President Trump’s renewed interest in Greenland seems inexplicable to most of us, unless it’s part of his notorious 51st state plan to further encircle Canada (forget I said that, the Liberals might use it to scare the boomers again…). A few days back, CDR Salamander discussed the “unfortunate Greenland kerfuffle” on his Substack:

It would be an understatement to say that I am not all that pleased with where we are in January 2026 with the Greenland question. This would not have been the productive path I would have recommended because, in the end, this is a very serious issue.

Sure, in the first few months of 2025, the meme-ish nature of it all was fun and funny … but only to a point.

In 2026, Denmark is not going to sell or otherwise transfer Greenland to the USA like they did with the now-U.S. Virgin Islands a bit more than a century ago.

However, before we go further, if you have a knee-jerk reaction to support or oppose anything or any topic because DJT is involved, please repress that feeling until at least the end of the post. It isn’t productive, enlightening, or good for your health — so give it a rest for a bit until we are done, then you can carry on as before.

Next, let’s do as we should in most things: let’s go to the chartroom.

Object Zero’s crayon work on the Arctic Institute’s map is superb to illustrate that point.

The Europeans have whipped themselves into an almost comical lather over it all. Having lived with their NATSEC nomenklatura for years, I’m not shocked. They tend to be very narrowly read, get their ideas about the USA from NYT, WaPo, the usual suspects in East Coast Universitlandia, and their nomenklatura is worm-ridden with the same people who opposed Cold War NATO efforts to counter the Soviet Union’s militarism and supported every anti-USA trend of the fiscal quarter, etc. It is always 1968 or 1983 with these people.

Unhelpful to trans-Atlantic cooperation has been an almost gleeful approach to triggering these people who never thought DJT would come back to power, and from 2020-24 acted like it. The vengeful and bitter are fighting with the frag-pattern hitting everyone else.

Behind that triggering and, at least from this side of the pond, trolling, is a very serious security concern in the high north that Greenland is, literally, right in the middle of.

At The Conservative Woman, Jonathon Riley wonders if Greenland is worth more than the NATO alliance:

Satellite view of Greenland, Iceland, and parts of Northern Canada.
NASA/Ames Research Center, 17 May, 2005.

Greenland is the world’s largest island, (just) contiguous with Canada, and geographically part of North America. It was colonised by Denmark in the tenth century but the Norse settlements, which farmed sheep and cattle, died out during the mini-ice age of the medieval period, not long before the rediscovery of America by Columbus.

The majority of the population is now Inuit with only about 10 per cent being Nordic. Following a 1979 referendum, Denmark granted Greenland home rule and in 2008, self-government increased further. Denmark retains control of citizenship, security, finance and foreign affairs. Greenland joined the EU with Denmark but has since left. As a self-governing part of Denmark, it remains a member of Nato.

Greenland sits astride an area of great strategic importance. First, the Arctic ice is retreating as the result of an entirely natural process of cyclical warming – nothing to do with so-called man-made “climate change”. This will end when the world enters the next ice age, which is long overdue.

As the Arctic ice retreats, ships can sail through the north-east and north-west passages, sought for so long by explorers. This means not only that transit times can be reduced but also that the Russian “shadow fleet” of unregistered oil tankers engaged in moving sanctioned oil can more easily dodge interception, as is happening to Venezuelan oil tankers.

Second, Greenland probably has reserves of oil, coal and gas concealed beneath the ice cap, but exploration has been slow and difficult, for obvious reasons. Estimates put Greenland fourth in terms of likely reserves in the Arctic region.

Third, in Greenland’s territorial waters in the Arctic Ocean there are huge reserves of fish, shrimp, whales and seals – valuable food resources especially for China and Japan.

Finally, there is the matter of fresh water, an increasingly scarce commodity in many parts of the world. The Greenland ice sheet holds about 10 per cent of the world’s fresh water.

It is therefore easy to see why both the Russians and the Americans see Greenland as a valuable asset. Donald Trump made aggressive noises about “acquiring” Greenland during his first presidential term and has now made further remarks, perhaps emboldened by his successes in Iran and Venezuela.

Special envoy Jeff Landry has been appointed to examine how the US could acquire Greenland. The means so far mentioned have included diplomacy, a territorial purchase – the US has done this before in its history, for example Louisiana and Alaska – or a lease agreement.

The problem here is that the Greenlanders and the Danes are having none of it. Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen told the BBC: “As long as we have a kingdom consisting of Denmark, the Faroe Islands and Greenland, we cannot accept actions that undermine our territorial integrity”. Rasmussen is on solid legal ground, as the UN Charter specifically states that frontiers must not be changed by force.

In his weekly post, Andrew Sullivan says that Trump is conducting a “Viking foreign policy” (trigger warning: contains Andrew Sullivan):

AI-generated image from AndrewSullivan.substack.com

In other words, Trump is a pagan. Two millennia of Christian ideas about war and peace, virtue and wisdom, individual dignity and morality, have passed him by entirely — which is why liberalism of any kind is incomprehensible to him. If you want to find the nearest analogy to his mindset, you have to reach back to a world where Christianity was entirely absent. The Vikings come to mind — resisting morality and Christianity up until the eleventh century. The 2022 movie, The Northman, was brilliant in its utterly unapologetic portrayal of this Viking mindset, with no moralizing at all. If you want to see the id of MAGA in full throttle, check it out.

