> The offer to buy Greenland from Denmark was never a threat. It was an offer.
The highest ranking member of the US executive, in a publicly televised speech before Congress, said that "we're going to get Greenland one way or the other".
You can argue that's not a threat, but it would make you look silly IMO.
The text on the page shows that his speech was actually:
"And I also have a message tonight for the incredible people of Greenland. We strongly support your right to determine your own future, and if you choose, we welcome you into the United States of America.
We need Greenland for national security and even international security. And we’re working with everybody involved to try and get it. But we need it really for international world security. And I think we’re going to get it. One way or the other, we’re going to get it.
We will keep you safe. We will make you rich. And together we will take Greenland to heights like you have never thought possible before.
It’s a very small population, but very, very large piece of land and very, very important for military security."
So he said Greenland has right to determine its own future. But he outlined that we need it for international world security. He then promised to improve the economy and security of Greenland so we can achieve "international world security". Then he said 'I think we're going to get it'. Then he said, in his casual New Yorker schtick that he's known for, 'one way or another we're going to get it'.
That is a forward looking, hopeful statement. But it's also, there's multiple possibilities to getting what Trump wants. He wants North American security. Note, that Greenland has a NORAD defense system in place since the 1950s. It has long been known that Greenland was important for the North American hemisphere's defense, to protect from threats across the Arctic by the then USSR and now Russia.
It has a U.S. military base. It also has some critical minerals like rare earths that China has captured 70% of global supply for.
A path to getting security and mineral access could also involve a treaty with a sovereign Greenland. That's how he thinks. The dude does not do pessimism.
"We strongly support your right to determine your own future, and if you choose, we welcome you into the United States of America."
That's the message. The optimistic riffing that he does as asides during his speeches are always exaggerative and forward looking. That's just his personality that he can't turn off. ::shrugs::
If somebody threatened you with murder, would you avoid hanging out with them or would you be like "it's just empty talk"? Stop justifying the unjustifiable.
Saying "nothing's happened yet" and "it's dumb" is not making this any better, neither the threat, nor the question of trust, which I think we were discussing here.
Also, while I don't share your assessment that anyone involved is (the equivalent of) a kindergartner: a child with a gun making threats is not a great image. I don't know what your point actually is, but it's not going in the direction of: just normal business between two states, there's nothing to worry about. Not at all.
That’s right. And Luca Brasi wasn’t threatening the band leader when he put the gun to his head. There’s a lot of reasons he could have been holding the gun like that— maybe he didn’t have his reading glasses and he was trying to read the serial number? Maybe he was comparing the the band leader’s hair sheen to a known reference gun? If the band leader then ‘decided’ to sign the contract to let Johnny Fontaine leave, it certainly wouldn’t be intentionally coercive.
Yes, of course it's anxiety, because you have one island with a tiny population listening to a leader of a huge military power saying "We'll get Greenland one way or another". Is it surprising people are feeling anxious when what they thought was a military partner starts to threaten other partners? Do you not realize how that is perceived by others?
> The offer to buy Greenland from Denmark was never a threat
Then afterwards said:
> No it wasnt a threat of force
How is that not moving the goal post? They realize they cannot argue for "it wasn't a threat" anymore so they now started arguing it wasn't a "threat of force" instead. Completely missing the point why countries suddenly feel it's necessary to setup defenses in case an ally decide to take "military action" against them.
"You know the U.S. has operational military bases on Greenland soil and Denmark was a founding member of NATO and remains an active member, right?
The offer to buy Greenland from Denmark was never a threat. It was an offer. The U.S. has made similar territorial purchases in the past, including most famously from our oldest ally the French known as the Lousiana Purchase."
The offer to buy Greenland wasn't a threat.
Greenland isn't setting up defenses against the U.S. Denmark and Greenland are part of NATO and run mutual defense exercises regularly. NORAD runs out of Greenland. There is no threat by the United States to Greenland. The U.S. already runs a military base there and has had several other shuttered ones in the past.
