Donald Trump's obsession with annexing Greenland for the US reemerged bigger than ever in the wake of his military raid in Venezuela, but a scathing new analysis from The American Prospect argued that this would be "conquest for its own sake" that would achieve "nothing," slamming Trump's bluster as "the ravings of a degenerate monster."
Over the weekend, U.S. military forces successfully captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, in a raid which some officials estimate killed around 75 people. In the aftermath, Trump and his administration threatened similar actions against other countries and regions, most notably Greenland, which the president has been keen to acquire for the US since his first term. Trump has given various reasons for his obsession with taking Greenland, including its supply of valuable minerals, but has more recently settled on the vague rationale of "national security."
In an unsparing breakdown of the Greenland situation on Thursday, Ryan Cooper, managing editor of The American Prospect, said that most of Trump's explanations for his obsession fall flat in the face of reality. Things are more easily explained, Cooper argued, by the president's desire for "conquest" and his own moral failings.
During past travels to Greenland, Cooper said that locals were uniformly perplexed by Trump's annexation threats, wondering "What could America possibly get from invasion and annexation that it does not already have?"
"The answer on any grounds — morality, self-interest, national security, or plain common sense — is: nothing," Cooper wrote. "These are the ravings of a degenerate monster, the worst person ever to occupy high office in this country, who in his dotage is indulging every one of his numerous awful instincts. This idea is entirely cruel, brutish stupidity."
Cooper's excursion to Greenland also revealed the many logistical holes in Trump's alleged explanations for wanting Greenland. Despite possessing some deposits of valuable minerals, very few of them are "commercially exploitable," being as they are "buried under hundreds or thousands of feet of ice." Greenland is also one of the most remote places in the world, with a terrain ill-suited for industry, given that "there are no internal roads between the few cities... many of the sea-lanes are clogged with ice for half the year," and its "handful of airports are routinely shut down because of fog."
"In short, Greenland is an exceptionally difficult place to scratch out a living, and it’s taken decades of grinding effort from the island’s residents — and a large ongoing subsidy from the Danish government — for it to develop a reasonably prosperous economy," Cooper concluded.
While Cooper agreed that Greenland is a key location for US national security, he noted that the military already has full access to the island and has several bases there, rendering Trump's desire to control the island for defense purposes moot. A military invasion of the island would also risk breaking up NATO, which has helped deter a third world war for nearly a century. Such an operation would risk retaliation from Denmark, which controls Greenland as an autonomous territory, or Canada, and while neither country could pose much of a direct threat to the U.S. military, Cooper argued that it would be relatively easy for them to jeopardize the U.S. nuclear response apparatus by attacking one its many bases in its "elaborate network of military radar installations stretching from western Alaska across northern Canada, Greenland and Britain."
"It likely never occurred to American defense planners that the American president might incite, for no discernible reason, Canada or Denmark to attack critical nuclear deterrence infrastructure that the U.S. military paid billions to construct," Cooper wrote. "The very idea is so paint-blisteringly insane that only one person in a million would even think of it. Unfortunately, the American people elected that person president."
