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Trump’s Greenland Plan Shows He Has No Idea How American Power Works
The U.S. doesn’t need to buy countries to rule the world.
President Trump announced on Tuesday that he would postpone a planned trip to Denmark because Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen refuses to consider selling Greenland to the United States. Ms. Frederiksen called the idea “absurd.” It might be, but it was also revealing. In seeking to purchase Greenland, Mr. Trump did more than rattle an ally. He demonstrated how little he understands the shape of American power.
Mr. Trump is right that Greenland is valuable. It has vast stores of zinc, copper, iron ore and uranium — all of which are becoming more accessible with global warming. It lies conveniently between North America and Eurasia. But his notion that the way to access this value is to buy it from another country is a throwback to the 19th century. Then, the United States bought or conquered a great deal of land, from the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 to the Philippine annexation in 1899. That pattern of forthright acquisition ended in the middle of the 20th century, though, as colonized people worldwide rebelled against empire and the United States found ways to achieve its ends without large land grabs.
The United States today gets key commodities like zinc, copper and iron ore on international markets. It does so with confidence, because many of its trading partners are connected to it via an intricate system of trade pacts and military alliances. Those alliances are backstopped by hundreds of American military bases around the world. The Pentagon lists 514 overseas bases, though there are surely more.
The United States’ network of power is hard to see. Maps show states, not the defense pacts and trade agreements that connect other countries to the United States, or the hundreds of foreign dots, some of them secret, over which Washington claims jurisdiction. Even if they were on the map, they would be hard to make out. Mash all the known base sites together and they total an area not much larger than Houston.
The result is that most American citizens have only the vaguest sense of the extent and character of the security system that makes their country so powerful. It seems Mr. Trump can be counted among them. “Strategically, it’s interesting,” he has said, concluding that the United States should therefore buy it.
What he misses is the fact that, strategically, the United States already has use of Greenland. After failing to acquire the territory in 1946, Washington cut a deal with Denmark that allowed it to operate bases in Greenland, the most important of which was Thule Air Base on the northwest coast. Over the objection of the Danish government, the United States military stored nuclear weapons in Greenland and flew nuclear-armed B-52’s over the country — part of a secret airborne alert program targeting the Soviet Union. Stanley Kubrick’s 1963 film “Dr. Strangelove,” filmed partly over Greenland, depicts this program.
In 1968, a B-52 flying near Thule with four Mark 28 hydrogen bombs crashed, hitting the ice at more than 500 miles per hour. The bombs didn’t detonate, but they spread radioactive debris for miles. From Greenland’s perspective, this was a hair-raising disaster, but from Washington’s it showed the benefits of foreign bases. The Air Force could make dangerous flights over Greenland with impunity.
Greenland also has strategic value as a source of raw materials. But here, too, the fact of its being foreign is no impediment. Denmark is a member of NATO and Greenland in 2013 lifted a ban on mining radioactive materials; nothing stands in the way of the United States purchasing what it needs. “We’re open for business,” Greenland’s foreign affairs ministry reassured Mr. Trump, in response to his talk of annexing the territory. That is true; Greenland and Denmark are so closely tied to the United States in both trade and defense that it is hard to imagine the relationship being severed.
The cost of secure trade and bases, however, is collaboration with foreigners, an activity the president does not relish. He has threatened to pull the United States out of so many treaties and trade agreements that it is easy to lose count. Though Mr. Trump celebrates American military might with parades and tanks, his 2017 budget proposed closing bases, and he has called to bring troops home from host countries that, in his view, pay too little. Mr. Trump wants power over the world, not presence in it.
His desired Greenland deal fits this pattern. The Pentagon’s longstanding strategy has been to negotiate use of Thule Air Base — still in operation — with Denmark. Mr. Trump’s plan is to buy Greenland, which is more than 2,000 times the size of the base, outright. Annexing Greenland rather than leasing the base would offer little strategic advantage. But it would remove foreign partners and the need for diplomacy from the equation.
Mr. Trump has described the Greenland purchase as “a large real estate deal.” That is fitting, as his mental map of the world resembles that of a property developer. The complex system of interdependency that is enforced by hundreds of American outposts in foreign countries does not fit this “mine or not-mine” view.
The president’s misunderstanding should not be ours. Small points, not vast tracts of land, are the territorial expression of power today — think Thule Air Base, not Greenland. Bases like Thule extend the United States’ reach and stoke considerable resentment around the planet. To understand influence solely in terms of property would be to overlook the forms of power, which, for better or worse, shape our world.
Daniel Immerwahr (@dimmerwahr) is an associate professor of history at Northwestern University and the author, most recently, of “How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States.”
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