Quotulatiousness

July 17, 2026

British logistics in the Falklands, 1982

Filed under: Americas, Books, Britain, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

A new post at the Operational Art of War considers the amazing achievements in logistical support that allowed the British to re-take the Falkland Islands so soon after the Argentine invasion in 1982:

This post is largely highlights from a book I think everyone should buy, called Logistics in the Falklands War: A Case Study in Expeditionary Warfare by US retired MGen Privratsky.

[…]

I read the book as part of a long term project on the history of command and communications in the Falkland War. I couldn’t figure out how the British managed to pull off victory given the logistical challenges, so I purchased this book hoping to find answers.

Having now read the book I know WHAT the British did to win the war, but I have ZERO clue how they managed to make it work. The conditions and limitations they faced were so much worse than I thought.

I can honestly say this is the most interesting book I have read in years, which is a shock to me as I’m typically as bored by logistics as the next non-logistician. It was genuinely more engaging and entertaining than the battlefield accounts of that war.

The Logistics Challenges of the Falklands War

The task eventually given to the British task force was to retake the Falkland islands from the Argentines. This was a daunting task, both logistically and in terms of the actual ground combat.

Strategic Logistics

Strategic logistics is providing the lifeline of supplies, personnel, maintenance and health care between the home country and a staging area about 300km outside the combat zone. British strategic logistics involved a link from England to a small British held island half way between Brazil and Africa called Ascension. This link was 4,300 miles (6,900 km) by sea from Portsmouth. It had an airport and one jetty capable of handling one or two small commercial ships.

The next link was a further 3,600 miles (5,800 km) from Ascension to a logistics loitering area about 200 miles (320 km) short of the Falkland Islands. This was just a box drawn on a map in the middle of the ocean where the larger supply ships would loiter, outside the range of the Argentine air force.

[…]

Tactical Logistics

Tactical Logistics holds a few days’ supply (eventually the BSA/DSA held about 30 days supply ashore at San Carlos) but it’s main job is to move supplies, broken equipment, replacements and injured personnel between the BSA/DSA and the manoeuvre units.

Normally the backbone of Tactical Logistics is trucks. Here there was a problem, as the image below is a comprehensive of all the paved and unpaved vehicle capable roads in the Falklands, excluding those in the vicinity of Port Stanley.

“Roads? Where we’re going Marty we don’t need roads.”

The details of tactical logistics take up several chapters of the book. The brief version is:

  1. The troops marched from the DSA to the Objective;
  2. For the attack on Port Stanley two days supply of Ammunition, Shells, fuel and shells were brought to the two Forward Support Areas (FSAs) along with skeletal field hospitals;
  3. Helicopters spent about 2 weeks bringing the artillery from the DSA to outside Port Stanley; and
  4. Limited emergency resupply of ammunition and casualty evacuation was available from the FSA to the troops in combat. However, most of the ammunition going brought and casualties evacuated rearward was done on foot over what can charitably be described as walking tracks.

Tactical Logistics in the Falklands was so difficult because there were no roads and the distances involved were enormous. While the orange arrows above give a sense of the distances involved, the image blow shows the size of the Falkland Islands superimposed over England.

[…]

Conclusion

Prior to reading Logistics in the Falklands I couldn’t quite figure out how the British managed to pull a victory out the hat, given the challenges of projecting power literally on the opposite end of the globe. Having read the book I am now convinced the British military in 1982 was either the best improvisational armed force in history or under some kind of Divine mandate.1

  1. Maybe both.

July 10, 2026

The Pastry War – When France invaded Mexico over pastry

Filed under: Americas, Food, France, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 13 Jan 2026

Puff pastry rings filled with raspberry and apricot preserves and topped with a cherry

City/Region: France
Time Period: 1840

The Pastry War between Mexico and France was kicked off when, during a time of political upheaval, Mexican soldiers ransacked Monsieur Remontel’s pastry shop in the 1830s. Seeking reparations for M. Remontel as well as the repayment of other debts, the French invaded.

