The American vassals’ nominal show of defiance against the US president’s land-grab plan is pathetic
In Frank Herbert’s novel ‘Dune’ – with its blood-soaked canvas of a whole universe of rules-based empire, incessant lying, enthusiastic mass murder, and some very critical raw materials – there’s a famous scene featuring a box.
Herbert – as most bros reading him for life hacks fail to understand – loved irony of the savage type. That’s why the box reveals the truth about you by lying to you: Put your hand in it and you will feel it burning so hot (though it isn’t, not really) that you will scream and shrink away (and, if you are a man, you will be murdered, for your pains as it were, by a very harsh nun-witch headmistress). Because you have been found out to be merely human, which the nun-witch headmistress thinks makes you an animal. It’s complicated.
Or you happen to be a deeply flawed ‘ubermensch’ produced by thousands of years of obsessively controlled human breeding experiments plus – very Herbert that, again – some last-minute coupling mutiny.
In that case, you won’t flinch, the headmistress will let you live (though not your father), and you will move on to become a charismatic, vaguely Islamic-looking rebel leader destroying the space equivalents of a perverse, sadistic Zionist death cult (called Harkonnen) and of the American empire, too (here led by the kind of wily, ruthless emperor US President Donald Trump really would love to be, if with a dash of glitzy real estate tycoon, of course). After that happy ending, however, things will get a little out of hand.
But this is where we leave the Herbert-verse and return to our own small, single-planet but no less blood-soaked world. There, a truth box has materialized – a little like that mysterious obelisk among that tribe of screaming, fighting prehistoric hominins in Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (my last science fiction analogy for today, I promise). And it’s called Greenland.
For in the unfortunately real world, whoever nowadays goes to Greenland, touches Greenland, or even talks about Greenland, starts revealing the truth about themselves. And, spoiler alert, it’s never pretty.
Let’s look at the self-revealers in turn. First, as is only right for our little planet’s empire, there is the US. It has revealed with almost laudable frankness what attentive observers have long known. Washington respects neither international law nor even the fuzzy would-be norms of that amorphous rules-based international (dis)order that has, literally, no rule book. Common decency, diplomatic forms, or elementary ethics – forget about those as well, obviously.
Under Trump 2.0, who sees Greenland as a really nice piece of property and a geopolitical linchpin as well, the US has escalated an obsession with acquiring the island. Never mind it already belongs to another country that happens to be a very obedient US vassal, Denmark. ‘Escalated’ because it’s an old – if often dormant – project going back to the 19th century, as Russian President Vladimir Putin has just noted in a speech at the International Arctic Forum.
Denmark, you may well say, should not be owning Greenland anyhow, in any shape or form, ‘self-government act’ home rule or not. The overwhelming majority of Greenland’s very small population – about 55,000 or 0.00068 percent of humanity – are Greenlandic Inuit, who have nothing in common with Danes ethnically and have had plenty of bad experiences with them, too. Greenland still being attached to Denmark is simply a late outcome of European colonialism. As such, this status quo is overdue for a swift, unsentimental end.
But none of the above means that the Greenlanders should end up under the control of the United States. For one thing, historically speaking, America is one of the worst outcomes of that same European colonialism, with the difference that in the US case, the ethnic cleansing and great white replacement of the indigenous inhabitants was almost total.
In more contemporary terms, there simply is no reason why Greenlanders should not be genuinely independent – as far as that is possible in the real world – with a state they fully own and the international political, commercial, and security relationships that would result from a combination of their own decisions and the necessities resulting from their place on the map.
In other words, simply due to proximity, the US is likely to play a large role in Greenland’s future anyhow. Its current ham-fisted, carelessly brutal approach, however, reveals more than its usual overbearing meddling. Even if also motivated by grandstanding for a domestic audience, silly, provocative performances such as Vice President J.D. Vance’s visit show that Washington has entered a phase of immature I-must-have-it-all-and-I-must-have-it-right-now imperialism.
The other thing this reveals is that the new, no-frills exercise of brute American power is openly contemptuous of Washington’s European vassals. No surprise there, you may well say, but still, let’s note that America’s new rulers are going out of their way to show just how little they respect the European underlings. And to be fair, isn’t this deserved?
Because here is what the Greenland truth box is telling us about the Europeans: Denmark’s foreign minister, Lars Lokke Rasmussen, has found “drastic” words, so we are informed, for Vance. For Vance’s “tone,” to be precise. Way to start! That’ll teach the ugly American! Do not focus on the substance of what he is threatening you with but on his tone. Really? Tony Soprano walks into your cod liver and whale meat restaurant making a change-of-ownership offer you can’t refuse, and your response is to ask him to say it more nicely?
Anyhow, Rasmussen believes that Vance’s – that is, Washington’s – tone “is not how you speak to close allies.” Oh my God! He is sooo close! Will he ever realize that this is precisely the issue: Denmark is not a “close ally.” It’s not even an ally. The most polite label with any connection to reality would be ‘client’. The most truthful – ‘vassal’.
That’s an exaggeration? A bit harsh in, you know, tone? Not at all. How do we know that? Two words: Nord Stream. Remember that pipeline that the US blew up – who cares whether on its own or with or through other steadfast allies, the Ukrainians, for instance – in a (barely) covert military attack and the largest act of ecoterrorism in European history? And that Washington is now thinking about acquiring and repairing to add some more injury to an already richly packed insult-injury sandwich?
Because of Nord Stream’s location in the Baltic Sea, Denmark was also directly affected. And like all other Europeans, it just rolled over and showed its belly. Its “investigation” (yes, scare quotes) “found” (ditto) that while the explosions were sabotage, there were not enough grounds to go after anyone. In other words, there were plenty, but going after the US and its Ukrainian or other accomplices was too scary. So much for Danes getting tough. Or Western Europeans as a whole.
At the time, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the Danish cop-out “close to absurdity.” True, if mildly put. But the absurdity wasn’t the worst part. That was the deliberate abdication of any remaining shred of practical sovereignty and therefore of any hope for respect from other states.
And disrespect has consequences. For this is the most fundamental revelation of the Greenland truth box: In the deeply Hobbesian world of states, cowards damage themselves the most. That is why the Greenlanders are right to tell the US to get lost. The way things are, they may not prevail against the biggest bully in the known universe, and they would be wise to settle for what they can if they must. But one thing we know for sure – they won’t get anything from just rolling over European-style. There, too, it’s time for Europe’s colonial legacy to disappear.
