands on the issue either,
having once sought to be given first refusal should Denmark decide to sell,
with a view to it becoming part of Canada in order to keep it out of the hands
of the US. He’s also probably at least semi-serious about annexing
Canada, and he’s not the first to think that either: the US actually
invaded Canada during the 1812-1815 war with the UK, expecting (rather like
Putin in Ukraine) to over-run the country in days. Buying territory along with
the people who live there is hardly a new concept either, especially for the
US, which bought Alaska from Russia in 1867 and a huge chunk of the mid-west
from France in 1803. Describing the purchase of Greenland over the heads of its
residents as ‘decolonisation’ is perverting the meaning of words somewhat, but
the process itself is hardly historically novel.
People tend to
forget that most – maybe all – of the world’s political boundaries between
states are the result of war, or treaties agreed between nominally equal
parties (even though, in reality, many of those treaties were effectively
imposed on the weak by the strong). The boundary between Canada and the US,
like Danish ownership of Greenland, are both accidents of history. Trump’s
mindset in this context isn’t radically different from that of Putin – both think
that the boundaries of the states which they govern should be drawn differently
to include more territory, and both are willing to consider, at least, the use
of force to bring about those changes. It is, unfortunately, far from
inconceivable that an early meeting between Trump and Putin – which both want,
apparently: Putin because he thinks he can outwit Trump, and Trump because he
believes his own hype about his abilities as a dealmaker and his friendship
with Putin – will lead to something akin to the Yalta conference after the
second world war, in which the so-called great powers (now reduced to two, in
the eyes of both of those involved) carve up Europe and the Americas between
them.
As for the people of
Greenland themselves, such evidence as exists suggests that their preferred status
is independence. In a world where invading the territory
of the EU is not ruled out, and an invasion
of the UK is floated as an option, the chance that the Greenlanders’ voice
will be heard seems slim.
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