Trump 101: The Greenland Edition

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President Trump traveled to Davos, Switzerland, this week to lay down the law to the world’s effete elites.

We’re taking Greenland, he thundered, whether you like it or not.

And in a nearly two-hour speech, he explained in great detail why the Greenland icecap is of tremendous strategic importance — not just to the United States, but to NATO writ-large.

For starters, all of Russia’s ICBM launchers border the polar icecap. If trained on Washington, DC, missiles launched from those sites would all cross over Greenland. The same goes for China’s ICBM launchers. This is why the president wants to base his Golden Dome anti-missile system in Greenland.

Clearly, the American taxpayer cannot be expected to make such a huge investment if, at some later date, the Danes or the Greenlanders could kick us out.

There is plenty of precedent for that happening. We lost the world’s largest naval base at Subic Bay in 1992, after the Philippines’ government extorted us for huge increases in lease payments.

In 2003, Turkey refused US requests to use our airbase in Incirlik to support the 40-nation liberation of Iraq. And who knows what type of limits Iran-ally Qatar has been putting on our enormous al-Udeid airbase outside Doha.

Do you think that might be one reason why the president ordered the USS Abraham Lincoln and its carrier strike group to steam from the  South China Sea to Bahrain last week?

So the lessons of history are clear: if we are to invest massive resources in overseas military bases, we had better own them. Forever.

And then, of course, there is the immediate threat of Russian warships prowling the polar icecap, and the Chinese taking advantage of the ice melt to reopen the northern passage as a much shorter transit route for bringing oil to China.

After all the huffing and puffing of the Euro-elites, they all finally bowed down to the don. Trump is the capo di tutti capi. The little French and German sottocapi, and the tiny Danish wannabe neighborhood lieutenants, all lined up and stood at attention.

This was Trump negotiation 101. Come out with demands guaranteed to outrage; then settle for what he wanted initially.

He already announced he wanted Greenland in 2019. And again in January 2025. I wrote about it then. But the Euros just brushed him off. This time, by inflating his demands and threatening force, he got the Euros’ attention. And it worked.

We’ve wanted Greenland for at least 150 years. Remember Seward’s folly? When then Secretary of State William H. Seward negotiated the purchase of Alaska from Russia, he initially wanted to buy Greenland and Iceland from Denmark as well.

We tried again in 1910, thinking to trade Greenland for Mindanao and Palawan, which Denmark would then trade with Germany for Northern Schleswig.

In April 1941, before the United States entered World War II, we signed an agreement with Denmark that allowed the US Army to begin construction of the massive Bluie West One base where my father was later stationed during the war.

But because that agreement did not transfer sovereignty to the United States, subsequent governments were able to walk it back.

It now appears that the Danes will cede large swathes of virtually uninhabited icecap to us while they continue to transfer vast sums to the 56,000 Greenlanders to maintain their social welfare statelet. I guess that is the price of pride.