There are threats to Greenland from external actors besides the U.S. including especially Russia that is directly across the Arctic. That's why NORAD runs intercontinental missile detection in Greenland.
There is an offer to Greenland and to Denmark, that if Greenland takes it, would mean Greenland would get billions of dollars in funding and economic boosts to their economy, in addition to even stronger guarantees of defense. If the mutual relationship with the U.S. is not desired, then U.S. can always walk. That's not a threat, that's called mutual exchange. If someone wants a divorce, accepting it and walking away isn't a threat.
> You know the U.S. has operational military bases on Greenland soil and Denmark was a founding member of NATO and remains an active member, right?
Bases as in multiple? Didn't they shut down all but one?
> was never a threat. It was an offer
Is this a joke? The president has literally said they're not ruling out military force to annex Greenland, in what world isn't that a threat? Especially when said to a military partner no less.
When the US purchased Lousiana from the French, did the bid also come with a "if you don't agree, we might take it by force" addendum?
Regardless of exactly what "military action" is, it's a confrontational, aggressive and non-peaceful way of negotiating, you have to be able to at least agree with that right? And regardless of it meaning invasion or not, it's still a threat, not sure how you cannot see it as that.
> It might be confrontational, but that doesn't really matter does it?
> Might Greenland be better off as a U.S. territory than as a Danish territory? Quite possibly!
That there are Americans with this line of thinking just showcases how out of bounds the US have become. This isn't the way of thinking for a peaceful and cooperative world, this is the thinking of imperialism.
I'm ashamed of sharing this same space with people with no respect or regards to sovereignty and actual humans living in places. I'm happy you can freely express it, and I'm happy people have different opinions and perspectives, but some perspectives are so fucked up I lose hope sometimes. I truly hope you can eventually see things from a less violent perspective, god speed.
> That there are Americans with this line of thinking just showcases how out of bounds the US have become. This isn't the way of thinking for a peaceful and cooperative world, this is the thinking of imperialism.
Greenland is already a colonized asset by Denmark. It is not a sovereign country, it has some forms of autonomy granted to it by Danish government. It can vote to go independent and there's a strong chance it will at some point.
As for the U.S. looking out for its own best interests, that is only natural. The U.S. is not an empire. Were Greenland to join the U.S., it would be through approval of Greenland citizens and U.S. Congress and would surely involve a financial incentive package that would be great for everyone involved (Greenland today is dependent on Danish subsidies). Greenlanders would become full U.S. citizens, not imperial subjects.
At any rate, the cost of running a global military and hedging against World War 3 for the last 80 years is pretty expensive. Most of Europe has gotten complacent with Pax Americana and have completely lost touch with the real risks of the real world. Russia would dominate the European continent were it not for U.S. military. How quickly could Russia take Greenland if it wanted to, were it not for the threat of retaliation by U.S. military assets?
If a guy says he's gonna stab you, are you going to try and prepare yourself or are you just going to be like "well it's just words, he hasn't stabbed me yet, I don't know why I should be worried?".
Nobody said he's going to stab you. This is international politics and the stakes are higher than you can imagine, because hypersonic intercontinental Russian nuclear warheads are arrayed across the Arctic ocean from Greenland and Canada and pointed at North America. That's why NORAD has operations out of Greenland. That's why NATO exists. That's why you can't rule out "military action" over Greenland. Greenland can choose to be independent, but the U.S. won't allow them to host Russian nukes or Chinese nukes were it to fall to that as it did with Cuba in the 1960s.
Do you know why Cuba went to the Soviet Union and asked for nukes? Because they needed deterrence after a failed US invasion attempt. Initially, Castro tried to be a good neighbor and even went on a US tour [0].
It was through American arrogance and aggressive attitudes that relations soured to the point where the Cubans thought they needed a deterrent.
It seems you guys still haven't learned your lesson.
France can protect Greenland though and they've signaled they will, including from the US. Attitudes like yours demonstrate why that is needed. Americans are a threat, not a partner.
France can't protect the Louvre from daytime thieves on scooters, it cannot protect Greenland from Russian subs, nukes, and drones. This is delusional.
