Opinion: Trump, Greenland, battleships, and surrounding Canada on 3 sides — Won’t work

Trump has repeatedly threatened to take over Greenland – Copyright AFP/File Juliette PAVY

On the subject of defense, Trump excels himself – At being Trump. All the proposals are melodramatic, grandiose, obsolete, and incredibly expensive. If you think what he did to the East Wing with a totally unnecessary ballroom was bad, this is far worse although equally obscene.

Let’s start with Greenland. The idea that the US needs Greenland for “national security” is absurd. In the 1950s, the US had a forward presence in Greenland until they decided that they didn’t need it even back then. Modern combat systems aren’t geo-dependent. Nor are strike capabilities. The US Navy doesn’t need to freeze its tail off to manage its role in the North Atlantic, either.

Administering a hot dog stand in Greenland, let alone a full-scale defense presence, would be astronomically expensive and administratively impossibly cumbersome. A US base in Greenland would become an automatic target with massive demands for core-level security for the base. Exactly how useful a Greenland base right next to a totally antagonized Canada and Europe can be is also highly debatable.

Battleships, you say? No. The general consensus is that major units are “drone bait” and instant high priority targets and will definitely be attacked. The Black Sea fleet would be safer. These things would need a fleet of chaperones to get out of New York harbor.

This rosy view also overlooks the fact that the US Navy is having a hard time managing its current construction and modernization. Creating a massive new unit with untold numbers of new systems, components, and maintenance requirements is suicidal.  Add nuclear systems, and it’s much worse.

The US Navy now has any number of good, irrefutable reasons and excuses to “go lean”, reduce the logistics burden, and modernize for survivable modern combat needs. This idea is the exact opposite. Big money for contractors, absolutely no use for anyone else, is the verdict.

It’s a costly glass jaw you can bring with you when getting into the ring with Muhammad Ali.

There’s no depth of strategic thinking or any semblance of understanding of tactical realities. The science, materials, and tech are there to deliver real strategic and tactical advantages without committing to idiotic platforms. An unmanned go-cart with a few Harpoon missiles makes more sense than these anything but viable monstrosities.

It’s fairly easy to argue that these proposals are the diametric opposite of any practical US military policy. The entire US military could be diverted from anything remotely practical by these “digressions into futility,” and so could the defense budget for decades to come.

Now we get to Canada. A US-owned Greenland puts US sovereign territory on three sides of Canada. The Canadians won’t like it, and the Danes and Greenlanders definitely already don’t.

Canada couldn’t possibly have made it clearer that after the “51^st state” debacle, that all bets are off. Trump has managed to thoroughly antagonize America’s longstanding ally in two words. Not two centuries. If the past was Manifest Destiny, this is Manifest Dumbness.

America’s allies have been patronized and insulted to the point of total refusal to cooperate. America’s credibility is tanking. The Five Eyes intelligence operation works better when one of them isn’t hallucinating non-existent threats all the time. NATO has basically written off US involvement in anything, at least for now.

Deploying major fleet units to Venezuela hardly helps. A non-threat that could easily be managed by the Coast Guard suddenly needs the Navy? Nobody believes that for a second. Wasting expensive ammo on barely credible threats while probably violating maritime law is simply ludicrous.

Forget it. All of it.

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