Excerpts:
When the president talks about security in the Arctic, he’s talking about climate change.
Their aim, the vice president said in a video on X, is to check up on Greenland’s security, because unnamed other countries could “use its territories and its waterways to threaten the United States.” And these are real concerns for the United States, rooted in climate change: As polar ice melts away, superpowers are vying for newly open shipping routes in the Arctic Ocean and largely unexplored mineral and fossil-fuel reserves. Arctic warming could pose a direct threat to America’s security interests too: Alaska could have new vulnerabilities to both China and Russia; changes in ocean salinity and temperature might interfere with submarine detection systems; the extremes of climate change, including permafrost thaw in Russia, could drive economic instability, social unrest, and territorial claims.
So far this term, Trump has acted as if climate change does not matter: He has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement, announced plans to reopen the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil and gas drilling, and paused new offshore-wind development and Inflation Reduction Act clean-energy funding. But if the president’s bid for Greenland—or the U.S. military’s quiet cooperation with Canada to boost Arctic defenses—is any indication, the U.S. is weighing its options for a warmer future. “We live in the real world,” Evan Bloom, a global fellow at the Wilson Center’s Polar Institute and former State Department official, told me. “The military and other agencies will continue to take climate change into account, because they have to.” When he hears Trump talk about Greenland, he hears the president speaking about the geopolitics of climate change—“whether he’s willing to call it that or not.”
Yeah, I’d put this article under “bad takes”. Trumps focus appears to be mining. If this was on his radar he wouldn’t be so concern about Panama as it would be made largely redundant.
Then again for these guys “the oil must flow”.
I’d go even one step further, which is to say he’s even dumber and more petty than you’re even giving him credit for.
He thinks expanding the physical size of a nation is a metric for success. Greenland is relatively large, (and he thinks it’s larger than it really is because he can not comprehend the reality of a Mercator projection). He knows there’s only a few tens of thousands of people there. Seems like an easy grab for a big plot of land.
He wants golden statues of himself in Gaza. He thinks the 49th parallel is an arbitrary line. The Panama canal is one of 4 presitegeous global pieces of infrastructure that his dementia addled brain can even recall.
He want big. He want thing people know. He want golden statue. He like 4 year old. He mad.
Trying to ascribe any meaning beyond that to his actions is like when people anthrpomorphise an insect as being embarrassed. We’re projecting meaning for which there just isn’t evidence to support, where there are simpler explanations to be had.
He is profoundly insecure, profoundly stupid, and profoundly petty. This provides sufficient explanation for everything he’s ever done.
I think you’re making the assumption that the Commander in Chief is actually commanding. One of the thing I found really scary about the Signal chat was that Stephen Miller said something along the lines of “as far as I heard him, it was a green light” and then everything kicks off. That group made it all happen based on hearsay of Trump giving a go.
…and WTF is the VP involved in the decision making of a strike for? He should be briefed, but he’s not part of the chain of command until Trump is incapacitated.
As a major shipping artery, Panama makes far more sense than Greenland. What are you talking about?
Europe to China. Look at a globe and not a map. Currently it mostly goes via Suez as Panama is such a long way out of the way. The Northwest passage was such a prized goal for 500 years because of trade with the far east.
America wants control over the world’s four main “chokepoints” for sea trade.
As well as taking control of Panama, the US wants to build the Ben Gurion Canal, an alternative to the Suez Canal, running through Israel close to the Gaza strip.
It also wants control over far northern sea routes, including the “northwest passage” that runs through Canada, and the Russia-China “northeast passage” that runs near Greenland.