Greenland and the other hand

I know I am out of my depth on this topic, but I remain fascinated by the ongoing discussion of Greenland. Like a bad traffic accident, it is hard to look away. Unlike Sen. Thom Tillis (R–NC), who takes Trump’s bluster literally, the talk about purchasing Greenland always struck me as being funny. It still does, yet the story stubbornly refuses to go away.

Tillis delivered a blistering speech on the Senate floor this week about the separation of powers and warned that Trump had better not invade Greenland without permission. I could be wrong, but I think he is reading the situation incorrectly.

There is no question that a significant U.S. military presence in Greenland would cause heartburn in the Kremlin, particularly amid a strategic contest over Arctic resources that is quietly brewing. Perhaps that is the point. It also creates an opportunity for strategic distraction, as when Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “The president and his team are discussing a range of options to pursue this important foreign policy goal, and of course, utilizing the U.S. military is always an option at the commander in chief’s disposal.”

Under almost any other administration, that would be treated as a career-ending gaff. White House press secretaries do not normally float military options so casually. When comments like that surface, it is usually worth asking what else happened that day.

Like a Las Vegas magician, one hand makes a grand gesture while the other is busy with the real work. That kind of sleight of hand is the essence of modern public relations, and whenever Greenland comes up, I find myself looking for the other hand.

Then there is the Trump factor. He is not running for reelection, and he does not seem terribly interested in the midterms. He is playing to the history books, and nothing would add more to a legacy than expanding the national footprint.

After all, the land beneath our homes was once part of a real estate deal between Napoleon Bonaparte and Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson’s reputation did not suffer for it. Even William Seward’s purchase of Alaska, once mocked as “Seward’s Folly,” looks shrewd in hindsight.

Knowing little about the world’s largest island, I turned to my trusty CIA Factbook. It tells us Greenland is roughly 80 percent ice, home to fewer than 58,000 people, and self-governing under the Danish crown, with its own parliament in Nuuk. Beneath that ice lie fish stocks, hydropower and untapped deposits of rare minerals, uranium, gold and perhaps oil and gas.

That is what makes all of this less ridiculous than it sounds. Greenland is small in population but enormous in geography, and it sits astride emerging shipping lanes and future resource fields. Its economy may look wealthy on paper, but it remains dependent on Denmark and exports largely to Europe and China.

Ultimately, this seems less about buying land than about strategic positioning. Public-relations explosions like Leavitt’s tend to start conversations in the most extreme terms, making whatever follows sound moderate by comparison.

A large American commercial presence focused on mining and energy would create a natural need for U.S.-provided security, and if that included a missile or radar base to protect Western interests in the Arctic, many NATO countries might quietly welcome it.

It would not be the first time Greenland has had a major U.S. military presence. Between World War II, when the Nazis occupied Denmark, and the Cold War, when people like Dick Trail turned Greenland into a flying gas station for the free world, the island was already a strategic hub.

Even Denmark, faced with the cost of defending a vast and sparsely populated territory, might find that arrangement less threatening than it first appears. In that context, Greenland may turn out not to be a punch line, but a proving ground for how the next chapter of global competition will be written.