Greenland

I recently wrote a book countenancing the idea that the United States could buy Greenland, and I have received some very interesting responses. Some are perplexed at the utility of an Australian assessment of Greenland geostrategy (I’m from Canberra); others have admonished me personally for ‘willing into reality’ US ownership of Greenland. All I did was offer a buyer’s guide to an alluring piece of real estate – background that anyone laying claim to this land should know. Lesson 1: America and Denmark have history  Greenland has tantalised Washington since at least 1867.  These guys have serious history.

When the earthquake is big, the porcelain rattles far and wide. And that’s exactly what’s happening now… in Cuba, Colombia, Mexico and even Greenland. The plates are rattling after the Trump Administration’s swift, successful mission to capture Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, who was allegedly a major figure in the country’s international drug trafficking. Both husband and wife now face criminal charges in the US. Who else is rattled? Well, the Democratic Party for one, but they are shaking with anger. They say that the raid was illegal and that they should have been consulted before any military action.

Empire has always been part of the American tradition. We are a sequel state to the greatest empire in world history. Our period of colonial tutelage under that empire taught the lessons of legitimate territorial expansion against French and Spanish rivals. Our continental aggrandizement after independence was necessary. Later overseas expansion, including periods of imperial apprenticeship in places such as Liberia, the Philippines and Panama, was further evidence of our colonial métier. Like it or not, imperialism and colonialism are congenital to the American experiment. This has been the case since 1779, when the Continental Congress branded a proposal to limit westward expansion an “intolerable despotism.

Ahead of the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska to discuss Ukraine, President Trump said there would be “some land swapping.” He waxed lyrical about “prime real estate.” The summit’s location is a good example of land swaps and prime real estate and is in a region of growing geopolitical importance.   In 1867 Russia "swapped" Alaska for $7.2 million in a deal mocked as Seward’s Folly after Secretary of State William H. Seward who negotiated the exchange. It turned out to be a snip. Commercially viable oil was discovered three decades later and has brought in more than $180 billion in revenue since Alaska became a state in 1959.

Historically, ex-presidents spend their golden years on the speaking circuit, writing their memoirs or planning for the inauguration of their presidential libraries. What they don’t do is lash out at their successors when they disagree with a policy or decision. Joe Biden, however, has no intention of keeping quiet. A little more than three months after vacating the White House, Biden is unencumbered from conventional decorum and feels free to speak his mind. Last month, he gave his first post-presidency speech in Chicago, where he blasted the Trump administration for taking a sharp hatchet to the federal workforce, including the Social Security Administration.

Weeks into his second term, it’s clear President Trump intends to be the most transformative force our politics has seen in a century. He seems equally determined to change the course of the world — and perhaps its map, too. Trump’s enemies can blame themselves for making this possible. They showed him that impeachment is nothing to fear: securing conviction in the Senate is nigh impossible and whatever damage impeachment might do to a president’s reputation has already been inflicted on Trump. Two impeachments and a welter of post-presidential criminal prosecutions and even convictions failed to stain Trump in voters’ eyes. On the contrary, they left him more popular than ever and discredited the institutions his opponents employed as weapons of their “lawfare.

Elon Musk claims that President Trump and DoGE are shutting down USAID.He made his claim on X Spaces last night following the administrative leave of two senior security officials at the US Agency for International Development (USAID) after they denied the newly established Department of Government Efficiency (DoGE) the ability to receive sensitive data from the agency, the Guardian reports.DoGE was created on Trump’s first day to “maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” Headed by Musk, the department has already taken action to bring to light extensive federal spending and has been granted access to the US Treasury’s federal payment system.Musk said that USAID is beyond repair.

President-elect Donald Trump has in recent years talked about ‘buying’ Greenland. Until recently his comments attracted little attention but recently he shocked the world by threatening the use of economic coercion or military force to fulfil his wish. Male gorillas in the forests of west Africa engage in chest-beating to see off their rivals but Nato, to which the Kingdom of Denmark has belonged since its foundation in 1949, is meant to be a zoo park in which all the wardens sign up for a working partnership. What is behind this public breach in diplomatic etiquette? Americans can point to earlier times when they expanded their territory by purchase, not to mention conquest.

Everyone wants to be an American, right? Or to enjoy our way of life anyway. So it would seem as millions continue to risk life and limb to get into the United States illegally, while others make monumental sacrifices to become naturalized. Still, things may get easier for people wanting a taste of America if President-elect Donald Trump’s imperial dreams come true.Left-leaning outlets have been panicking for a while now over the possibility that a second Trump term would result in an American Empire of sorts. Trump’s reign would be eerily similar to Julius Caesar’s, Politico warned ahead of the 2020 election; the pair’s similarities are “uncanny,” the Globalist declared in October 2024.