by dathinab | 2026-01-15 16:28:01+00:00
The thing is:

- Greenland has always been open for companies starting mining resources under fair terms. But while they have a lot of resources Greenland is mostly cliffs and glaciers, worse increasingly melting glaciers and permafrost in cliffs, i.e. increasingly unstable terrain. Little infrastructure you can take advantage on. Few places you can safely build harbors. Wetter so cold that a lot of equipment simply would fail. So it's not nearly as profitable as it might look. Maybe you can make some decent profit if you run it like the soviet union ran many things, i.e. forced labor with 10s of thousands of people dying.

- The US has one military outpost in Greenland, and AFIK they don't need more to a) protect the US from that direction and b) project power to arctic shipping routes and similar. And realistically if this where to actually need some expansion then any past president probably could have come to an reasonable agreement with Greenland. I mean it's land they don't use and can give for some monetary benefit to one of their closest allies while implicitly gaining some added protection, like why would you say no to that. Except maybe the past Trump presidency as he had already been eroding checks and balances then and that is a red flag for trusting that an ally will stay an ally.

> Nobody is going to war over this and [..] wants to save face.

This is what people also said about:

- Hitler starting WW2 (like seriously he said he would start war, neighbors countries where like: "Nah no way he is just barking")

- Same, but after Hitler had already rearmed Germany and sized some boarder territory (he -> war, other countries -> na, no way he actually want to start another large scale war)

- heck even after he invaded Poland many still insisted that there is no way he would go beyond that as that would be just supper dump

- a Wall being build around west Berlin to prevent people from entering it (there is a famous citate: "Nobody intends to build a wall." (after rumors started that they might want to do that, many people believed them as build a wall would just be too absurd))

- during WW2 most Germans (in cities) knew something really bad is happening to Jews, many approached it like "there is no way he is literally killing all of them" (even trough he kinda wrote exactly that in his book)

- etc. etc.

The point is humans are very very prone to make them-self believe that there is no way some very unpleasant possibilities will happen.

Also if person who as repeatedly shown to act unreasonable, sometimes outright despotic, with clear autocratic tendencies, who has shown to be fully fine with civilians suffering or dying as consequence of his actions says "I want to size your country", and has the military might to do so, you should assume that they want do _exactly that_ (at least in the moment when saying that).

Historically speaking claiming that "nobody wants that, because it's supper dump" has rarely ended well.

Lets hope it wont happen anyway it would likely spiral into WW3 as it's a pretty clear signal for China that the the US has lost most of its allies and Nato is disfunctional and the EU is weaker and more likely to work with or at least unlikely to antagonize them then ever before (in recent times). If not now when else is a better time to size Taiwan. China increasingly doesn't need TSMC, the rest of the world including the US do. China might even profit from it being destroyed in the war... Really don't give them a reason to believe Nato is weak it will screw over the quality of live/cost of living/etc. of pretty much all western countries for years to come.