While we don’t know what was sold in Monsieur Remontel’s pastry shop in Mexico, these puits d’amour could certainly have been on the menu. By all means, you can make your own puff pastry, but I gave myself permission to use store bought, and you should, too. You can even use store-bought preserves to simplify things even further, but this preserves recipe is very delicious and very sweet. I used both store-bought apricot preserves and homemade raspberry preserves, and both were delicious. You can also fill them with half jam and half chantilly cream or pastry cream if the fancy strikes you.

    PUITS D’AMOUR.
    When the puff pastry has received all its turns, roll it out to a thickness of two lines; cut it with a fluted cutter, that is to say with a pastry cutter, and place the first piece on a baking sheet; then, with a cutter of the same type but smaller, cut another piece and place it on top; moisten the round with a little water, press it in slightly, brush these puits with egg, and put them into a hot oven. When they are three-quarters baked, sprinkle them with sugar in order to glaze them — that is, until the sugar melts; then remove them, hollow them out, and fill them with whatever preserves you judge appropriate.
    — Le Cuisinier Royal by André Viart, 1840

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July 8, 2026

QotD: The Wilmot Proviso

Filed under: Americas, History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The details of the procedural shenanigans aren’t important. The thing to know is, the Wilmot Proviso made official and on-the-record what everybody knew, but was desperate to keep sub rosa: The Mexican War was a war for slavery. Specifically, it was a war for Texas (and California), which was a massive new slave state. And since pretty much all territory captured from Mexico after the inevitable US victory would be below the old Missouri Compromise line, slavery would be legal in all of it under the Compromise.

The Wilmot Proviso attempted to scotch that, which forced the Senate, at least, to come right out and say it. People always underestimate the power of words and symbols, and professional historians are among the worst offenders. With the newer generations of pros it’s ideological enstupidation that causes it, but the older folks were almost as bad. It’s a structural issue — we rely on documents, so even though “the temper of the times” is real obvious in the aggregate, unless you can pin it down to specific statements in archival sources it’s hard to make your case.

If it helps, think of the couple whose marriage is obviously on the rocks. They fight constantly, they all but live separately, everybody knows their relationship is doomed … but when one of them finally comes out and says “I want a divorce”, things often change radically. Temporarily, most often, but how many people have you seen suddenly make all-out efforts to patch things up only after somebody finally says the D-word?

You can hear the capital letters in their voices. Before, all that stuff — romantic weekend getaways and the like — were attempts to “get back on track” or “spice things back up” or whatever. As soon as someone says Divorce, though, all those things become capitalized — we’re Saving Our Marriage.

The Wilmot Proviso was like that. Somebody finally said the D word.

Severian, “1846-1861”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-25.

June 25, 2026

Formerly Peru’s First Lady, Keiko Fujimori is now President in her own right

Filed under: Americas, Economics, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The new President of Peru, Keiko Fujimori, faces a big economic challenge to her nation:

With just over 99% of ballots counted, Keiko Fujimori holds a lead of roughly 40,000 votes over Roberto Sánchez — less than half a percentage point, and the third consecutive Peruvian presidential contest decided by a margin that narrow. Sánchez led through the early days of counting, carried by rural and highland turnout; but the overseas votes, which broke for Fujimori above 63%, pulled the result the other way as the tally crossed 95%.

The outcome is no longer seriously in doubt. What remains in doubt is whether a victory this narrow constitutes a mandate to govern, or merely a turn to occupy the office in impotence.

Fujimori has never held executive power. What she inherits, however, is a name: her father, Alberto Fujimori, governed Peru from 1990 to 2000, stabilizing a hyperinflationary economy and crushing the Shining Path insurgency, albeit with darkly authoritarian techniques for which he was later convicted. Long known as Peru’s answer to Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Fujimori has cast a long shadow over Peruvian politics ever since.

