Greenland Redux: Trump and America’s Continuing Obsession
Greenland is visible from space. Arctic Sea ice is not shown.
History shows that empires acquire territories in various ways. Dynasties link arms through marriage, as the Habsburgs were famous for doing. Territories are pinched by means of arms or stolen through sham contracts and undertakings. They might also be purchased.
The United States made much of the vast property sale in acquiring an empire. The Louisiana purchase of 1803 for a mere $15 million was daring, opportunistic and extra-legal. It was also initiated by a US president who had romantically insisted that the fledgling republic confine itself to the agricultural good deeds of a model yeomanry. But Thomas Jefferson could be cunningly devilish, and France, then under the firm rule of Napoleon Bonaparte, worried him. “There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans.”
Boney, his interests more focused on Europe, was open to giving up the land for a fee. The natives, naturally, were not consulted. Jefferson, having previously advocated the need to observe the Constitution with pious dedication, ignored it on the issue of purchasing territory, there being no allowance for it in the document. And so the first signs of the imperial presidency showed.
In 1868, the hungry eye of US officialdom showed that conquering and controlling the continent was not merely a matter of westward expansion that would eventually see, in the lofty observation of Frederick Jackson Turner, its closing. Acquisitive desires pointed to Iceland and Greenland as possible eastward options.
A 1868 publication for the US State Department compiled by Benjamin Mills Peirce takes more than a fleeting interest in the resources of Iceland and Greenland, acknowledging the treaty with Denmark which was intended to cede control of the Caribbean islands of St. Thomas and St. John to the US. The 1868 report encouraged the acquisition of Greenland for two important reasons: commercial opportunities arising from exploiting the natural abundance of “whale, walrus, seal, and shark, cod, ivory-cod, salmon, salmon-trout, and herring” and the political soundness of attaining a territory flanking “British America on the Arctic and Pacific”. Greenland could thereby “become a part of the American Union” and diminish British influence in the area.
The treaty with Denmark concerning the Danish West Indies was a reminder that things were not going to be smooth. The acquisition of what would become the US Virgin Islands was the brainchild of Secretary of State William Henry Seward, a move seen by the US State Department as admirably benign. The treaty’s fate was chequered: initial rejection by the US Senate, directed mostly at Seward’s support for President Andrew Jackson during his impeachment proceedings, followed by Danish rejection in 1902. There was also some rancour about whether a plebiscite would be held for local inhabitants, given Danish fears about what would befall the black inhabitants under US rule, one hardly famed for its generosity to the swarthy races.
The First World War finally saw the Danish West Indies formally transferred on March 31, 1917, along with $25 million in gold coin, an outcome assisted in some part by the bullying antics of US Secretary of State Robert Lansing. The Secretary was not shy in hinting that occupying the islands to prevent them falling into German hands was a distinct possibility.
Interest in acquiring Greenland was further kindled by the Second World War. Again, worries about Germany featured, given its uneventful occupation of Denmark in 1940. The United States subsequently built the Thule Air Base in 1943. The Truman administration, at the conclusion of the war, failed to bait the Danes with a purchase price of $100 million, though the base continued to function under US control and the kingdom’s blessing.
During President Donald Trump’s first term, the purchase obsession resurfaced like an itch, with any acquisition of Greenland being likened to a “large real estate deal.” Denmark, he advised, carried it “at a great loss. And strategically for the United States, it would be nice.” By most accounts, this had less to do with realpolitik than real estate. According to Peter Baker and Susan Glasser’s account of Trump’s first term, Denmark would receive the benighted territory of Puerto Rico in the exchange. They also suggest that the cheeky proposal came from the president’s longtime friend Ronald Lauder, heir to the Estée Lauder cosmetics empire. Typically, Trump insists it was all his idea.
Trump subsequently found the Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen unimpressed, unwilling, and “nasty”. For her part, the Danish PM had decided that “the time when you buy and sell other countries and populations is over. Let’s leave it there.”
Trump’s imminent return to the White House has revived old idiosyncrasies. Over the holiday period in December 2024, he had moments of Jeffersonian fancy, promising to take over the Panama Canal, which he regarded as being operated illegally, albeit lovingly, by “the wonderful soldiers of China”, turning Canada into the 51st State with former hockey professional Wayne Gretzky installed as governor, and purchasing Greenland.
The president-elect’s choice of US ambassador to Denmark is seemingly premised on wooing Copenhagen, with Trump declaring Washington’s ownership of the territory “an absolute necessity.” The views of Greenland’s Prime Minister Múte Egede suggest that such a project is unlikely to succeed. “Greenland is ours. We are not for sale and will never be for sale.” It’s dangerous to be so unequivocal in the field of politics.
In April last year, the Thule Air Base was renamed the Pituffik Space Base in a fit of advertised cultural sensitivity. The Department of Defense claimed that this better recognised “Greenlandic cultural heritage” and more appropriately reflected “its role in the US Space Force.” Greenlandic cultural heritage otherwise plays little role in the imperial vision of the base, with the US Space Force insisting that it “enables Space Superiority”, performing missile warning, missile defence roles, and space surveillance missions.
In the scheme of things, owning Greenland in any official sense hardly matters, and the second Trump administration would be wise to just let the Danes deal with the icy mass and its incumbent problems. Washington already has what it needs – and more besides.
