Prime Minister Frederiksen may not have left the call motivated to divest herself of Greenland, but she wasn't laughing about the seriousness of the situation.

Many European officials had hoped Trump's comments about seeking control of Greenland for national security reasons were a negotiating ploy to gain more control over an increasingly vital area as nuclear-powered ice breakers are making the fabled Northwest viable and Russia and China are both also jostling for position there. Greenland is sparsely populated and would be an ideal target for China's "elite capture" strategy, which they have aggressively pursued in suborning island nations in the Pacific. Quite honestly, Denmark is only a little less vulnerable than Greenland to China buying it outright. //

The Euros and the New York Times have concluded that Trump is deadly serious.

I think Trump is largely right in his assessment. //

Quite honestly, I don't see how Greenland could sustain independence in the face of a concerted Chinese effort to establish control (Vitkor Orban's Hungary allows uniformed Chinese police in Budapest). Our free association model is also showing weakness as China exerts influence there. The best arrangement would seem to be declaring Greenland to be a commonwealth (like Puerto Rico) or a territory (like Guam and the Virgin Islands). But no matter how it arrives, I think Greenland's internal politics, which has had the right to declare independence since 2009 and that option is favored by 64 percent of the population, and the geopolitics of our competition with China indicate that Greenland becoming US territory is inevitable. //

j. o. lantern
4 hours ago
I think one of Trump's least appreciated abilities is his awareness of strategic considerations in our national interest. Even here in Red State forums, he was being roundly derided for being distracted and off course when he began speaking about Greenland and the Panama Canal. I maintained then and still do that he was seeing the Big Picture, that hardly anyone else did.

anon-tk7z j. o. lantern
2 hours ago
he IS the Big Picture. We each think a piece of what he is thinking. He pulls them all together into the American Flag. He is helping us to weave the New Glory. //

surfcat50
4 hours ago
“The Guardian cites former Obama administration climate adviser Alice Hill, who observes: “It’s ironic that we are getting a president who famously called climate change a hoax but is now expressing interest in taking over areas gaining greater importance because of climate change.””

What’s ironic is a “climate advisor” who thinks America’s strategic interest in Greenland is because of climate change when we occupied the place in WWII to keep the NAZIs from controlling it, protected it during the Cold War to keep the Soviets from controlling it, and now want to keep the ChiComs from controlling it!