Owen Strickland’s life as mayor of a town of 568 people between Rocky Mount and Raleigh, North Carolina, is usually small-town politics. But this particular moment has been giving his political science degree – with a concentration in national security policy and international relations – a workout.
Donald Trump’s call to annex Greenland has roiled markets and flabbergasted half the world. But the president’s supporters in conservative communities – to the degree that this issue has their attention at all – are apt to accept his political argument as genuine.
Americans of either party are unlikely to know much about China’s “Belt and Road Initiative”, a series of investments in infrastructure – ports, roads and rail across continents – to connect Chinese trade to the world, Strickland said.
“They started about a decade ago,” Strickland said. “They are attempting to make inroads worldwide, up to and including Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, areas like that. That includes the Arctic, Greenland, Iceland and the extreme north of Canada. They are doing everything they can to reduce western influence.” (The Chinese investments in Greenland, many of which have been blocked are actually part of what it hopes to call the “Polar Silk Road”.)
Strickland is one of many conservatives who believe that Trump’s efforts to bring Greenland under American control are justified. “I may not necessarily agree with approaches,” Strickland said. “But our president is a negotiator, and he’s proven where his thought processes are, and he’s also proven that he’s meant to be believed. Everything with our president is a negotiation.”
Trump also alludes to the “Golden Dome” project, a system of defensive countermeasures to shield the United States from nuclear missiles, as a reason to take over Greenland. The technical elements for knocking down intercontinental ballistic missiles are both untested and classified. Accepting an assertion that the system would work as advertised and requires ownership of Greenland to function is an article of faith to supporters of Trump’s push for annexation.
But faith is not in short supply among the converted, said Jack Watts, a Christian author in Atlanta with a large conservative social media following.
“The confidence that people have – particularly conservative Christian people – is that Trump has our best interest at heart,” Watts said. “He’s playing chess while others are playing checkers, and what he does they agree with even if they don’t understand it.”
A deal is going to happen, Watts said, “and it’s going to happen very quickly”.
But for a transfer of sovereignty? Probably not, he added. “I think that it will be like Guantánamo Bay, which is part of Cuba, but we have a permanent lease on it. We have an impenetrable base in Guantánamo Bay and the same thing will happen, and it won’t happen near anybody that’s living any place.”
Voices to the farthest right of the political spectrum are leaning into the rhetoric of America as empire and Greenland as territory to conquer, taking a cue from White House senior adviser Stephen Miller’s comments earlier this month in which he said to news anchor Jake Tapper that “we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.”
Matt Walsh, host of the rightwing Daily Wire, said that taking over Greenland by force is “worth talking about”, adding: “It’s interesting to me when people today get so offended by the very notion that we would try to acquire land, that we would try to grow the empire, and in particular, that we would try to do it by force … that’s the only way that America exists in the first place.” (In Davos on Thursday Trump said he would not consider military force in his quest.)
Some conservative leaders have been critical of the Trump administration’s demands for Greenland, but more often challenge the provocative process than the underlying rationale.
Conservative commentator Erick Erickson described Trump’s fixation on Greenland as evidence of “insane impulse control issues”, arguing that the fixation on Greenland is a product of isolationism within his cabinet. But even Erickson believes the issue is valid.
“The crazy thing here is that I agree with Donald Trump about the strategic importance of Greenland,” Erickson wrote in his newsletter. “But this is counterproductive to accomplishing the security goal he wants. The Europeans cannot now be seen to be bullied into giving up 840,000 square miles of territory to an unhinged and obsessive eighty-year-old.”
In either case, the refrain that Trump’s bluster – from his tariff threats to his talk at Davos – is the art of the deal reverberates from conservative commentary on talk radio and YouTube through social media into the kitchen table talk of his voters.
Jerry Mobley, chairman of the Winston County Republican Party in Alabama, represents a rural conservative community 50 miles north-east of Birmingham. Alabama Republicans are focused more on political primaries than international politics. Hotly contested races for governor, US senator and statewide offices could upend Alabama politics this year. But the Greenland news has been hard to ignore.
“I’d hate to say it’s all in the wrong hands,” Mobley said of Greenland. “I think it’s a security point … I would just like Trump to make sure that we maintain security for us and all of our allies.”
Antonio Ruiz is a former Army Ranger in New Braunfels, Texas. He’s been to Greenland a couple of times, always on the way somewhere else. The prospect of a military confrontation with Nato is absurd to conservatives, even as the public discussion contemplates the possibility, he said.
“We laugh at it because there’s no way that, number one, it will get to that point,” Ruiz said. “I mean, it’s not like you guys haven’t seen how Trump operates. We understand he throws a smattering on the board, but his pinpoint objective is right there at the bottom. It’s bringing the people to the table to make a deal.”
Denying China a clear shipping route through the Arctic, and Chinese bases in the region, is a valid strategic objective, Ruiz said. The discussion within conservative military circles has been about how to achieve that objective.
“A majority of them are all believing that this is this is a strategic thing that needs to happen,” Ruiz said. “How we go about it is, all told, we want it diplomatic. I mean, we don’t want to have to be watching your backs and going through guerrilla operations to hold a military base installation in Greenland. It’s just not feasible.”
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