The Vikings in their prime years had just recovered from a sixth and seventh century population collapse (climate change), followed by a period of widespread anarchy and warlordism that rendered any kind of civil society impossible. The warlordism that became endemic at home soon became warlordism abroad. The goal was relatively simple: use violence and the threat of violence to invade, murder, and plunder. The goal was lucre, which gave them more power to seek more lucre, which led to more glory. There was nothing in their worldview that would ever give them moral pause, even as Christian Europe was incubating the idea of moral restraints on state violence.

The Vikings sacked Paris twice, for example. But they came, destroyed the place, and then went. They sacked large parts of Christian England for decades — entirely for the riches of the monasteries — and then went back home. Over time, as their raids continued, their victims tried to pay them to lay off — effectively protection money. Parisians kept coughing up when besieged repeatedly from the Seine, and in the end they offered the Vikings land in Normandy. (Yes, that’s where the word Normandy originates: the Northmen Land.) The idea was that giving Vikings some territory at the mouth of the Seine would deter other Vikings from coming up the river to mug Paris again. And it worked for a while.

The English, for their part, were forced to pay what became known as Danegeld — protection money again, first forked over by King Æthelred II. But the Viking threats never lifted, and demands for more and more money kept coming. Æthelred’s first payment was 10,000 pounds of silver in 991; by 1016, that became 85,000 pounds. Similarly, Trump raided Venezuela, murdering dozens and kidnapping the president, and rewarded himself by stealing 50 million barrels of blockaded oil, worth up to $3 billion. And that, of course, is simply the first payment. The goal is a Viking one: the threat of war by a superior force unless Venezuela hands over its oil resources to the US. That’s worthy of the Viking warlord, Olaf Tryggvason.

If you have no concept of anything but domination by violence, are completely amoral, and you have the biggest and scariest force around, the Viking logic is impeccable. You just bully for money. Anything else is for suckers. That’s why Trump long called America’s post-war leadership “stupid”. If we had huge military superiority, as we did for decades, why do anything but bludgeon the rest of the world to enrich and glorify yourself? The Marshall Plan remains as incomprehensible to Trump as it would have been to the Vikings. Mutually beneficial trade too. Why help anyone else when you can fuck them over?

Hence the tariffs. Trump raised them because, in his mind, he could leverage American economic and military power to raid other countries’ treasuries. (He’s wrong, of course, but he genuinely thinks foreign countries pay tariffs, and no one else.) Hence also the loathing of NATO: any alliance that rests on mutual security and respect is anathema to him. Either the US should demand full reimbursement as mercenaries, or get the hell out.

This has been one of Trump’s core beliefs his entire life. He was outraged in the late 1980s, for example, when the US deployed naval forces to protect Kuwait from Soviet influence during the Iran-Iraq War. “When I see Kuwait, a total rip off. Why aren’t we getting some of that money?” he lamented to Phil Donahue in 1987. NATO is, first and foremost, a “rip-off”. That’s all. And don’t forget this critique of the Iraq War:

If we had controlled the oil, we could have prevented the rise of ISIS in Iraq — both by cutting off a major source of funding, and through the presence of U.S. forces necessary to safeguard the oil and other vital infrastructure. I was saying this constantly and to whoever would listen: keep the oil, keep the oil, keep the oil, I said — don’t let someone else get it.

War for plunder. Simple, really. It’s what he’s always believed. And this is what he was saying about Venezuela in 2023:

How about we’re buying oil from Venezuela? When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over, we would have gotten all that oil, it would have been right next door. But now we’re buying oil from Venezuela, so we’re making a dictator very rich. Can you believe this?

In this Viking rubric, there’s no mystery why Trump attacked Venezuela and kidnapped the president and his wife. He did it for the thrill of domination — man does he relish parading his enemies in a perp walk — but mainly for the lucre. He has told us this explicitly — shamelessness is one of his pagan virtues — long before and immediately after the fact. The idea that he is interested in Venezuelan democracy is ludicrous. He’s a mob boss — that’s all. And a protection racket has now descended over the entire Western Hemisphere, called the Donroe Doctrine. This is what America now is: a global Tony Soprano.

And Greenland? Again, the reasoning is quite simple. Trump has the military power to take over the world’s largest island tomorrow and ransack it for its vast mineral resources — just as he envisions (however deludedly) that “running” Venezuela means US oil companies selling Venezuelan oil to enrich the US treasury, if we’re lucky, or to himself, if we’re not: “that money will be controlled by me”.

So why on earth not force Greenland into submission? What is anyone gonna do about it anyway, as Stephen Miller said out loud, channeling Napoleon. You also get the thrill of expanding American sovereignty by adding 836,000 square miles — more than a quarter of the continental US landmass. That new chunk of Greater America looks even more impressive on the Mercator maps that Miller jerks off to every night.