When Will US Invade Greenland? What Channel Is Greenland Invasion On? Where Can I Get 'Invade Greenland' T-Shirts?
AI slop T-shirts are already out there, and they suck.
Donald Trump keeps insisting that the USA absolutely must have Greenland, and his threats of taking over the island haven’t let up. Wednesday, the foreign ministers of Greenland and Denmark met with JD Vance and Marco Rubio at the White House, but the prospects of dissuading the administration from Trump’s weird fantasy seem no better.
“We didn’t manage to change the American position,” Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen told reporters after the meeting. “It’s clear that the president has this wish of conquering over Greenland.”
Vivian Motzfeldt, Greenland’s foreign minister, likewise said that her country — a semiautonomous part of Denmark — wants to keep cooperating with the US, but added that doesn’t mean that Greenland wants to be “owned by the United States.” The USA already has a major military base there, for stashing JD Vance away, and as a member of NATO, the US also has a treaty obligation to defend Greenland, which is rather the opposite of what we’re talking about now. Trump isn’t very hot on NATO, though, so he pretends that the US actually needs to take over Greenland to “defend” it from Russia or China.
Trump’s continued threats may be delusional, but he has a long history of doing the stupidest possible thing in every circumstance, so to be on the safe side, Denmark and other European nations are sending contingents of military forces to Greenland to have some boots on the ground in hopes of at least making Trump think twice before launching a war against our NATO allies.
This raises the interesting class discussion question of what might happen if the US invades Greenland anyway, triggering Article 5 of the NATO treaty, which treats an attack on any NATO member as an attack on all. Would Trump then be obliged to send the US military to kidnap himself?
Prior to the White House meeting, Greenland’s Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen said at a press conference with his Danish counterpart, “If we have to choose between the United States and Denmark here and now, we choose Denmark.”
Nielsen continued, “One thing must be clear to everyone. Greenland does not want to be owned by the United States. Greenland does not want to be governed by the United States. Greenland does not want to be part of the United States.”
Asked about Nielsen’s remarks, Trump went Full Dipshit, explaining, “Well, that's their problem. I disagree with him. I don’t know who he is, don’t know anything about him. But that's going to be a big problem for him.”
So far, the NATO deployments to Greenland have been pretty limited: 15 French mountain infantry members were there already for training exercises, and President Emmanuel Macron said Wednesday that additional “military elements are already en route,” with others to follow. The German Defense Ministry said it will send 13 military personnel to Greenland on Thursday. Norway and Sweden have also pledged to send troops, and Denmark is stepping up its military presence in Greenland too.
The European troops will in part be getting logistics in place for larger deployments of troops who will participate in defense drills to come a little later this year.
The NATO troops aren’t being sent in large enough numbers to repel an American invasion, certainly, but to serve as a strategic “tripwire” that could deter Trump from invading at all, and to underline that if he attacked Greenland and killed allied troops, it would be a publicity disaster, and almost certainly the end of NATO — which Trump doesn’t give two shits about, unfortunately. This week he also said that while he “liked” NATO, he thinks it needs the US more than the other way around, and he dismissed Greenland’s defenses as “two dog sleds,” Ha! Ha!
Whether Trump remotely understands how much blowback there’d be is anyone’s guess. But there’s at least the remote chance some of his advisers would point out that if a Greenland invasion led European countries to cut off trade with the US, he wouldn’t be able to impose tariffs on them anymore.
Trump repeated earlier this week that “one way or the other, we’re going to have Greenland.” That ignores the fact that a poll of Greenlanders last year found that just six percent wanted to leave Denmark and become part of the US, while 85 percent were opposed. As if the opinion of the population of 57,000 mattered. If Trump cares at all about what Americans think (he doesn’t), a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday found that 86 percent of Americans are against using the military to take over Greenland, too. Only nine percent are in favor.
Trump posted on his stupid fake Twitter Wednesday that He’s Gotta Have It (Greenland) and that “anything less than that is unacceptable.”
Or hell, maybe Trump will simply decide he can’t bring himself to go to war with Peter Boysen, the head of Denmark’s Army, who as this Atlantic article makes clear (gift link) is a lean mean fighting machine who’s straight out of central casting.
We’ll keep you updated on whether we’re at war again, assuming the internet isn’t shut down when Trump invokes the Insurrection Act in Minnesota.
[Al Jazeera / NBC News / NPR / BBC / The Hill / Reuters / Atlantic (gift link)]
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Greenland is a territory of Denmark, one of America's NATO allies.
The destruction of NATO has been Putin's goal for YEARS now...
Just suggesting we invade one of our NATO allies is enough to impeach and remove Trump.