Keiko served as his First Lady through the latter half of the 1990s, then built her own career: a congresswoman from 2006 to 2011, and the leader of Fuerza Popular (“Popular Force”) since. She spent 13 months in pretrial detention on corruption charges tied to Odebrecht financing; a court voided the case in January 2025. She has run for president four times, losing the previous three runoffs by margins under a single percentage point before, now, winning her fourth.

Her governing history is, as a result, tied deeply to her father’s. She has spent two decades defending it rather than living it, which is itself a kind of qualification in a country where economic memory often prevails over institutional memory. The model her father installed — trade liberalization, fiscal orthodoxy, an open door to foreign capital — has outlasted eight changes of president in ten years. The claims of Fujimorismo — the governing-economic doctrine named for Fujimori that has dominated ever since his time — is that it alone can be trusted to keep that model standing.

Keiko Fujimori’s flagship commitments are, consequently, the two pillars of Fujimorismo itself: a hard line on crime, and an unapologetic defense of the market economy.

The security platform proposes deploying the military against organized crime and prison disorder, taking inspiration both from Peru’s own recent past, and Nayib Bukele’s divisive tactics in El Salvador. Alongside this, the platform promises expanding video surveillance, and modernizing this apparatus through the use of artificial intelligence to detect corruption in public contracting. She insists that her father’s system’s abuses will not be repeated.

The economic platform is a much-needed deregulatory shock: cutting investment-approval timelines by 40%, reducing the fiscal deficit from 2.2% to 1% of GDP, and shrinking the state. As for exactly how that shrinking will be achieved besides the aforementioned measures, Keiko is not clear.

Nevertheless, both pillars of the plan were sold on a single word, repeated at her closing rally and in her final debate: order, against the chaos she says the left represents.

In counterpoint to recent claims that cutting USAID funding cost the lives of millions of children who depended on those funds, taking away USAID support in much of South America led to a number of electoral changes:

June 16, 2026

Why Argentina Lost the Falklands War

Filed under: Americas, Britain, History, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Real Time History
Published 6 Feb 2026

On March 28, 1982 almost the entire Argentinian navy, carrying 900 troops, invaded the Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas). The ruling junta was confident Britain wouldn’t oppose the Argentinian fait accompli. But Britain’s political will and military ability to carry out a successful campaign at the end of an 12,500 km supply line surprise many.
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June 3, 2026

China’s pirate fishing fleets

Filed under: Americas, Books, China, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

John Carter was really impressed with a recent self-published novel by Frank Kidd, and takes the time to set up the real-life situation the novel imagines being kinetically addressed:

A few years ago a photograph taken by a pilot over the Pacific went viral. It showed a mysterious red glow spreading ominously out over the water.

Initially people thought it was aliens, and to be fair, they weren’t far off. The glow belonged to the closest thing humanity has yet invented to a Tyranid hive fleet: a Chinese fishing fleet raping the seas in search of seafood. The glow is from huge banks of LEDs, which the ships use to draw marine life to the surface, where they trawl it up with nets. Much, maybe even most of the indiscriminate catch is discarded.

China has over half a million fishing vessels. Their vast fleets comprise thousands of ships, and can often be seen from orbit.

The triangular lights inside the red circle are a Chinese fishing fleet.

China has long since eaten its way through its own territorial waters, and therefore sends its fleets out into the rest of the world’s oceans. As a rule marine life is much more abundant close to the shore, since this is where most of the nutrients are. Fishing in another country’s territorial waters is illegal under international law. The Chinese do not care. Their fleets park just on the edge of a country’s Economic Exclusion Zone, and then turn off their Automatic Identification System transponders so that they can sneak inside and poach. Turning off an AIS transponder is also illegal: maritime law requires these to be activated at all times, for collision avoidance and search and rescue. Organizations which track this regularly observe Chinese ships on EEZ borders disappearing from the AIS network, and reappearing a few hours later on the right side of the border.

