When President Donald Trump expressed serious interest in obtaining Greenland, it wasn't actually the craziest idea he's come up with. Many U.S. presidents, some of them fairly good ones, have bandied about the same thought for the same reasons: strategic defense and mineral availability.
Importantly, no other president proposed simply taking it, as Trump essentially did — a pattern of behavior that goes well beyond Greenland, but we digress. He's back at it, in Greenland again, only this time things are set to get even more heated. Heated enough to be less funny, more scary.
As some might have heard, a particular oil company has drilling equipment parked just offshore with no particular permit. As all could have guessed, Trump even has an opaque interest in said company.
Let's get the basics out of the way and then really look at how many ways this could go very wrong, very quickly, and heat up a world already past boil.
Greenland stopped issuing any oil exploration permits some time ago, but one that was issued prior to the ban went to a British Company in which America's "Greenland Energy" just took a controlling stake, thus inheriting (sort of) the permit. According to The Guardian, Larry Swets, Greenland Energy’s chair and the biggest shareholder, is firmly within Trump’s inner circle. Swets says the oil project is “not related to American annexation”.
The very fact that he has to even address such a thing already brings responsible doubts.
Whatever else is going on, it's undisputed that Greenland Energy doesn't have the proper paperwork, prior permit or not — at least according to the only entity that matters, the government of Greenland, which has set aside "Jameson Land" (the area in which Greenland Energy wants to drill) as a preserve. Greenland has sent a "strongly worded" condemnation of the action, stating: “All future logistical matters must be advised and approved by the mineral resources authority – before they are carried out."
Just two days later, Trump posted:
To take a serious matter to predictable Trump-comedy, Greenland Energy has also gone so far as to engage "Dr. Phil" to make a reality television documentary about the drilling. Why waste such compelling video, one supposes. If the war to end the world is going to start, they sure want it on television.
Greenland Energy, wholly unbothered by the lack of paperwork, has already dumped some equipment onshore. It says that a ship carrying its 300 shipping containers of drilling equipment is to set sail from Canada on September 12th, and by October it might have the first well.
Well.
Granted, the move might be less offensive if it were led by U.S. Marines backed by heavy equipment of their own, but only by degree. Because what's planned sounds as close to an invasion as anyone wants to envision. Moreover, it's unlikely to escape any American's mind that once an American company establishes a beachhead, an oil boom bumrush likely won't be far behind.
Now, despite the strong protest, Greenland's actual approach to this whole thing sounds like they're realistic enough to understand that it would be a bigger pain to usher this thing back out than let it roll for more money and tighter restrictions. That fact, however, is unlikely to assuage the Danes and the rest of NATO, who, most certainly, are already angry with Trump's brazenness and who probably already appreciate that once the door is opened, it won't close.
And all this is happening while Putin is making increasingly aggressive moves with drones in the skies above Germany and Bulgaria. That's a problem.
You can hear them in Brussels, "The one time we actually need this guy and... "
You would think that Putin's play would otherwise give the man who brags about his dealmaking prowess a golden opportunity. Imagine Trump telling NATO: We have your back in Eastern Europe, and we'll work this Greenland thing out so that everyone is in agreement, if you help us open that Straight of Hormuz place."
Word. That might even work, and some of us might have to say, "Okay, that actually made sense."
Fortunately or unfortunately, all of us know that's not how it's going to work because that's just not how Trump does business, especially crossing Putin. Plus it's just bad television if everyone is cooperating over a "great idea!" (Seriously, is anything more on-brand for the mid 2020s than someone saying, "I know! Let's do something insanely stupid and edgy, drill for oil, maybe start a world war, and let's do it with icebergs, whales, blizzards, and cool stuff. Kinda like Skinwalker Ranch, only with more freaks and a scarier place!")
Perhaps the biggest irony in all this is that, beyond the oil and riches under the ice, Trump says he needs a major footprint in Greenland as a strategic location in a warming world. There is now a Northwest Passage in summer, and Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles are aimed to fly conveniently right overhead. But evidently, it never occurred to this administration that strategic defense plans that create more enemies aren't that strategic and are bad defense.