With fewer friends the super power ends up simply being a power. A more volatile world.
Brilliant minds thought up the Marshall plan. It secured the world. Nothing less! The world.
Did it come with a price? Yes. But what the protectionist do not get today as they dismantle the system is that is might actually have been cheaper than the alternative while remaining the leader.
Those who think that governments should be run as a business are delusional. They think we buy F35 because they are the best. The sales proves it! They will never realize that SAAB had better and more fitting options for us. They will never understand that we did pay some protection money. It is not a simple Luca Brasi situation. It is more subtle.
Ou friend is gone so we will try to do that. We have to. Now you understand that might not actually be to your advantage.
The Marshall Plan was brilliant, but it's pretty terrible that it was ever necessary in the first place. Americans don't really want to be the world's bodyguard. Don't get me wrong, we like to be #1, but our original default position was neutrality when it comes to foreign conflicts. We hesitated to even enter World War II. It wasn't our war, it wasn't Europe's first conflict and it was unlikely to be its last.
The arrangements made after WWII came at a time when U.S. was over 40% of the global GDP. That's no longer the case. Now, globalism has gutted our own labor market, and many formerly proud manufacturing hubs in the U.S. are saddled with methamphetamine and fentanyl problems. Our veterans have a very high incidence of suicide, and we have a lot of them, because we have had to maintain a large military for a century. Unchecked immigration has diluted national cohesion and inflamed tensions domestically (and from what I understand, Europe's got its own internal tensions with this problem). The world as it existed in 1948 no longer exists.
Sorry you think the SAAB is better than the F35. It's really not, and lacks the same thrust, payload, stealth, etc but it's a perfectly good jet. That being said, I don't think fighter jets are going to win 21st century warfare. Drone tech is likely to be the deciding factor.
You realize that if relations really broke down to that level, then most likely NATO would simply exclude the USA, it wouldn't be all of the other NATO members leaving it, right? Also, if it gets to the level that the EU / Europe would feel they no longer want a military alliance with the USA, then it's likely that they wouldn't want to counter just Russian and Chinese influence, but US influence as well - there's nothing inherently better about US influence than the other two (Chinese influence so far has been the least bad outside of China itself, out of the three, by far - though I have no delusion that this will continue as China's power grows).
"Danish broadcaster DR reported that at least three U.S. citizens linked to the U.S. government were involved in activities that, reportedly, authorities fear could be used covertly to support Trump’s desire to make Greenland part of the United States."
I don't know where to start with this, there is so much space here you could drive a country through it. So citizens (not government officials) "linked", what does that mean? What activities exactly? "Fear could be" again, what does this mean, people are fearful, over what? People are afraid all the time.
> He doesn't take options off the table because it automatically weakens your negotiation position.
With the notable exception of dealing with Russia...
See the recent threat to allow Ukraine use of Tomahawk missiles. Taken off the table after Putin made a hurried call, and now Putin has lost interest in negotiations, again.
Trump has success "negotiating" with a regional terror group already almost bombed out of existence. He seems to blink first rather a lot when faced with an actual danger to the US.
He hasn't taken any option off the table with Russia. He's applying economic pressure by placing large tariffs on countries that trade openly with Russia, he's floating the Tomahawks to let Putin know we'll just keep beefing up Ukrainian weaponry, etc. I think he's hesitant to activate, say, B2 bombers like he did in Iran, but Russia remains a huge nuclear power so it obviously has to be treated differently, no one wants World War III.
> He said he wouldn't take "military action" off the table. Which doesn't mean invasion. You are imprinting that.
... based on the fact that the US did quite a lot of questionably legal invasion campaigns over the last decades and Trump having signed an EO to "rename" DoD to Department of War. It's not an unrealistic interpretation.
> This is the same guy that just negotiated peace between Gaza and Israel.
He re-hashed Biden's negotiations and takes credit for it. Classic Trump.
> He doesn't take options off the table because it automatically weakens your negotiation position.
What "negotiations"? We don't live in times any more where kings can distribute pieces of land and the people living on it at will - no matter what Trump thinks he is.
