The Davos World Economic Forum, a yearly gathering of many of the world’s most influential people, is not usually the stage where leaders castigate each other in public. But this year is different, in large part because President Donald Trump insists that the U.S. take control of Greenland, long a Danish territory. In a speech yesterday in Davos, Canadian prime minister Mark Carney said the West could no longer depend on an American-led international order. “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition,” Carney said. So is America’s global hegemony coming undone in Davos? Celebrated author, historian, and Free Press contributor Niall Ferguson is on the scene, and today he joins Rafaela Siewert to talk out what all this means for the U.S., Europe, and the world at large.
Don’t miss the livestream conversation at 12:45 p.m. ET, available to paid subscribers only. Click here to tune in.
As a Danish-American who speaks Danish, has spent a lot of time in Denmark and still has close family there, I can assure you Denmark has never intended to protect or defend Greenland, which they have mostly viewed as a costly appendage that they cannot figure out what to do with. Danes are generally supportive of the US and have been decent allies, but they are a tiny country with a small population and gnat-sized military that is more for show than any functional use.
Twenty years ago I told my Danish cousin I would like my son (then age 7) to serve in the US military before committing to college. My cousin, who also had a 7-year old son, responded that she would never let her son or any child of hers serve in the military, because "Denmark is not worth dying for." Danes assume and expect that Americans WILL die for Denmark, because we're useful idiots and they are our intellectual superiors. Danes have an excellent opinion of themselves. No Dane will EVER die defending Greenland.
An option is that we just come to an agreement with Denmark that the US will do all the defense of Greenland, including with American lives, and send Denmark an annual bill for the cost. About $100+ billion per year. It's a fair trade for no Dane dying to defend a block of ice they haven't really wanted in at least 50 years. Danes have minimal investment in Greenland, their national identity is not tied to Greenland, and they've made Native "Greenlanders" welfare vassals who hate Danes & Denmark. Danes can't get rid of Greenland because the island's inhabitants are incapable of being a functional independent country. It would be like sending children to play in traffic.
Insert Trump into that dysfunctional relationship, and I expect a deal will be made. Denmark's ego has been bruised, but there is room for a mutually satisfactory deal.
The Status Quo of Davros,ECB, WTO have done a great job for themselves. The rise of the right worldwide is a result of an unelected elite who have done a bad job. I am not a Trump supporter,I forget who said this "sometimes the wrong person does the right things for wrong reason "