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I’m starting to get a strong Iraq War vibe about Greenland.
By this, I want to be clear, I don’t mean that I expect a catastrophic and ruinous U.S. invasion to take place. I’m referring to something different … but let’s just say: still not great. One of my strongest memories of those dark times 20-plus years ago was a peculiar dynamic that took hold in Washington after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The desire to invade Iraq was already a big thing in elite conservative circles in the late Clinton years. That was the origin of the “Iraq Liberation Act” of 1998. After the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration quickly made clear it wanted to overthrow the Iraqi regime either as retaliation for the attacks or as some sort of preemptive action to forestall future attacks. The ambiguity was of course an important tell about what and why any of this was happening.
From the first weeks after the 9/11 attacks, there was a kind of competitive bidding largely though not exclusively in right-wing DC circles proposing arguments for the invasion. There was the democracy argument, the WMD argument, the Saddam-bin Laden alliance argument among a lot of others. These almost entrepreneurial proposals moved between the think tanks and the administration with a range of policy entrepreneurs and agitators bubbling in the mix. For anyone there at the time and watching all this closely it was impossible not to ask, what’s the real story here? What’s actually motivating this? I discussed this at the time not only here at TPM but in a number of articles in The Washington Monthly. One of my abiding memories of those months is being at a party in DC and having a pro-Iraq War journalist walk me through these different arguments for the war. At a certain point in the conversation I said, Okay, I get the logic in each of those cases. But these aren’t really arguments. They’re rationales. Which is the actual reason why the people leading this charge want to do this? It can’t be a bunch of logically unrelated rationales.
What I eventually decided was that there actually was no reason. Or to put it more specifically, the idea of invading Iraq and overthrowing its government had become a sort of idée fixe in 2002 in Washington, DC. Once it became clear that people at the highest levels of the administration really, really wanted to do this there was a kind of unannounced contest to come up with a reason why it was a great idea. It’s started to feel like that again today. Donald Trump is a bit obsessed with possessing Greenland. And that’s creating a kind of gravitational pull to come up with reasons to justify the idea.
Let’s start by saying that it is true that as a consequence of climate change the strategic importance of Greenland is increasing and will continue to grow. That’s not made up and it’s not new to anyone. But that doesn’t mean we need to conquer it. Great Britain also has strategic importance. We haven’t conquered Britain. Greenland also has a lot of mineral wealth. So do a lot of places.
What got me thinking about this was a Politico Nightly newsletter that arrived in my inbox yesterday with the title: The spiritual case for Greenland. Yes, the “spiritual” case for how a deeply inhospitable though massive chunk of land which has had humans living on it off and on for well over a thousand years and still only has a population of about 50,000 people is the key to a cultural and manly rebirth for America.
You can read the piece yourself but it’s basically a mix of two ideas. First, conquering/buying Greenland will create a new American frontier (sort of an inverse neo-Turnerianism) which will spur a national regeneration of 19th century pioneering values. Turner’s thesis was that the closing of the American frontier, which he dated around the time he published his theory in 1893, marked a turning point or an upending of the self-conception of America and Americans. Historians have been discussing Turner’s core idea for more than a century. We don’t need to get into its merits. But that’s these guys’ concept. Greenland will become a new American frontier which will spur a rebirth of the masculine, questing values that America lost during what they view as America’s long decline during the 20th century. In the words of one Trumpite intellectual, Eric Teetsel, Trump’s plan to acquire Greenland will reset American culture to the tradition of “explorers defying long odds in pursuit of their dream of a better life, from Plymouth Rock to Lewis and Clark, the Sooners to the 49ers.” To some it’s weird to see what is rightly called “the American century” rebranded as a time of national decline. But I’m just giving you the run down.
The second version of the “spiritual” argument is that expanding America will provide a kind of testing ground for tech bro/transhumanist experimentation somewhat along the lines of what I described last week with the idea of a “network state,” a tech bro state based on crypto, libertarian values, voting by equity stake and gene-editing. Notably, the folks behind this version of the ‘spiritual’ argument appear to see it is a setting for dry-runs for Elon Musk’s plans to colonize Mars. Politico even quotes one guy who isn’t necessarily persuaded about frontierism or crypto states but just thinks that Great Power assertion/aggression (i.e., conquering Greenland) will help America up its cultural testosterone levels and perhaps accomplish the re-masculinization of America by other means.
Needless to say, all of these ideas are fairly weird. What seldom gets discussed in what we must now call “Greenland discourse” is that the U.S. already has a military base in Greenland with about 100 soldiers permanently stationed there. To the extent that Greenland becomes an even more strategically placed piece of land in a warmed Earth future (which is quite possible, even likely) there’s every reason to think we can come to some agreement with either Denmark (the current national government) or Greenland itself (if it becomes independent) to secure everyone’s defense interests. The Greenlanders probably don’t want to be invaded by China or Russia any more than we’d want that to happen. And similar to the situation with the Panama Canal, it’s all kind of moot. Panama knows full well that we’d never allow them to sell the canal to China or have the Chinese military come in and run it. That’s not something any American government could ever allow. Everyone gets that. And yes, I guarantee the U.S. military has plans on the shelf to take control of Greenland and the Panama Canal if it were ever deemed necessary. That’s what general staffs do. If I’m remembering correctly, the Department of Defense (then the Department of War) had battle plans to invade Canada on the shelf well into the 20th century.
This is all a long way of saying that these Greenland ideas are solutions in search of a problem. But you can see how Trump’s obsession is creating that same gravitational pull, creating a hot house climate where upstart national revivalists are coming up with new reasons to conquer or buy Greenland, explaining the mix of economic, strategic or spiritual awesomeness doing so would bring in its wake.
I’m pretty sure none of this is going to happen. But it is worth keeping an eye on the Trumper freak show that is busy spinning up these ideas. Remember, this didn’t go great last time.