politics

Everyone said naming the good country Iceland and the shitty one Greenland wouldn't actually trick anyone...

Yet here we are in 2025 and the US president is falling for it.

And what the hell are they going to do about it? The US might be being led by a megalomaniac with dementia, but that megalomaniac still commands the most powerful military on the planet, and it isn't even close.

I'm not trying to sound arrogant, but the reality is that if the US truly decided to put their military might into annexing Greenland or the Panama Canal, there's not a whole hell of a lot that Denmark is going to be able to do about it, even with the backing of the rest of Europe.

What's NATO going to do about it? Kick out the US? Russia would absolutely love that. Trump would just sit back and watch as Putin starts marching across Europe. Economic sanctions? The US is the cornerstone of the global economy, and any sanctions would either be ignored or end up doing more harm to Europe than the US. How many sanctions against Russia has the EU all but ignored because enforcing them would be too detrimental to their own economies? If they're not willing to enforce them against Russia, they're certainly not going to enforce them against the US.

In this era, what seems to be an era of might makes right, if the US wanted to annex Greenland militarily, who exactly is going to do what to stop them? With what military?

Somehow I don't think the Danish military is going to be a substantial barrier to the US military. How many carrier groups does Denmark maintain? Danish military expenditure is about $8 billion USD per year. The US is more like $900 billion. The Danish military has 25,000 soldiers. The State of Texas alone, just in the minor military forces under the direct control of the Governor of Texas, has 23,000 troops. Texas alone, even without any federal support, could probably win a war against Denmark. That is how comical the difference in power here is.

And NATO? Well look at how good of a job NATO is doing at preventing the US from supporting Israel, or how effective NATO was at preventing the US from invading Iraq. In this scenario, Trump would effectively be walking away from NATO anyway. Without the US, NATO is pretty toothless. The US is the only NATO power that maintains a substantial expeditionary pressure, with some exceptions in the French and British. Almost every NATO power has a purely defensive military - their job is to defend against Russian aggression, not extend NATO power around the globe.

But moreover, even by the letter of the NATO treaty, NATO is powerless to intervene in intra-NATO conflicts. When a NATO country is invaded, the rest of NATO isn't automatically at war with the country that invaded. Rather, that country can quickly bring a resolution in front of NATO to invoke Article V of the charter. And adopting that resolution requires unanimous approval of all NATO members. So the US invades Greenland, Denmark tries to invoke Article V, and the US just vetoes the resolution. The NATO treaty is not meant to address intra-NATO conflict. Greece and Turkey have fought numerous territorial spats while both being members of NATO.

The law is a piece of paper. In reality, if the US wanted to invade Greenland, the only powers that could even theoretically do anything about it would be Russia and China. And in this scenario, they would agree to the plan, as they get their own annexation prizes in return.

The US just elected a fascist into power. Making agreements like this is par for the course for fascists.