> the US did quite a lot of questionably legal invasion campaigns
The U.S. is a sovereign country, and Congress approved all the actions in Iraq and Afghanistan for better or worse, and it was bipartisan.
Renaming Department of Defense to Department of War is something like the opposite of doublespeak. It's more honest, isn't it?
> He re-hashed Biden's negotiations and takes credit for it. Classic Trump.
No. The entire Gaza situation erupted under Biden's presidency. As did the Ukraine invasion. The Biden presidency was completely powerless to stop any of this from occurring. Biden, the same guy that bumbled through sentences and lost track of topics in the presidential debate and was replaced by his own party's superdelegates in 2024 after he won the state primaries, had nothing to do with this.
> What "negotiations"? We don't live in times any more where kings can distribute pieces of land and the people living on it at will - no matter what Trump thinks he is.
There's 185 countries on planet earth. Many of them are run by literal kings and some of them are run by king-like figures. The U.S. absolutely isn't one of them, but when it comes to international politics, the duly elected President is the negotiator-in-chief. This follows in a long history of deal-making, going all the way back to President Jefferson and the Louisiana Purchase from France.
The Danish king has zero power. Yes, he needs to sign the laws. Should he refuse, the next law he would see was his removal.
We have been lucky enough to have reasonable people give up power without bloodshed.
Have a word with the French how it goes if not. Can we find other examples of revolutionary wars? Something more close to home?
I sadly see no irony. None at all.
You love a strong man. A negotiator-in-chief. You think that is a president. Learn from the Germans. They replaced a monarch with a toothless head of state (look how I gracefully avoided the Austrian Painter). Most Americans do not even know the difference between the German President and Bundeschancellor.
What you are arguing for is a litteral king. Call it what you want. You will soon enough find out how hard it is to get rid of cetralized power.
Great, can you just get rid of the role now? What is the point in the role? Why give nobility and all this heritable nonsense even the slightest auspice?
> We have been lucky enough to have reasonable people give up power without bloodshed.
> Have a word with the French how it goes if not. Can we find other examples of revolutionary wars? Something more close to home?
> I sadly see no irony. None at all.
I don't know what to tell you. America kickstarted the whole monarchal upheaval movement in 1776 and we had to fight the world's largest empire for it with our own guns. It's unfortunate that the French did not have the same success in 1789.
> You love a strong man. A negotiator-in-chief. You think that is a president. Learn from the Germans. They replaced a monarch with a toothless head of state (look how I gracefully avoided the Austrian Painter). Most Americans do not even know the difference between the German President and Bundeschancellor.
No I'm not going to learn from the Germans, there's nothing to learn there. We have been doing democracy for 250 years, longer than anyone, our Presidents have generally been strong men, including General Washington himself. 32 of our 47 presidents have been ex-military. Some notable examples are General Ulysses S. Grant, General Eisenhower, Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, Colonel Thomas Jefferson, Major General Andrew Jackson, Captain Abraham Lincoln, Lieutenant John F. Kennedy, etc etc. In that 250 year time frame, the U.S. conducted war, negotiated expansions of territory, settled conflicts, negotiated treaties, and defeated numerous empires. That could only happen because our Presidents were strong men with strong leadership.
Our duly elected president is the Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. military and the Chief Diplomat. It has always been the case. U.S. Presidents are powerful. It has always been the case.
However, U.S. citizens are also powerful. We have real freedom of speech, not some feckless version of it that europeans flirt with. We have guns to defend our human rights, including our lives, our liberty and our property. We have a robust legal system, 50 independent state governments with broad powers, a bill of rights that can't be overturned except by a large supermajority of states (75%), balances between branches of government, etc.
We have a long deep cultural history of fighting for liberty, it will never be taken from us, you have to understand. We demand strong leaders, because we are strong people. But our leaders know they are in power for a short time. We have Constitutionally limited terms (can't be overturned except by 3/4 of state legislatures and 2/3 of Congress).
We are never arguing for a king. We will never accept a king. But we will also never accept a weak President. Hope you can understand.
