Greenland Could Be a Threat to the US
10:18 Share

So I have a question. This kind of ties into the map thing. And if you look at a standard map of the world, I mean, not only is Europe the center, but also typically they have the market or projection. And one of the things that does is...

because you're taking a sphere and you're spreading it out. - Yeah, taking a sphere. - An oblate sphere, I'd use that. You get big distortion. So things that are further north look bigger. So Europe looks bigger. Greenland looks huge. Like it looks almost the size of Africa when in fact it's maybe the land mass as well, like a 10th the size of Africa or something like that. But certainly it's very, very big. And what's really small and in fact basically invisible on the map are all these Pacific island nations.

And, and I bring this up with comparison with Greenland because, you know, Trump is

does seem to be pretty serious about acquiring Greenland for a lot of important strategic reasons. So I guess my question is, what are those strategic reasons for Greenland? And then is that more strategic than our relationship with these island nations and these territories in the Pacific, which are invisible on most maps? Okay, so those are linked questions.

Did any of you collect stamps when you were kids? Pogs. My parents did, yeah. I'm going to show how doubly pathetic I am. So one is you're Canadian and the other is you collecting stamps. This is the third. Me and

Nicola, who I went to school with, had a very big debate about the relative sizes of Australia and Greenland when we were nine because it was like, look at the map. Look, it's bigger. And so we wrote to the governments of Greenland and Australia and asked them which one was bigger. And did you get responses? Yeah, Greenland answered and said, we're not as big as we look, but you're very welcome to come visit. Yeah, that's good. That's good.

Australia didn't answer. And have you been to Greenland? I haven't. No, I haven't. Well, you're welcome to. If I am, I'll show up with my letter. But so if you shift the map and you look at the world from the North Pole, we talked about how important sea lines of communications are.

And the corollary to that is choke points become incredibly important. And if you're looking at the Arctic as if it was a lake, there are only certain entry points into it. And one of them is the Bering Strait, which is why Seward was pretty smart to grab ahold of half of that choke point. And the other is that line that comes down

off the top of North America and then down between Greenland and the landmass of North America. During the Cold War, that zone was called the Greenland-Iceland-UK Gap.

because there were only certain places where the Soviet nuclear submarines could come down through, so you needed to monitor that. So there's Greenland, there's Iceland, there's actually the Faroe Islands where there was also a military installation, and the UK. So as the Arctic starts to open up,

Or even, the Arctic doesn't even have to open up. We have better ships, better subs, better capacity to operate in an icy environment. That becomes an entry point or an attack point. Obviously, also from the Arctic, if you launch missiles, it's much closer.

If you're flying a plane from... if you're going from Japan to New York, you might... you might arch over the Arctic. It's just... it's a closer entry point. So I've been looking... I used to do Arctic stuff, so I've been looking at Greenland for probably 20 years now, and the Chinese have been very active about trying to get in there for a long time. There are resources, there's the strategic location,

There's what China particularly thrives on, which is the controlling power, in this case Denmark, treated the locals really badly. So there's a dissatisfaction that you can froth up into an entropic warfare type situation and start to create fractures, social political fractures.

Yeah, I know that the CCP has been looking at Iceland too for over 20 years now. Yeah. Pretty seriously like...

Remember, I went there in like 2015 or something like that. And they had this giant new Chinese embassy that they had built. And like this whole, but they had been trying to get into Iceland's good side for like a good decade plus before that. So it's just kind of crazy to think, oh, yeah, we had been really not paying attention to

Yeah, so it had been occupied by the U.S. during World War II. And so there are fundamental demographic differences between Greenland and Iceland. So the majority, by far, the majority of the population of Greenland is Inuit, so more closely related to the Canadian Inuit. Iceland is mostly a descendant of Scandinavians. What's interesting in the Faroe Islands is that there's been a lot of outreach from Russia

The Faroese fish and the Russians fish, they have exchanges. They have during COVID, they were allowing Russian ships to come into port.

and they brought COVID. But there's a kind of, because of the, Faroese are also European descent, but they also, they have a constitutional arrangement with Denmark that is similar to the Greenlandic arrangement. So Iceland is an independent country. Greenland and Faroes are self-governing entities within the Danish realm.

So there are all of these, the argument that you hear President Trump make is Greenland, to the Greenlandic people, is Denmark didn't really take good care of you. We'll take better care of you. And that's true. There were cases of taking Inuit children and putting them with white families and like all sorts of just horrible things.

stuff. But again, the question is always, you saw, you can see Trump negotiate in real time. You know, remember there was, right at the beginning, there was somebody who came up and said, one of the investors, we're going to invest whatever it was, a hundred billion. And he said, I hear 200 billion, you know, like that sort of thing. So if the, what is the ultimate goal from a US strategic perspective on Greenland? That it not be a threat.

I suspect there's also some pretty advanced research perhaps related to the space, to space at the US base up in the north. It doesn't have to control the island to do it. So would they want Greenland to have a compact or free association type agreement? So the process is Greenland votes to become independent

and then it votes to have a compact or free association with the US. That's sort of the pathway that's being proposed. Would the US want that? Would this Trump administration want that? Probably. Would it settle for a Greenland that isn't a security threat?

where there's functionally strategic denial, which is a key component to the compacts, and at the same time be able to do the sort of high north research that it's doing. Yes.

But if it had continued on its current trajectory, it was potentially going to become a security risk for the U.S. because of Danish inattention. But neither of those scenarios you mentioned have Greenland be a U.S. territory, let alone a state. Yeah, it doesn't. The most likely scenario I've heard of was compact. And it's not...

If you're compact, so going back to the Pacific Islands, you mentioned there are sort of little specks on a map. What that means is it's like you can think of it as oases in a desert. How valuable is an oasis in a desert? It means life. It means you can survive. So if you've got a little speck of land where there's water, you can land, you can resupply, you know, you can...

you can live, that becomes that little speck of land becomes incredibly important.