The US' multibillionaire president is in the news again for yet another one of his characteristically ambitious plans, this time to explore the possibility of purchasing Greenland from Denmark during his upcoming trip to Copenhagen next month. The self-proclaimed "dealmaker" has floated the idea with his aides, being interested as he is in the resources and geostrategic location of the world's largest island. The US already operates the Thule Air Base on its northwestern coast, but Trump supposedly wants to obtain full control of the landmass in order to prevent any of his country's competitors from tapping into its enormous potential in the future.

Climate change has resulted in the progressive melting of the Arctic ice sheet that's in turn making the Northern Sea Route and Northwestern Passage commercially viable, and with Greenland situated right between them, it naturally becomes one of the world's most pivotal locations for controlling the future of East-West trade across the Arctic. It might be for this reason why China had previously shown interest in the island but was later prevented from developing its infrastructure there as a result of presumed American pressure. Even so, the US might not be able to keep China away from there forever.

It therefore makes sense from an American strategic perspective to make Greenland a formal part of the US itself in order to ensure without any doubt whatsoever that nobody else is ever able to extract its resources or use its location to control trans-Arctic trade between the hemispheres. Although Danish politicians are against Trump's idea, there really isn't anything that they could do to stop him if he really wants to take control of the world's largest island. Simply put, the US could easily occupy it, generously pay off its slightly more than 50,000 people, and establish concrete facts on the grounds regardless of international law.

In its defense, the US could point to the entirely separate situations of Crimea, Kashmir, Palestine, and the South China Sea to show that the so-called international community has come to accept "frozen conflicts" and de-facto recognize "Lines of Control" despite their lack of consensus about the legal validity of the moves that each participant made in them. Just as with those four examples, so too would the world come to (most likely begrudgingly) accept the US' military occupation and subsequent unilateral annexation of Greenland if Trump has the political will to go forward with this scenario.

He might not, however, since the costs could outweigh the benefits in that this move might fracture NATO even more than it already is and show beyond any doubt that the US regards its partners as vassals whose territory it'll seize at will if they don't accept an "offer that they shouldn't refuse". Having said that, Trump already seems to have mostly given up on the Western European members of the bloc other than France (which it cooperates closely with in Africa), so he might accept this as a necessary cost to ensure the US' regional supremacy. Should that be the case, then the US should also realize that it's sacrificing even more of its soft power for hard power.

Nevertheless, Trump doesn't seem to care much about the US' international reputation, especially among the "old guard" protecting the Liberal-Globalist "New World Order", so there's a chance that he might actually take pride in smashing their shibboleths to bits by outright seizing Greenland if Denmark doesn't want to sell it or at least allow the US to establish proxy control over the island instead in order to keep its chief Chinese competitor out. As is always the case with Trump, it's very difficult to predict what he'll do next, which not only keeps his adversaries on their toes, but also increasingly his allies too, as proven by this Greenlandic intrigue.