The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Anonymous
A friend selected this week’s topic when he asked my opinion of President Trump’s focus on Greenland. Despite the ongoing insurrection and fraud in Minnesota, the world has moved on from Venezuela, Iran, Gaza and the Ukrainian “killing fields.” Now everyone is talking about Greenland. Trump even explained it to the Davos Devotees.
I’m no geopolitical expert. I’m just a retired doctor with an opinion column in a local newspaper. But, I enjoy researching a topic and learning, so here’s what I discovered about Greenland and why we should be interested in that huge, frozen island, dubbed a land, but it “sure ain’t green.”
I was mystified by Trump’s interest in Greenland, but the simple answer is geography. Greenland is “on the northern frontier of the Western Hemisphere” and lies between us and Russia across the Arctic Circle.
Norsemen from Norway settled the southern part of Greenland in the 10th century when the climate was warmer during the Medieval Warm Period, 900-1300 AD. (Tell Al Gore there was no industrialization then, proving his infamous CO2 hockey stick chart was bogus.) Presumably, it was warm enough 1000 years ago for some greenery, so Norseman Eric the Red used this fact to encourage settlers. Viking descendants lived there for 400 years, but left when the Earth again cooled. Inuit peoples arrived in the 13th century, and their descendants largely comprise the current 57,000 population.
The island is an autonomous territory of Denmark because Norway ceded Greenland to Denmark in 1814. During WWII, the US controlled Greenland to prevent a Nazi occupation. Because of its strategic location, President Trump says we foolishly gave it back to the Danes after the Second World War. I agree, but hindsight is often better than foresight.
Greenland is covered with ice, and the small shrimping industry is insufficient to support the islanders. As a result, the territory is supported by Danish subsidies of 600 million dollars a year. There are claims that Danes have abused the islanders and consequently, a strong independence movement exists. NATO provides Greenland’s security. And since the US is in NATO, we provide security against Russian and Chinese military ambitions in the Arctic region, including Greenland (Danish Defense Intelligence Services data). Does anyone think Denmark or the European Union could or would defend Greenland against Chinese and Russian aggression? If you believe that, I have swamp land in Florida I’d love to sell you.
I don’t believe President Trump is planning to use force to acquire Greenland. In fact, he said so in Davos, Switzerland. So the media can stop clutching their pearls. He is using leverage to gain a strategic advantage in Greenland. Trump reported that his meeting with the Secretary General of NATO went well, and a deal regarding Greenland is in the works. Consequently, Trump canceled the upcoming tariffs, and the stock market surged.
Russia already has extensive bases in the Arctic, and Trump wants to keep Russia out of Greenland. The president has plans for a missile defense shield (Golden Dome), which will protect North America and Europe from the ballistic missiles of a rogue state like North Korea. Expanded surveillance systems in Greenland will therefore be needed. Bill O’Reilly has written that we also want to establish a submarine base in Greenland. Furthermore, Greenland is crucial to ocean shipping lanes. And there is also the issue of rare earth minerals in Greenland, crucial for tech and AI, but Trump says this is less of an issue than security.
The outcry against Trump is largely from Democrats and elitist, priggish Europeans who hate President Trump. I’m making generalizations, and of course, there are exceptions, but many European leaders despise Americans whom they consider upstarts. Europeans especially bristled that Trump cajoled them into paying for their defense. The EU has a population and economy comparable to the US, but it has depended on the US to pay for its defense. And Trump warned them about depending on Russian oil and gas for their industries and economy, which have suffered as a result. Furthermore, buying Russian oil and gas has funded Putin’s war in Ukraine.
I now further digress into a bit of history for geopolitical context. In 732, at the Battle of Tours, the Frankish (French) king, Charles Martel, defeated a Muslim invasion of Europe. Then in 1571, the Venetian navy defeated the Ottoman Empire fleet at the Battle of Lepanto, again blocking the Muslim invasion of Europe. Without these two rejections, we might all be speaking Arabic. How odd that current European leaders allowed myriads of Muslims into the EU, who, like illegals in the US, resist assimilation. Although Muslims make up a small percentage of Europe’s current population, by having more children than Europeans, they will ultimately replace the indigenous European population.
If you still doubt the importance of geopolitics, the UK’s prime minister, Starmer, will soon surrender the critical Indian Ocean base, Diego Garcia, to Mauritius, which “has a close trading relationship with China.” The base was integral to Midnight Hammer, our destruction of the rogue state of Iran’s nuclear facilities. I pray the Brits’ 50-year lease is as solid as our Guantanamo base lease in Cuba, and our guys will be able to use the base.
You might think this essay’s header quotation was a reference to Euro bros who oppose the Trumpster. It is actually a reference to the red-green alliance. And you say, What is that?
Intersectionality is the association of diverse and even oppositional perspectives that nonetheless align against a common enemy. The color red is associated with Marxism and the color green with Islam. You ask how godless communists can align with Islamists and march in the streets and at our universities? It is because their common enemy is Western Civilization, America and, of course, President Trump, the defender of both.
We are not the bad guys, as the red-green alliance and the despicable Somalian Ilhan Omar, who profanely disparaged our country, allege. She reminds me of Obama’s minister, Jeremiah Wright.
We must stay vigilant and “speak the truth in love” (Ephesians 4:15). Pray for the good guys and for the bad ones to be driven to their knees. It is their only pathway to salvation.
