“The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies; a diseased appetite, like a passion for drink or perverted tastes; one can scarcely use expressions too strong to describe the violence of egotism it stimulates.” — Henry Adams, “The Education of Henry Adams”
Trying to imagine the unimaginable is a useful mental calisthenic. So, suppose Vladimir Putin faced this choice: He could assuage his fury about the Soviet Union’s disintegration by conquering Ukraine. Or he could destroy the cause of that collapse — NATO. Now, imagine that he might not need to choose, because of the American president’s obsession with seizing a possession of Denmark.
Averse to using a scalpel when there is a machete at hand, the president threatens Greenland with military conquest if Denmark will not sell the island. Were Congress to refuse funds for this purchase, he would declare a national emergency and “repurpose” money appropriated for other uses.
Using chest-thumping mob-speak, he says, “If we don’t do it the easy way, we’re going to do it the hard way.” If NATO, history’s most successful collective security instrument, perishes, he might consider that a bonus.
The president probably agrees with the wit who said that the trouble with facts is that there are so many of them. Such as:
The U.S. military already uses Greenland under existing agreements, and more expansive uses are negotiable. After all, Danish blood has been shed in Iraq and Afghanistan in solidarity with U.S. forces. Danes seem to like America, despite the president’s efforts to cure them of this eccentricity.
The U.S. military was involved with Greenland long before, in 1958, the USS Nautilus, the first operational nuclear submarine, cruised beneath the ice cap at the geographic North Pole. In “Polar War: Submarines, Spies, and the Struggle for Power in a Melting Arctic,” journalist Kenneth R. Rosen writes that in 1935, Brig. Gen. Billy Mitchell testified to Congress that “Alaska is the most strategic place on earth.” Now, everyone is interested in the far north. “India,” writes Rosen, “declared itself a near-arctic state in 2021.” And:
“In 1975, C.L. Sulzberger, New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent and newspaper heir, wrote that ‘Greenland must be regarded as covered by’ the Monroe Doctrine. The Arctic island nation has remained in the American security perimeter firmly ever since. It is already an American partner in all the ways that matter.”
Norway, Sweden, Finland and other proximate nations would not recognize such a harebrained misapplication of the Monroe Doctrine. Neither would China or Russia, whose Arctic activities reveal intense interest in its natural resources, expanding shipping lanes and potential paths for intercontinental attacks. The U.S. military is training for Arctic missions, and the Defense Department is belatedly investing in icebreakers.
As usual, today’s president, coming late to a long-standing problem, but presuming his original discovery of it, has made himself the issue. His acquisitiveness regarding Greenland has nothing to do with national security, and everything to do, as everything always does, with his fragile ego. He is pouting, and threatening aggression, because he has not received the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Danes can perhaps take comfort from the fact that the president is contemplating military operations against another northern place. As this is being written, the Army is reportedly readying a potential deployment to Minnesota to quell disturbances stemming from ham-handed activities by the ludicrously — and lethally — militarized U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
During all this, the president has announced he will order that no other football game can be televised during the annual Army-Navy game. Although highlighting this game might stimulate military recruiting, the source of his power to decree such things is dubious. This inconvenience can, however, be magically dispelled by the wave of the presidential wand. Greenland, Minnesota, Army-Navy game: Another day, another emergency — declare that the game serves national security (it probably does this more than possessing Greenland would) and questions of legality become irrelevant.
In Winston Churchill’s biography of his ancestor the Duke of Marlborough, he wrote that the Earl of Sunderland was “one of those dangerous beings” who “have no principle of action; who do not care what is done, so long as they are in the centre of it; to whom bustle, excitement, intrigue, are the breath of life; and whose dance from one delirium to another seems almost necessary to their sanity.” Or is evidence of its absence.
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