In a statement that would be dismissed as insanely provocative and warmongering if made by any other global leader, US President-elect Donald Trump added Greenland to the list of territories he has proposed to acquire for the United States. He has previously called for the return of the Panama Canal Zone to US control and for Canada to become the 51st state.
Satellite view of Greenland [Photo: NASA]
The corporate media has largely dismissed the fascist musings about territorial expansion of the United States as mere bluster or at most, signs of a Biden-style mental deterioration on the part of Trump, the oldest man ever to be elected president. But some of the intended targets of US takeover have not been so complacent.
Trump wrote on Truth Social Monday morning, “For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.” How he would compel Denmark, a NATO member, to give up its ownership of the territory he did not say.
Greenland Prime Minister Mute Egede issued a written response Monday to Trump’s declaration of interest in purchasing the Arctic island: “Greenland is ours. We are not for sale and will never be for sale. We must not lose our long struggle for freedom.”
In Panama, President Jose Raul Mulino denounced Trump’s comments about taking back the canal. “Every square meter of the Panama Canal and the surrounding area belongs to Panama and will continue belonging” to Panama, he said in a video posted on social media.
During his first term, in 2019, Trump raised the prospect of buying Greenland from Denmark, which exercises loose control over the giant but largely unpopulated territory, with fewer than 59,000 people spread out over 836,000 square miles, or 2,166,000 square kilometers. Nearly three-quarters of the land surface is covered by glaciers. The island is larger than Alaska, and ten times the size of Great Britain.
Due to its position on the globe, Greenland is the most direct route for air travel from much of North America to Europe—including American nuclear missiles headed towards European Russia. This accounts for the longstanding US military interest, expressed in the US facility long known as Thule Air Base but renamed Pituffik Space Base last year, after the Inuit name for the area.
In the 1960s, Thule had more than 10,000 US personnel, rivalling the adult population of Greenland as a whole. Its current estimated population is about 3,000, along with US nuclear-armed missiles, specialized radars, and dozens of classified missions.
In addition to its military strategic importance, Greenland is being eyed by US and Canadian corporations for exploitation of its vast mineral wealth, as the ice sheet that covers most of the island’s surface melts. The island’s western coast could become a major route for ocean-going trade if the melting of the Arctic Ocean opens up a year-round Northwest Passage.
If Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping were to begin musing about the need to absorb large adjacent territories—Poland, the Baltic states, Mongolia or Nepal—or critical choke points like the Turkish straits or the Strait of Malacca, the corporate media in both the US and other imperialist powers would be sounding notes of alarm and predicting imminent war.
Putin’s reactionary invasion of Ukraine, provoked by the US-NATO policy of pushing forward the military alliance to the Russian border, has been cited as proof that he intends to conquer all of Eastern Europe and perhaps Western Europe as well.
China’s rehabilitation of small islets and reefs in the South China Sea to build them into actual land masses equipped with air strips and permanent housing has been the subject of a years-long campaign in the Australian and American media portraying Beijing as a military threat to the entire Indo-Pacific region.
Trump’s statements about absorbing Canada and Greenland into the United States, which would create the world’s largest country, even bigger than Russia, are treated as unserious and certainly posing no threat of war. But the threat of American expansionism will certainly be taken seriously by the government and military officials of countries that might be standing in the way.
His own entourage is certainly taking these remarks seriously. Corey Lewandowski, a “senior advisor” and former top campaign official, told the ultra Newsmax outlet that Trump was a “real estate master,” unlike President Jimmy Carter, who agreed to return the Panama Canal to Panama.
“Once again, this is President Trump focused on America first,” he said. “And so it’s time to make sure that our independence and our dominance on the world stage is back in play. … He’s talking about maybe Greenland from a historic perspective coming as part of the United States, taking back the Panama Canal so that China doesn’t have its influence there. This is a president who is making outside-the-box announcements to put the world on notice that, once again, the United States is the dominant world superpower.”
Pressed by his far-right interviewer on why Trump would target Greenland, Lewandowski declared, “And by the way, we have not expanded our country in 70 years. So look, Donald Trump is, again, thinking outside the box. How do we have a lasting impact on the world stage? What does his legacy look like? This is someone who has a vision for America’s greatness long after he has left the White House, and this is just part.”
Lewandowski could have been asked whether Trump had been reading his book of Hitler speeches that, according to his first wife, he kept by his bedside. That would spell out the inspiration for his crude declarations that American imperialism needs lebensraum, albeit in the Far North rather than the East.
Meanwhile, Trump announced nominations of four top officials for the Pentagon, those who would be the principal aides to his nominee for secretary of defense, former Fox News commentator and pro-war crimes activist Pete Hegseth.
As previously reported, billionaire Stephen Feinberg was chosen for deputy secretary of defense, the number two position and the likely replacement for Hegseth if his nomination founders. Feinberg is the co-founder of Cerberus Capital Management, a private equity firm with heavy investments in the arms industry, having acquired much of US tank and armored car production from General Motors, as well as the gun manufacturer Remington.
Elbridge Colby is to be nominated as undersecretary of defense of policy. The grandson of the late CIA director William Colby, who oversaw the Phoenix assassination program during the Vietnam War, Colby held a lower-ranking Pentagon position during the first Trump term. He is on record supporting arms shipments to Ukraine and economic sanctions on Russia but opposing Ukrainian membership in NATO.
Michael Duffey would be undersecretary for acquisitions and sustainment, an enormously influential position for steering lucrative contracts to the vast US arms industry. He worked in the White House Office of Management and Budget in Trump’s first term. Emil Michael would be undersecretary for research and engineering. He was formerly an executive at Uber, where according to the New York Times, “he supported hiring investigators to pursue journalists who wrote articles critical of the company.”
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Publish date : 2024-12-23 15:45:00
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Author : theamericannews
Publish date : 2024-12-24 06:26:22
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