Yes, Greenland is Strategic

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I love it when Donald Trump makes the media talking heads explode.

If you believed their hyperventilating reaction to this week’s masterful press conference at Mar-a-Lago, the United States Navy was getting warships out of mothballs in preparation for legitimate threats to American security in Greenland and the Panama Canal.

And it wasn’t only in the U.S.

French foreign minister, Jean-Noel Barrot, puffed up like a peacock and beat his tiny chest on hearing the news. “There is no question of the EU letting other nations in the world, whoever they may be, attack its sovereign borders,” the little Frenchman sniffed. “We are a strong continent.”

Outgoing German chancellor Olof Scholz backed up his French bud with words of his own, with talk of “the principle of the inviolability of borders.” Those would be Denmark’s borders, not Germany’s.

The Danish foreign minister, while telling reporters that Greenland “has its own ambitions” and could become independent in the future, was more level-headed in acknowledging America’s very real national security concerns.

“We are open to dialogue with the Americans on how we can possibly cooperate even more closely than we do to ensure that the American ambitions are fulfilled,” he said.

Guess what? Greenland is indeed strategic. FDR realized that at the onset of World War II when he ordered the U.S. Army to establish an air base in the south-east of the country once Denmark had been invaded by the Nazis in 1940. My Dad commanded the coastal artillery unit at the base, known as Bluie-West One – later renamed Narsarsuaq Air Base – as a 29-year old US Army Major.

In this early panoramic photo, stitched together from a series of stills taken in June 1942 from a nearby hill, you can see how bleak the area was:

The men on the base bathed in wooden washtubs, and whiled away the long arctic nights playing cards inside Quonset huts (My Dad is on the left):

And they thanked their lucky stars to have those huts, because when they first arrived they slept in tents that regularly got swept away by the Arctic winds!

President Truman negotiated a Treaty with Denmark in 1951 that guaranteed the United States’s right to build and maintain military bases on the island and to move forces freely on its territory. Under President George W. Bush, the United States agreed to amend and supplement that treaty in 2004, limiting the U.S. presence to Thule Air Base.

President Trump wants to renegotiate the deal. Why? Because Russia and China pose a real and present threat to Greenland, and from Greenland, to the North American continent.

China, which has no territories above the 54rd parallel, is now claiming to be a “near-Arctic power.” This July, the U.S. Coast Guard encountered Chinese navy ships in the Bering Sea. China has been sending ice-breakers to the Arctic for five years, and more recently has started using the Northern Sea Route to receive crude oil shipments as an alternative to sending its tankers through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal.

Neither Denmark nor the European Union can defend against Russian or Chinese aggression against Greenland or the Arctic. Only the United States can — but that protection comes at a cost. Serious European thinkers understand this. The French and German puff-pastry politicians do not.

But much worse for the Euros than U.S. designs on Greenland is the way Trump has simply sidelined the EU, showing them to be irrelevant in world affairs. He has his sights focused on serious countries such as Russia and China, and on containing potentially serious threats such as North Korea and Iran.

I suppose that’s why Trump was chatting away with Obama during Jimmy Carter’s funeral service at the National Cathedral, while neither of them deigned to even acknowledge the presence of Kamala Harris, who was scowling away just in front of them. Obama is a serious politician. Harris is not.

In Iran this week the top military official in charge of the Syria debacle, Brig. Gen. Behrouz Esbati, actually admitted that Iran had been thrown back on its heels. “We were defeated and defeated very badly,” he said, in remarks that traveled the world via social media but never appeared in Iran’s state-run media.

Meanwhile, in California Governor Gavin Newsom’s phony environmentalism is burning down the house to save the smelt, while in Washington, Biden is breaking the toys like a kid who has been kicked out of kindergarten.

Hey Gavin, wanna know what real men do on their vacation? They cut brush.