John Wall (11:31)
Alright, first up, let's start with what the right is saying. The right is mixed on Trump's push to acquire Greenland, with many saying he is using overly aggressive tactics to pursue a worthy goal. Some say the military and economic threats are ill advised. Others question the utility of NATO as an ongoing alliance. In the Daily Signal, Jarrett Stepman argued Europe needs to calm down about Greenland. Is the United States about to invade Greenland? If you've followed this issue from the beginning and have tried to accurately understand how the president operates, then you should conclude that this brouhaha is all about negotiating, stepman said. I'd hazard to guess Trump's reason for potentially using the military is because he virtually always says as much. It is an option, one that he would almost certainly never take. What he wants is to create maximum urgency on the part of a negotiating partner to get a deal done. Greenland is important for the interests of the American people as far as security, economics and even, to a certain extent, national pride. Bringing the island territory fully into the American orbit is not just a pointless media stunt. It has real implications for US Strategy vis a vis major competitors like Russia and China, countries that have a keen desire to have access to and control of the Arctic, stepman wrote. Given how much pressure Trump is globally putting on US Rivals, it makes sense that he's essentially playing hardball to ensure that Greenland remains and becomes an even more integral part of US national security. The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote about the Greenland War of 2026 There are good reasons for Washington to care about Greenland, including the island's strategic position and untapped reserves of Rare Earth Minerals. Mr. Trump isn't the first president to suggest buying it outright, and the US Already has a high degree of access to the island, and Denmark is willing to negotiate more, the board said. Mr. Trump is taking reckless risks with the NATO alliance that advances U.S. interests in the Arctic. If he doesn't believe us, he can look up Norway, Sweden and Finland in an atlas. The latter two joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization recently and already are discovering that with Mr. Trump, no good strategic deed goes unpunished. The economics are nonsensical, too. All of the countries on his tariff list, except for the United Kingdom, are members of the European Union with a common trade policy. This means any tariff he imposes on those countries will have to extend their entire 27 member bloc. So much for the trade deals Mr. Trump negotiated to great fanfare last year with the EU and the UK, the board wrote. The message to these countries is that no deal with Mr. Trump can be trusted because he'll blow it up if he feels it serves his larger political purposes. In racket news, Matt Taibbi asked, if NATO dies, do we really have to mourn? NATO is history's most expensive self licking. Ice cream cone proponents spent much of the last three decades taking bold, often destructive policy actions to convince taxpayers of member nations the alliance needs existing We've redrawn the world map multiple times and even invented new forms of war just to give it something to do, taibbi said. Now we're told that the issue with Trump possibly occupying Greenland isn't that it might be crazy or bad for Greenland, but that it might hurt the Transatlantic Security Alliance. NATO's mission was reimagined again and again over the years, notably after 9 11, when Article 5 of the NATO treaty obligating member nations to fight was invoked for the first time. Then again in 2010, when we learned that NATO wasn't just a military alliance but a political community, NATO's mission grew so unwieldy that by the time Trump arrived, it was nearly impossible to say what it was, taibbi wrote. If some other president tried to militarily occupy the Danes territory in a more de facto than de jure fashion, with less of a goodfellas vibe, Europe might have shrugged, as it did in a thousand other incidents. But it's Trump. Which means NATO may indeed finally crack and sink. Do we have to mo. Alright, that is it for what the right is saying. Which brings us to what the left is saying. Many on the left condemn Trump's disregard for alliances and say Europe should fight back. Others say Europe cannot win a power struggle with the US Others suggest tech elites are driving Trump's Greenland push. In Bloomberg, Lionel Laurent argued Europe has the weapons for Trump's Greenland tariff war. Trump's contemptuous delight in beating up U.S. allies was given free rein over the weekend as he raised the ante over the Arctic territory. It's time for Europe to fight tariff fire with fire, laurent said. The cost of such extra tariffs would be high. Bloomberg economics estimates they could cut these countries US exports by up to 50%. Germany, Sweden and Denmark look especially vulnerable. But another timid acquiescence from the Europeans would be disastrous. This is textbook economic bullying, driven by a leader who recently said the only limitation on his global power was his own mind. The starting point is bolstering the European Parliament's threat to hold back approval of last year's trade agreement, which was hailed by Trump's administration as providing unprecedented levels of market access for American products. Laurent said there should be an urgent push too, to unbox the EU's bazooka for the fight ahead. The bloc's anti coercion instrument is explicitly designed to defend member states put under tariff pressure by foreign powers. That is a much bigger stick than the usual clobbering of more niche US Companies such as Harley Davidson Motorcycles with higher import taxes. Also in Bloomberg, Mark Champion said Europe can't afford a throwdown over Greenland. I sympathize with the European outrage over Donald Trump's naked attempt to bully Denmark, a particularly loyal NATO ally, into handing over Greenland. But as some leaders call for using the European Union's so called bazooka of countermeasures to launch a full blown trade war with the US I'd suggest they game out the consequences before pulling the trigger. Champion route if Trump is ignoring Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's advice never to start a fight that won't gain you much in victory, then Europe risks ignoring even wiser counsel from the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu. Don't start a battle you can't win. Would Poland and the Baltic states truly be willing to endanger their US Security umbrella over Greenland? Territorial sovereignty is a principle that they very much embrace, but it's a principle. The threat of losing US protection against Russia is for them existential, champion said. Would they or most other European countries really risk giving Trump an excuse to withdraw intelligence sharing and US Sales of Patriot air defense missiles to Kyiv? With the potential for collaps Ukrainian lines that would follow. Likewise, would Italy really support the launch of a trade war with Washington when it isn't among the eight nations Trump has threatened with tariffs? In Jacobin, Lois partially wrote about the tech billionaires behind Trump's Greenland push. Though the island is not for sale, the president emphasized Greenland's importance to US national security. Left unspoken, a US Takeover could weaken the country's mining laws and ban on private property, aiding Trump's donors plans to profit from the island's mineral deposits and build a libertarian techno city, partially said. As the country's glaciers recede, it's also facing sweeping climate driven transformations, threatening traditional industries like fishing and hunting and exposing valuable mineral resources. These shifts have prompted interest from powerful players associated with Trump. Tech moguls in the front row of his inauguration like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are also investors in a startup aiming to mine western Greenland for materials crucial to the artificial intelligence boom. The push for control of the Arctic country comes as deep pocketed investors like Andreessen have been drawn to startups hoping to build experimental enclaves sold by the promise of freedom from the constraints of government, partially wrote. Proposals for these crypto states have sprung up in Honduras, Nigeria, the Marshall Islands and Panama, the latter of which Trump has also recently proposed taking over by military force. The sales pitch includes replacing taxes and regulations with cryptocurrency and blockchain. These utopian dreams have led to Greenland. Alright, let's head over to Isaac for his take.
