Greenland, Ukraine and all that stuff

Last Wednesday, the Danish foreign minister, Lars Lokke Rasmussen, summoned the top US diplomat in Copenhagen to his office to complain that the United States is running a covert operation in Greenland, a semi-autonomous part of the Danish kingdom.

- Gwynne Dyer

According to Denmark’s public broadcaster, the goal of the operation is to infiltrate Greenland’s society and promote the island’s secession from Denmark to the US. It’s straight out of the Russian playbook in 2014, when Vladimir Putin was subverting the Russian-speaking Donbas in the eastern part of Ukraine and funding a separatist movement.

There's nothing particularly original about getting some dissident or sold-out minority to call on a great power to intervene in order to provide political cover for what is really an invasion.

At peak arrogance, when the US was the sole superpower, it sent in the troops: Dominican Republic 1965, Grenada 1983, Libya 1986, Panama 1989, Afghanistan 2001, Iraq 2003. Now it needs a bit more cover, especially when invading the territory of a longstanding ally.

To be fair, the attempt to recruit a few “pro-American” Greenlanders to front the operation suggests that the Trump regime prefers a nonviolent conquest if at all possible. On the other hand, it also indicates that at least some of the planners in Washington have been instructed to start preparing the ground for an American takeover. (Canadians take note.)