Sinking Mike Pompeo: Tucker Carlson,
Assange and Trump
Photograph Source: Gage Skidmore – CC BY-SA 3.0
Mike Pompeo’s role in the first Trump administration as both director of the Central Intelligence Agency and US Secretary of State will be forever associated with the venom and desperation he had in targeting Julian Assange, a publisher who drove him to distraction and engendered mania. As the chief founder of WikiLeaks, Assange had regularly published troves of classified documents uncovering the messy muddles, messes and more sinister features of the US imperium.
When WikiLeaks published the CIA Vault 7 files in March 2017, disclosing a suite of hacking tools used by the organisation, Pompeo became insensible. CIA operatives had thought themselves invulnerable to such publishing revelations, unlike their wobbly counterparts in the State Department and the Pentagon. The report from the CIA’s WikiLeaks Task Force might have encouraged some of the bureaucratic boffins in government to improve: WikiLeaks had, effectively “brought to light multiple ongoing CIA failures”, a fault that enabled a CIA employee to pilfer 180 gigabytes of information, constituting “the largest data loss in CIA history”.
The report goes on spelling out the need for reform. “We must care as much about securing our systems as we care about running them if we are to make the necessary revolutionary change.” That said, all bureaucracies treat the exposure of failings through an external airing as treasonous, a compromise that rents the thick cloak of secrecy. Most importantly of all, it often shows officials as clumsy, doltish and undeserving of their position.
An avenging Pompeo, flushed with spite, went on a crusade against leakers and those aiding them, seeking more serious measures against WikiLeaks. In his April 2017 speech to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, he first designated WikiLeaks a “hostile non-state intelligence service”, a classification that lowered the threshold in terms of what was permissible against a publishing outlet. Implicit was the suggestion that the United States, through its various channels, would actively and aggressively pursue the organisation as an information guerilla misfit prey to foreign powers.
Pompeo even emitted a few smoke signals that Assange would not be able to avail himself of those blessed protections available under the First Amendment to the press. “Julian Assange has no First Amendment freedoms. He’s sitting in an embassy in London. He’s not a US citizen.” In time, a seedy term intended to diminish, if not scuttle the notion of press protections, began circulating in the chatter of Espionage Land: information broker.
In that most revealing Yahoo News report, published in September 2021, Pompeo and various other agency chiefs were, in the words of a former Trump national security official, “completely detached from reality because they were so embarrassed by Vault 7”. Within months, the US intelligence community was monitoring the communications and movements of targeted WikiLeaks personnel. Audio and visual surveillance of Assange was avidly pursued.
Some few months after revealing his intentions regarding WikiLeaks, Pompeo decried the emergence of a cult of “worship” that had grown around “Edward Snowden, and those who steal American secrets for the purpose of self-aggrandizement or money or for whatever their motivation may be”. Typical of Pompeo: the information disclosed was irrelevant to motivation, the central tenet of the US Espionage Act of 1917.
Be it through means conventional or otherwise, the WikiLeaks publisher, then a political asylee in London’s Ecuadorian Embassy, was to be extradited to the United States and tried, or, short of that, abducted or assassinated. (Under a plea deal, Assange was eventually convicted under one count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information under the Espionage Act.)
As the noble scribblers at Yahoo News go on to reveal at some length, using material gathered from interviews with more than 30 former US officials, various scenarios, encouraged by Pompeo, were encouraged. Discussions took place on whether it was possible to extrajudicially remove Assange from the Ecuadorian Embassy under the CIA’s operational doctrine of “offensive counterintelligence”. Three officials also reveal that killing the publisher was discussed at various meetings as a possibility. At points, the cooling restraints on such heated lunacy were placed by various National Security Council lawyers.
With the return of Donald Trump to the White House, whose campaign was aided, in no small part, by various figures sympathetic to Assange’s publishing efforts, the eyes shifted, once again, to Pompeo. Would the now leaner figure (he boasted in 2022 to shedding 90 pounds over six months) make a return, probably as Defense Secretary? Not if Tucker Carlson could help it.
The former Fox News host made sure to get to Trump’s ear during the election campaign to remind him about Pompeo’s soiled résumé. In a Wall Street Journal piece this month, Carlson’s efforts at reputational sabotage are mentioned. Certain neoconservative markings of Pompeo were pointed out: a tendency towards warmongering; the obsession with Assange and a contemplated plot to assassinate him. Donald Trump Jr., the eldest son of the president-elect, also threw in his lot, warning that bringing those like Pompeo into the fold again would hamper his father’s free hand. The Make America Great Agenda was not to be cramped.
The WSJ piece was hardly sensational. Carlson had publicly aired his dislike for Pompeo in an April interview on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast. As CIA director, “he plotted the murder of Julian Assange. So he is a criminal as far as I’m concerned.”
Carlson also spoke of receiving threatening calls from Pompeo’s lawyers after speaking about the JFK files on his Fox News show. “His lawyer called me and said, you know, you should know that anyone who tells you the contents of classified documents has committed a crime.” In Carlson’s opinion, Pompeo “pressed” the president to keep documents relevant to the CIA’s involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy “secret”. Be that as it may, Carlson’s account from Pompeo’s lawyer on discussing classified documents certainly tallies with the worldview of the secrecy goon himself.
At the moment, there is much ado about Trump’s various appointments. They constitute a Flemish painting of characters: the vulgar and the violent; the self-contradictory and the untrained; the stained and the falsely pure. They are threaded by a suspicion that the National Security State has become a canker on the Republic’s foundations. They are also unlikely to dismantle it, whatever the aspirations. Keeping Pompeo out of the stable, however, could be seen as a work in progress.
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