Why Greenland? Why Now?

Why Greenland? Why now?

It can seem, at first glance, a strange and incongruous new obsession, akin to Lex Luthor's desire for Australia.

It's entirely reasonable to suggest that there's no reason the United States needed to stop at fifty states, or to argue that adding another territory is somehow unacceptable as a topic of discussion.   That's only true, mind you, if that's a free and uncoerced choice of the inhabitants of that region.  If America economically bullies a people into submission, or...far worse...uses military force?  Then we are tyrants and monsters and morally bankrupt.  Those things need to be off the table, period, or we are no longer a nation where republican virtue matters.

But the principle of adding to the United States is not inherently invalid.  It's just, again, why Greenland?  Why now?

The geopolitical situation has changed since the Cold War.  It's not 1975.  It's 2025.

Most of the 20th century proxy struggles between the United States and those powers occurred in the Global South, but in 2025, all eyes are on the Arctic.  In 1975, the Arctic was just a desolate, inhospitable frozen waste, one where access to mineral and fossil fuel resources was immensely challenging.  The only reason to keep an eye on it was because that's where the Soviet ICBMs might be flying over on their way to pay us a visit. 

That old geopolitical reality isn't the reason for our new interest in Greenland.  In fact, the reason we pulled back from Greenland, and have fewer troops there than we did at the height of the Cold War?  It's because we're not toe-to-toe with the Soviets there anymore.  That changed.

But other things have changed.  

It's not missiles we're expecting, but ships, because Northern shipping routes are opening up.  Resources that were formerly out of reach are suddenly potentially available, particularly to American oil companies.

Greenland and the newly open waters around it are of much more interest now, economically, than they were fifty years ago.

But...why is this an emergent reality?  I mean, there's a reason.  A single, glaring, significant, obvious reason.  There's a term for that reason, but you're increasingly unlikely to find that term in the mouths of our leaders or on the recently censored websites of our government agencies.

It's climate change.  We want Greenland because of climate change.

I mean, duh.  Less ice means more shipping.  Less ice means deep sea drilling for crude and natural gas becomes a logistical possibility.

In the context of the melting of Arctic sea ice, there's a definite logic to Greenland as a focus.  It's not nuts at all.  Selfishly grasping, crassly profiteering and catastrophically short-sighted, perhaps, but there's a definitive internal logic to it.

But this is only true if anthropogenic, fossil-fuel-driven climate change is actually happening.

Which it is.  

Meaning there's a cynical and implicit acknowledgement on the part of this administration, running all the way to the top.  America's sudden hunger for Greenland exists now only because the increasing pace of climate change makes the control of that region suddenly far, far more lucrative to the oil interests who helped bankroll the current regime.

So.  How does Trump say "climate change is real" without using those words?  

"I want Greenland."  That's how he says it.