President Donald Trump (R) has decided to impose an additional 10% tariff on several European countries, starting next month, in an effort to get them to push Denmark into selling Greenland to us.
Greenland is important to us from both a national security and an economic perspective, but this is the wrong way to go about satisfying those two imperatives.
We don’t want to own Greenland. Begin with the fact that we don’t want to incur the bill for the $1 billion annually in subsidies that Denmark currently pays Greenland because the Greenland economy is so deficient.
Set aside that unnecessary expense. It’s cheaper and win-win all around for us to cut deals with Denmark (and Greenland, to the extent the island’s autonomous territory status within Denmark gives it a seat at the negotiations) to greatly expand our basing rights in Greenland and to expand our access to and development/exploitation of Greenland’s oil, natural gas, coal, and rare earth resources, of each of which Greenland has a wealth. Maybe even get exclusive rights to access and develop/exploit the rare earths.
The win: we get what we need strategically and economically without bringing in a population unenthusiastic about joining us and without our having to absorb those $1 billion annually.
The other win: Denmark gets an infusion of money from the royalties involved in those resource developments, and Greenland gets a large expansion of its economy from its cut of those royalties; the large jobs expansion from construction, drilling, mining, and all the supporting and ancillary businesses that will appear; and it will see a broad diversification of its economy away from the fishing industry that is virtually is sole current economic activity.