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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   22553 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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USA really, seriously wants to own Greenland.

Trump has made this extremely clear ever since his first presidency when he first offered to buy the island from the Danish government. At the time, the Danes made it very clear that this was not possible. They could not legally sell the island, and if they could, it still would not be for sale. This presidency, he has been probing around, trying to find an effective strategy that can give the administration what they want. He made that clear in 2025 by essentially stating that no tactic is off the table. He has since attempted the following:

  1. Threaten a military takeover. He did this by stating that military intervention was not considered off the table.This was shut down by European leaders promising to retaliate.
  2. Convince the locals to declare independence. In reality, independence for Greenland means choosing a new master (thus creating an obvious opportunity for the US), as their current society cannot survive without subsidies from a wealthier nation. However, the administration failed to convince the Inuits. I suspect they might return to this strategy in the future though, if the current one does not work.
  3. Currently, the administration is attempting to use the situation in Venezuela as leverage. They are showing that the threats of invasion were not empty, using the implication to frighten the relevant parties into submission. Once again, European leaders have, through indicating support for Denmark, threatened retaliation if the US invades. I suspect this will be enough to deter the administration once more. Although if Europe had not been supportive and instead let Denmark stand alone, I do not doubt that America would be planning an invasion right now.

This begs the question though: Why does the US want Greenland so badly? It is a frozen rock in the middle of the ocean, with an entire population living off government subsidies. Why not just let Denmark pay the bill while the states keep their bases? I have some ideas below, ordered from what I think makes the least sense to the most:

  1. It is a hedge against global warming. As the earth grows hotter, Greenland will become increasingly habitable, making the island much more valuable as other landmasses are swallowed by the ocean.
  2. Real estate for data centers. The island is cold and remote, with a lot of empty space and rare earths in the ground. To my layman's knowledge though, construction of the necessary infrastructure would be ludicrously expensive, even though the land itself might be cheap. Still, I would not put it past the likes of Elon Musk to try something like this anyway.
  3. To secure the North Atlantic against military threats. This seems like the official reason, but I don't really buy it. America already has military bases on Greenland, and I do not see why the military could not simply send more equipment and personnel there if the government wanted a larger presence. No official ownership necessary. If this is wrong, then I invite any other commenter to correct me.
  4. To control the rare earths. Rare earths are a priority of the Trump administration, and even though extracting them is supposedly ridiculously expensive, the mere possibility of another country (China) gaining access to them might be enough to warrant official occupation. This way, the US government, not the Inuits, would be in control of who is allowed to mine there.
  5. It is in the American "Sphere of Influence". It is possible that the world order is turning towards one in which Great Powers (USA, Russia, China, and maybe the EU) hold influence over the smaller countries in their vicinity. The smaller countries remain sovereign and independent as long as they operate in the interest of their great power. In this scenario, the USA views all of the Americas as being under her sphere of influence, including Canada and Greenland. These countries will either bow to their leader or suffer her wrath.
  6. The purpose is to secure Trump's (and more broadly, the Republican's) legacy as president. Trump clearly cares a lot about his image, with the most recent example being how hard he has tried to win the Nobel Peace price. Successfully expanding the nation's territory with the world's largest island would go down in the history books, cementing this administration as potentially the greatest one since world war 2.

Currently horrified by the notion that this might be practically impossible for Trump to accomplish simply because it would secure his legacy - and so any anti-Trump successor would have a strong incentive to just hand it back to Denmark for partisan signaling reasons. Any legacy Trump wants to leave needs to be durable against a predictable successor every few years who wants to repudiate and smash it.

In the hypothethical situation where the Trump administration expends a significant amount of resources to acquire Greenland, something that the US has wanted to do for more than a hundred years, would there even be a mandate to give it back while receiving nothing in return? I imagine the sunk cost would be way too high to justify.

Hell, would Denmark even want it back? It is possible that she is defending Greenland mostly out of a sense of duty and national pride. But not having to subsidize the population might end up being enough of a boon for the mainland to not want that responsibility back years after finally losing it.

Denmark would probably take it back if they were offered - Greenland is practically self-governing and requires minimal resources out of Denmark to maintain. I think the likely scenario - if Trump takes it - is that Greenland is offered some degree of independence, if not complete national independence. There is an appetite for it in the territory, though they vastly prefer Denmark's rule to a hypothetical American occupation.

I think Puerto Rico (and the other US territories) are a bit of a cautionary tale for any Greenlanders looking to join the US. In Denmark, Greenland is represented roughly proportionally to its population (which to be fair, is rather small, about 1%).

The smallest US state by population is Wyoming. I do not see Congress granting two senators to an island with 10% of the population.

And the way the US system works, no statehood means no federal representation whatsoever. So while it would be in the interests of whomever gets to exploit the natural resources to just pay every resident of Greenland 100k$/year for their trouble, this is something which would be hard to enforce. (Of course, if the US gov does pay that, that will probably attract other US citizens. Probably half of Alaska would move there.)

Once you are a territory, your concerns are not the concerns of the US politics. Who cares about Puerto Rico? (Compare and contrast with the Cuban exiles in Florida, who despite being a smaller group have shaped US Cuba relations for decades simply by virtue of being a relevant demographic in a battleground state.)

I think Puerto Rico (and the other US territories) are a bit of a cautionary tale for any Greenlanders looking to join the US.

They're the second most wealthy place in the Caribbean by per-capita GDP PPP (Guyana moved way ahead thanks to oil discovery, something which figured into the recent Venezuela unpleasantness), and the wealthiest by nominal GDP. Their people are full American citizens with the right to move to the US mainland. Their territorial government is terrible, but that isn't due to being part of the US. There's a reason they keep not voting for independence.

Puerto Rico (and the other US territories)

Who cares about Puerto Rico?

Virgin Islands erasure. :-(

Seriously, you should point directly at the Virgin Islands instead of just lumping them together in "the other US territories". They even have much more comparable population—87 thousand vs. Greenland's 57 thousand and Puerto Rico's 3.2 million—and they were purchased from Denmark just as Trump is considering purchasing Greenland from Denmark.

Full independence seems more like an ideal that the people like and less like a realistic goal. As I understand it, the current society there literally cannot function without being subsidized by the mainland. There is currently no actionable plan (that I know about) to attain financial independence within the near future.

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