Here we see the scum pillaging the ocean around the Galapagos. Yeah. I know. Billions must die.

The consequences for local fishermen are disastrous: the Chinese scoop up all the fish, and lead the local fisheries towards ecosystem collapse. When they’re done pillaging they just move on, leaving an oceanic wasteland in their wake.

Environmental groups generally don’t seem very bothered about this, perhaps because the ocean is a CO2 sink whether or not there are fish in it, and the only thing that matters about the environment is how much carbon is in the air. National governments are reluctant to take action, because they are often dependent upon Chinese investment for their economic growth. The only people who really seem to care are fishermen and Internet racists.

This is the set-up for Frank Kidd‘s immensely satisfying debut mercenary novel, Once Upon A Time In Argentina.

June 2, 2026

Judging Javier Milei’s work by the numbers

Filed under: Americas, Economics, Government, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Thanks to automated translation from the original French on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Laurent outlines what he sees in the data from Argentina before and after Javier Milei became president:

I’ve been wondering for a while now about the (provisional) balance sheet of Milei in Argentina. You read everything and its opposite. So I stopped reading the commentary and looked at the raw numbers.

Argentina is the full-scale experiment that economists have been waiting for for 50 years. Same country. Same people. Same culture. We change ONE variable: the economic method.

Before: decades of statist and Peronist management, “redistributive”. The concrete result? 211% inflation, 42% poverty, a state in permanent deficit that funds its lifestyle by running the printing press.

Then Milei arrives. The opposite method, brutal, acknowledged: we cut, we deregulate, we stop printing.

Two years later ([snapshot] at his arrival (end of 2023) vs today):

Annual inflation: 211% → 31%
Monthly inflation: 25% → ~2%
Public deficit: −5% of GDP → +1.8% (surplus)
Growth: −1.6% → +4.4%
Poverty: 42% → 28%

No debate. Judge for yourselves.

And the essential point: these gains don’t go “to the rich” or “to the markets”. They go first to the poorest.

Inflation is the most unjust tax that exists — it hits those who have no assets to protect themselves. Dividing it by 7 is giving back purchasing power to those at the bottom. And 14 fewer poverty points means millions of people, not an Excel line.

For a century, Argentines were told that the state would protect them by spending more and more. Result: one of the richest countries in the world in 1910, ruined. We’ve just reversed the method. Look at the result.

At some point, you have to accept what the facts say: on the economic front, the liberal method has delivered in two years what decades of socialism promised without ever delivering. And it benefits the most modest first.

You can hate Milei’s style — the chainsaw, the excess, the improbable outbursts, he’s nothing like a classic statesman. But you don’t judge an economic policy by the style of the one who leads it. You judge it by what it does to people’s lives.

And the numbers have spoken.

May 22, 2026

The Real-Life British Top Gun

Filed under: Americas, Britain, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Imperial War Museums
Published 7 Jan 2026

This video take an in depth look at the Sea Harrier. We cover its development, the air battle for the Falklands in 1982 and renowned Sea Harrier pilot Nigel “Sharkey” Ward.

0:00 Introducing Sea Harrier ZA175
0:57 Why the Sea Harrier?
2:00 Harrier Development
2:40 GR.3 vs Sea Harrier
3:30 Nigel “Sharkey” Ward
4:35 The Falklands Conflict
5:39 Preparing for Battle
7:12 The Air War
9:11 The AIM-9L Sindewinder
9:54 Sharkey’s Kill
11:41 The Sea Harrier’s Record
12:17 What happened to Sharkey and ZA 175?
(more…)

May 9, 2026

Argentina not in the news

Filed under: Americas, Economics, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Martin Varsavsky illustrates the real situation in Argentina after Javier Milei was elected as opposed to the dystopian nightmare imagined by the western media:

“Argentine flag” by papajuan74 is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

After more than two years of Milei, the international press still does not understand what is happening in Argentina.

