My entire life I’ve been hearing that America is done, we’re finished like the end of the Roman Empire. This past year has been the first time since maybe 1953 that America reversed its decline and we are going to keep stacking wins at a faster and faster rate.
the year we chose to lose the Korean War. Truman fired/demoted Douglas MacArthur (in 1951) after he suggested dropping nukes to win the war.
would a declining power do THIS?!"
gets in a pointless disastrous war of choice due to ego of dying senile ruler
I genuinely do not believe that we could take Greenland, even if the only thing Denmark has for us is strong words. Blowing things up overseas is an entirely different thing from establishing and maintaining a permanent imperial presence, which is itself entirely different to the status quo of letting dollar hegemony do that for us. The special forces of the US is a bunch of jackbooted thugs who are good at murder and kidnapping, which is why they were able to get Maduro, but that won’t help them take control of Greenland from a presumably overwhelmingly hostile population. It would be like the Winter War, only extremely dumb.
The population of Greenland is only about 50k. The US has murdered an order of magnitude more people in the Iraq war alone. I believe they could easily commit a genocide there to take it, if they are depraved enough.
They definitely are
Going the violent route would also allow them to remove potential indigenous opposition to large scale mining operations.
From what I read on Politico, this is largely a reason why the EU hasn’t invested more into mining Greenland’s rare earth minerals. I doubt the US would respect the local population in the same manner.
The local population should consider researching booby traps; make invader a climate
I don’t know that the population of Greenland is large or militant enough to be a significant factor. I reckon it’d be more of a Falkland Islands type extremely dumb exercise.
Greenland doesn’t have a big enough population to stop the USA from seizing it. They would no doubt inflict extremely disproportionate losses if they chose to fight back, but 50k people are not stopping the US military, more’s the pity.
Edit: also Finland lost the winter war.
There’s only 50k people living on Greenland, so there’s not enough to do some massive attrition-style thing. Or thats the popular notion here anyway, but I’ve never been a guerrilla and nothing is set in stone. Maybe there’s an inuit Ho Chi Minh out there who will revolutionize warfare for a modern age.
I do agree Greenland will be more cumbersome to take than most users here seem to think. It’s big and cold and logistics are a thing. In practicality I think that would result in some tier 1 operators freezing to death, some grunts murdering a polar bear in self defense and then freezing to death and us getting a few good memes out of it.
Wouldn’t heat detecting equipment be perfect for finding freedom fighters hidden in all that snow? There also isn’t the protective canopy the NVA and VC had in Vietnam
Regardless I do hope for the troops to turn into Popsicles and polar bear chow
There’s probably ways to mask yourself, but yeah. I don’t really think insurgency would work.
There will definitely be popsicles. People who don’t interact with cold often underestimate it. They do dumb stuff, fall in a ravine and die. Then again I’m not a US army vet so what do I know?
Granted, the US military can defeat Greenland’s population, but then what? What happens when we start trying to charge greenlanders taxes? When we try to install a government that the people overwhelmingly reject? Do we just turn up the oppression infinitely until they comply? Treat Greenland like the Israelis treat Gaza? I don’t think we have the state capacity or political will to do that, and in any event such a project would require cross party and inter-generational coordination that just feels impossible in the current moment.