NATO – Memphis Flyer

If you had Greenland being invaded by the United States on your 2025 bingo card, congratulations! You may be a winner. The Financial Times reported last Friday on a 45-minute phone call made by Donald Trump, the newly elected president of the U.S., to Mette Frederiksen, the premier of Denmark, a longtime NATO ally. The results weren’t encouraging.

According to the Financial Times, Frederiksen “emphasized” to Trump that the world’s largest island — a self-governing territory of the kingdom of Denmark — was not for sale. That apparently went about as well as you would expect, given the intellectual maturity of our current commander in chief.

The FT spoke to “five current and former senior European officials” who had been briefed on the call, each of whom said the conversation had gone badly. Trump was “aggressive and confrontational,” said one of the officials. “He was very firm. Before, it was hard to take it seriously. But I do think it is serious, and potentially very dangerous.”

You have to forgive the Danes for being a bit shocked. They have had dibs on Greenland for a long time — since 986 A.D., to be semi-exact. That’s 1,039 years, certainly long enough to have gotten a little attached to the place. Now, out of the blue, comes a call from the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth and his message is, basically, “Gimme your biggest piece of land.”

To quote The Don more precisely: “People really don’t even know if Denmark has any legal right to it, but if they do, they should give it up because we need it for national security.” Simple as that. Give it to us because we “need” it. It’s a geopolitical version of The Godfather. “It’d be a shame if something were to happen to your cute little kingdom, Mette. So hand over the island, capiche?” She’s lucky she wasn’t in the same room with him. No telling what he would have grabbed.

The truth is, “people” actually do know if Denmark has a right to Greenland. And the answer is yes, they do — and have for over a millenium. Equally true is the fact that the United States has absolutely no claim to the place. Zero. Yet Trump is on record as saying he wouldn’t rule out military action to seize Greenland, which is an act of war. Forcibly taking the territory of one of our NATO allies is such a bonkers concept that some pundits are writing that Trump is just posturing — playing three-dimensional chess — in order to distract us from his horrible cabinet appointees and batshit presidential orders by making these outlandish (Ha-ha!) feints at taking sovereign territory from our allies.

Nope. He’s not that clever. Yes. He really does appear to be that delusional.

According to the NATO treaty, an act of aggression toward one NATO member is seen as an attack on all members. So what Trump is dancing around by threatening Denmark is a circumstance that could put the U.S. in a military stare-down against Great Britain, France, Germany, and all the other NATO powers. Like World War II, only this time we’re the bad guys.

Trump seems to see Greenland, like Canada (who he’s pitched as a “51st state”), and the Panama Canal (“We’re taking it back.”), as nice additions to his North American Monopoly collection. Oh, and we’ve renamed the Gulf of Mexico because why not? (No word yet on whether my hometown of Mexico, Missouri, will become America, Missouri.)

If it weren’t so insane, all of this would be comedy gold, ripe material for a wacky Broadway farce: The Emperor Has No Clues. But imagine how terrifying all this is to the rest of the world. Imagine how we’d feel if China or Russia or some other nuclear power was suddenly being led by an erratic buffoon who was calling Australia and demanding they hand over New Zealand.

To most of the other civilized countries on planet Earth, the United States appears to have lost its freaking mind. How do you begin to comprehend a country that elects Barack Obama, then Donald Trump, then Joe Biden, and then Trump again? It’s not normal. None of this is normal. We’re all in Greenland now.

Speaking to Tennessee reporters from Brussels on Tuesday, 8th District congressman John Tanner, who was there as chairman of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization delegation from the U.S., commented on the obvious: Our NATO allies require — and on this occasion got — confirmation that our misadventures in Iraq and the lingering controversy about our involvement there will not hinder the American commitment to Afghanistan.

“One of the reasons for the trip was to reaffirm to our allies that from the congressional point of view the two are not the same. Afghanistan is a completely different situation,” Tanner said. Such reassurance was all the more necessary, he pointed out, because of wide international publicity given the congressional debate over President Bush’s “surge” strategy for pacifying Baghdad.

Tanner, who voted with the majority in the House of Representatives last week to oppose the surge, said his delegation’s talks with military and civilian representatives of NATO, beginning over the weekend, had buttressed his convictions. “We’ve tried two surges — actually three — and not lessened the violence.”

Noting an ominous amount of evidence that resurgent Taliban and al Qaeda forces are preparing a Tet-style spring offensive on Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan, Tanner made an effort to sound reassuring that NATO had the situation under control. He pointed out the obvious distinction between our go-it-alone policy in Iraq and the coordinated multinational effort in Afghanistan.

And, at a time when the Bush administration is making much of alleged provocations in Iraq by Iran, Tanner passed on a note of caution that pervaded his delegation’s talks in Brussels: “There is a feeling in NATO that we need a diplomatic approach to Iran, that we need more diplomatic and political effort with respect to Iran and Iraq.”

We can only hope that this wise counsel on our allies’ part has at least a modicum of impact on President Bush and other administration officials, and we are grateful to Representative Tanner and his delegation colleagues for helping to broker such views.

A Modest Suggestion

Face it: For better or for worse, Shelby County commissioner Henri Brooks has become a force in local government — and, increasingly, a focus of controversy. Most recently, she was the target of criticism for a taxpayer-paid trip to Washington to request a Justice Department investigation of procedures at Juvenile Court. Critics charged that her action was premature, in that she will return to Washington next month for a meeting of the National Association of Counties.

We are struck by a certain irony in Brooks’ actions. In her brief tenure on the commission, she has made a point of citing federal statutes and the authority of the national government to achieve a variety of ends commensurate with racial equality. We suggest that such commendable single-mindedness might oblige her to reconsider her persistent refusal to join her commission colleagues in their ritual Pledge of Allegiance to the emblem of the federal government — under which, after all, hundreds of thousands of young Americans, white and black, once died to abolish slavery and other instruments of the inequality she so rightly detests.