The narrative abroad is “shock therapy, social pain, fragile coalition”. That frame misses the actual mechanism. Argentina did not have a budget problem. It had a printing problem. From 2003 to 2023 the central bank financed deficit after deficit until the peso lost 99 percent of its value against the dollar. Annual inflation hit 211 percent in 2023. Half the country was poor. That was the floor.

What changed is not vibes. It is arithmetic. The fiscal deficit was eliminated for the first time in 16 years. Monthly inflation fell from 25 percent to low single digits. The central bank stopped printing to fund the Treasury. Country risk dropped from over 2,500 basis points to a fraction of that. Argentine sovereign debt, which used to trade like a default option, began behaving like normal emerging market paper.

Critics say poverty rose. It did, briefly, because removing price controls and subsidies revealed the real prices of energy, transport and food that the state had been hiding with debt. Once measured honestly, poverty has been falling fast. Real wages are recovering. Mortgages in pesos are reappearing, something that had not been possible in a generation.

This matters beyond Argentina. It is the clearest live experiment in whether a developed-style economy can be rebuilt by pulling the state out of places it never belonged. Spain, Italy and France should be paying attention. A country does not get poor because it lacks resources. It gets poor because its political class learned to live off printing money and calling it social policy.

Argentina spent 80 years proving that. It is now spending two years proving the opposite.

May 8, 2026

“… without Western Civilization, we’d all still be whacking at the dirt with sticks and dying of intestinal parasites”

Filed under: Americas, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Devon Eriksen responds to someone who had a clanker generate an imaginary Aztec capital today if the Aztecs had managed to defeat Cortes and his conquistadors:

Guitars. Suits and ties. Western architecture. English and Spanish text.

What’s easy to miss is that the generative AI is making its own, separate, political statement here. Not because it intended to, but because it had no choice.

Even human creativity consists mostly of rearranging things, but AI generation is entirely that and nothing else.

So when you ask it for “modern”, it gives you “western”, because in its eyes, there is no distinction between the two. “Western” is the only “modern” that actually exists for it to draw from.

Even cultures that were capable of building an alternative version of modern, because they weren’t skinning and eating each other, and had invented the wheel, still borrowed heavily from the West, not because they couldn’t do otherwise, but because the West moved faster, and had already done the work.

So, ask an AI for “modern Aztec”, and you get English-speaking Tokyo/Venice, with browner people, pyramid reskins on skyscrapers, and some out-of-place Mayan stuff, all set to Peruvian flute music.

This is the same reason that a lot of people, most of whom really aren’t much more than LLMs themselves, say silly things like “there is no White culture” … because, like the very simple art machine, they cannot conceive of any alternative version of modernity.

So nothing is Western to them, it’s all just “modern”.

But of course it really is Western, because without Western Civilization, we’d all still be whacking at the dirt with sticks and dying of intestinal parasites.

That AI is Western, too.

May 5, 2026

A 375 Year Old French Recipe for Pumpkin Soup

Filed under: Americas, Food, France, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 11 Nov 2025

Creamy pumpkin soup served in a hollowed out pumpkin

City/Region: France
Time Period: 1651

This is one of the first recipes for pumpkin soup where we can be sure that the pumpkin they’re referring to is a new world pumpkin. This cookbook was written by François Pierre de la Varenne, who’s credited with leading the shift away from highly spiced medieval and renaissance foods into what we would call French haute cuisine. He was into showcasing the flavor of the key ingredient in whatever he made, and this soup does it.

The cloves, onion, and pepper are there but subtle, and the pumpkin really shines through. You can use canned pumpkin to make this soup even easier, and serving it in a hollowed out pumpkin adds some festive flair. It’s simple, delicious, and would be a great addition to any holiday or autumnal table.