We will pump the brakes for a second. True. It's all but impossible that the U.S., NATO, Blackwater, or Russia will send divisions to war on Greenland. Indeed, it's all but impossible for shots to be fired anywhere about this thing. Modern kinetic warfare among superpowers is such that pretty well everything is Mutual Assured Destruction with even conventional weapons. The missiles are too good, too precise; it's just too expensive. Modern wars among superpowers will be fought with trade and net manipulation as much as anything, and that carries its own inherent dangers.
Communications, shipping, and other logistics in these modern times all but require free trade and accurate communication among nations because everything is going every direction anyway. The system is now set up such that massive changes to free trade (even more massive, much more massive than we've already seen) happening across the globe, over a short period of time, truly threaten to send the economy spiraling into a worldwide recession, perhaps all the way to a depression. Even that might seem almost impossible were it not for the fact that if anyone could do it, we've got the guy.
Oh, and — perhaps it's worth pointing out that if there ever was going to actually be a shooting war between superpowers, it almost necessarily will come about during the extremes found during a depression, as we've seen before. And that's bad. Not for nothing, but most of us think of "The Great Depression" as the quintessential "worst-case scenario," but no. Not even close. There was a bigger one, called "The Dark Ages," and it lasted 300 years.
Granted, we're getting a little over our skis here, going from drilling some holes in glaciers to the Dark Ages. But there is a more subtle point. Since the end of World War II, society has gotten used to believing that progress in science, civil rights. and increasing cooperation among nations (with notable exceptions) is a birthright. And yet there is no rule that says it must be so. Indeed, the Roman Empire had highways, international banking, and aqueducts, all right before it was devastated by a plague pandemic that stopped all trade and took all jobs.
Huh. And now we're looking at a world where trade may be severely hindered, and AI is taking a lot of jobs? There is no rule that says civilization must progress.
Pulling back again, Greenland Energy is rushing ahead, unconcerned about formalities for some reason, and not just because they're backed by Trump's quixotic dreams. Just spitballing, but the plan sounds like one meant to establish precedent. And if American companies do establish the ability to just "park" in Greenland with little or no cooperation with the Greenlanders or the Danes, well, what's stopping us from doing it elsewhere?
And that's how trade wars start, even real wars. We really don't want to make trade worse; not while one-quarter of the world's oil is effectively shut off, not while things are too expensive anyway, not while Putin is already doing daring stuff elsewhere, and really not while it looks like AI is going to really start chipping away at jobs very, very soon.
True, the odds that Dr. Phil unleashes the "Darker Ages" are exceedingly small. But that's not the point because the situation need not get anywhere near that dire before things get bad enough economically that a lot of people die — always the poor. The kindling for such earth-shattering economic ramifications is already laid bare, and once lit, then things are actually far harder to contain or predict. And, of course, we do have that guy again.
So much could go so wrong that one might otherwise think that even Trump would write it off, preferring to simply make another Saudi deal to make up the money (now that is a place where real bombs get tossed around). But with Greenland, one gets the sense that, to Trump, there's even more on the line than money. It is a vanity project. He won't let the place go. He wants that Golden Dome (probably thinking it's named after his head), definitely wanting the whole place renamed after him.
Vanity projects have sent history reeling before.
If there was ever a point in history where just so much could go wrong so quickly, so many AI unknowns, with so many dangerous leaders roaming the globe, never with scarier weapons, a point that needed someone to yell out "everyone just cool off," it would be now.
Send Dr. Phil to Saudi instead to report on yachting through the Straight, telling Iran to "get real." Now that would probably be exciting television. He likely won't succeed in going to Greenland to tell everyone to "chill"... It's likely not in the script.
Jason Miciak is a Raw Story Columnist, former editor at Occupy Democrats, author, political consultant, attorney, and single parent, girldad. Please follow on Bluesky, and he can be reached at jasonmiciak@gmail.com