Yesterday morning, the following pinged my brain as soon as I heard it, specifically the bolded part (the rest is included for context). From NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday: Politics chat: Trump announces a Greenland deal, bans more media from the White House.
ELLIOTT: So a busy Friday in Washington, per usual. Let’s start with Trump’s announcement about a deal regarding Greenland. What does it mean?
FOWLER: We don’t actually know much about what it means because the full details of this agreement have not been released. And it hasn’t been approved yet by the people it needs to – the governments of Greenland and Denmark. Ultimately, we know it’s supposed to bolster an existing American military presence there as an effort to deter threats from Russia and China. And remember, there was this push by the administration to purchase or acquire Greenland, even posturing from Trump and the White House that they could seize the island by force from Denmark, a fellow NATO ally. But we do know Denmark will remain in control of its territory. And you could argue that this is a rare foreign policy win for President Trump at a time when the ongoing Iran war is deeply unpopular.
No, no, no!
You can only “argue” it is a win if you simultaneously take Truth Social posts seriously and you don’t know the basic history of US-Danish relations on this topic (which, fair enough, the reporter may not have known, but I would argue should have).
As best anyone can tell (because this White House tweets things out, rather than providing real documentation), we have agreed to pretty much what has been agreed to since 1951 (as I noted back in January).
Anne Applebaum has more: Greenland Forever.
The Trump administration has just announced a new “deal” with Greenland. It seems to be more or less the same deal that the U.S. has had with Greenland since 1951. In that year, Denmark, a founding member of NATO, agreed to give the US the right to build military bases on Greenland, in the context of the NATO treaty.
[…]
The BBC reports that the agreement states that hostile powers, meaning Russia and China, cannot build bases on Greenland, which the Danes would never have allowed anyway. It rules out major investments from those countries too, which weren’t a serious prospect either.
In other words, anything new in this “rare foreign policy win” is just making explicit what was clearly implicit in the existing framework. It is kind of like declaring that the Danes have agreed not to allow basing rights for Martians on Greenland.
I understand that it is an exhausting and difficult job to pay close attention to the Trump administration, and even get the impulse to fall into normal reporting patterns and language, but at this point we need more vigilence.