    Pumpkin Soup with Milk
    Cut up a pumpkin and cook it as above [in water and salt], then pass it through a strainer with some milk and boil it with butter, seasoned with salt, pepper, and onion stuck [with cloves], and serve with yolks of eggs thinned [with some broth].
    — Le cuisinier françois by François Pierre de la Varenne, 1651

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March 13, 2026

Argentina shedding decades of mal-investment in uncompetitive industries

Filed under: Americas, Business, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Argentine President Javier Milei didn’t promise an economic revival for all of Argentina, because significant chunks of the Argentine economy were invested in low-profit or even loss-making industries as the country followed “traditional” South American economic advice. Tim Worstall celebrates some of the belated losses in those deadweight areas of the economy:

Argentina has, for decades now, been making itself poorer by following — effectively — fascist economic policy. That whole process of trying to make everything at home, not importing, being self-reliant in manufactures and so on. The effect being that everything is made by companies of sub-optimal size and therefore consumers can only gain access to expensive shite.

So along comes a liberal — Milei — who lets consumers buy what they wish to buy from whoever, whereever. The result is that those inefficient, expensive, manufacturing firms close down as people buy the better, cheaper, stuff from abroad. The people are better off because they get better, cheaper, stuff. Not that expensive shite from the domestic producers.

Now, true, those jobs go. But those workers can go and do something else. Which they will too. In fact, they are — the unemployment rate is falling.

So, who loses out here? Obviously, the domestic capitalists, the people who own the now bust factories. Which, well, the correct reaction is probably Har Har. If your wealth is based upon producing expensive shite your customers are forced to buy then why shouldn’t we celebrate when you lose the lot?

We can — and should — take our analysis that one step further too. If the absence of the trade restrictions harms the domestic capitalists then who benefitted from the trade restrictions? The domestic capitalists, obviously. Which is how that infant industry protection, that insistence upon self-reliance, how fascist economics always does work out — the people who benefit are the domestic capitalists. And why in buggery would we want to protect them from the effects of free trade?

March 4, 2026

QotD: Socialism

Filed under: Americas, Economics, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The blunt teaching of history is that socialism is not an advanced stage in the evolution of human society but one of its most primitive stages. A highly articulated form of socialism was practiced among the Incas, the tribe which Pizarro found in control of Peru when he landed there in 1527. All produce, whether agricultural, pastoral or industrial, was the property of the state … In fact, the Incas had not only “communal ownership of the means of production” but a “planned economy”. All the basic features of socialism were present, and the feature which has specially attracted the attention of the archaeologist is that the Incas were in effect a huge bureaucracy … [T]he lesson of history is clear that communal ownership is normal among primitive people, and the institution of private property in the “means of production” is the first big step on the road to civilization.

Ivor Thomas, The Socialist Tragedy, 1951.

January 22, 2026

QotD: Higher education

Filed under: Americas, Education, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Back in the 1980s, I took an interest in Latin American guerrilla movements, especially in Central America. The general consensus among those who took an interest in such matters was that they were caused by the intolerable conditions of the poor, oppressed peasantry who rose up spontaneously against them. This was complete nonsense, of course. This is not to say that the peasantry was not poor and oppressed, but poor and oppressed peasants are rarely capable of more than a jacquerie, a kind of rural riot that exhausts itself and results in the oppressors coming back stronger than ever.

No; I came to the conclusion that the cause of the revolutionary guerrilla movements was the expansion of tertiary education in countries where it had not long before been the province only of the elite, largely, though never entirely, hereditary. (For the poor, gifted, and ambitious, the army was the route to social ascension.)

Tertiary education, however, was expanded with comparative suddenness. Before it was expanded, those who had it, being few, were more or less guaranteed important roles in the economy and government. They had already drawn a winning ticket in the lottery of life. Not surprisingly, a false syllogism insinuated itself into the minds of the newly educated: If the rich were educated and important, then being educated would make you rich and important. Again not surprisingly, this turned out not to be the case. If you turn out thousands of lawyers, for example, the remuneration of their work, if they find any, will be reduced and they will be disappointed in their hopes and expectations. They become angry, bitter, and disaffected, believing themselves not to be valued at their inestimable worth. They and their ilk became the middle ranks of the guerrillas (the very uppermost reaches being filled mainly by the narcissistic, spoiled sprigs of the upper classes). Only revolution would acquire for them the positions of influence and importance to which they felt that their education entitled them, and which such education had always entitled people to in the past.

Is it possible that Latin America was not so much in the rear as in the forefront of this modern social development (the case of Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path of Peru, was a pure culture of this phenomenon)? Is it not possible that we in our societies have duped tens of millions of young people into believing that the prolongation of their formal education would lead them inexorably into the sunny uplands of power, importance, wealth, and influence, when in fact many a PhD finds himself obliged to do work that he could have done when he was 16? No one likes to think that he has been duped, however (it takes two for fraud to be committed, after all), so he looks around for some other cause of his bitter disappointment. It isn’t ignoramuses who are pulling down the statues, but ignoramuses who think that they have been educated.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Bees With Degrees”, Taki’s Magazine, 2020-07-02.

Update, 24 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

January 17, 2026

How would Greenlanders cope with a sudden case of American citizenship?

Filed under: Americas, Europe, Media, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Only a minority of Canadians would welcome Donald Trump’s offer to become the 51st state, and Canadians have a long history of coping with the overflow of American politics across the border. Greenland is suddenly a target for involuntary statehood if Trump gets his way, yet few seemed to be concerned how the actual people in Greenland feel about this proposed change of legal status:

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

According to President Donald Trump, taking possession of Greenland is a national security necessity. It’s so critical, he claims, that he’s willing to take the chilly island the “easy way” or the “hard way”. Denmark, which governs Greenland, isn’t eager to surrender the territory. Even more important, the residents of Greenland, most of whom don’t especially want to be Danish, have even less interest in becoming American. The leader of a country founded on high-minded sentiments about the “consent of the governed” should consider taking that into account.

[…]

“56% of Greenlanders answer that they would vote yes to Greenlandic independence if a referendum were held today, 28% would vote no, and 17% do not know what they would vote for,” The Verian Group announced a year ago about a survey it conducted in Greenland.

With regard to Trump’s long-voiced desire to acquire Greenland for the United States, Verian’s Camilla Kann Fjeldsøe added, “the results show that 85% of Greenlanders do not want to leave the Realm and become part of the United States, while 6% want to leave the Danish Realm and become part of the United States, whereas the remaining 9% are undecided”.

Greenland’s 57,000 people don’t want to be Danish, but they really don’t want to be American. If forced to choose between remaining an appendage of one country or joining another, they’ll likely take the devil they know over the one they don’t.

What About the Consent of the Governed?

That’s a problem for Trump’s imperial ambitions — annexing Greenland would have to happen over the objections of the people who live there. The U.S. could get away with that sort of thing when it didn’t even pretend to give a damn about what the Sioux and the Cheyenne wanted, and when it bought the Louisiana Territory and Alaska from autocratic regimes. It’s not as if Napoleon Bonaparte or Czar Alexander II were going to offer their subjects a say in the matter anyway. But Denmark is a relatively inoffensive liberal democracy that holds regular elections. Greenlanders are accustomed to picking their own political leaders and having input into their fate. If asked, they’ll almost certainly reject the offer.

So, is Trump really going to opt for doing it “the hard way” and just grab the island?

When the United States decided its own fate 250 years ago, the Declaration of Independence set out grievances with the British crown, as well as some basic principles for the new nation. Among them:

    We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Most Americans no longer consented to be governed by King George III or the British Parliament and so set up a new country with a government of its own. What excuse would we have for foisting American governance and laws on Greenlanders if — as seems likely — they reject political affiliation with the U.S.?

In his Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan — who has never in his life been a fan of Donald Trump — warns that “Greenland is a Red Line” and crossing that line will destroy the American constitution (Warning – contains Andrew Sullivan):

(more…)

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