GEOPOLITICAL LOGIC BEHIND CREEP1'S SPOKEN MADNESS ON

Here are a couple of basic geo-economic facts.

1 Contrary to the ways in which most liberal media talks about it, Greenland is not quite "part of Denmark" but a Danish post-colony dependency. Its relative separation is recognized by the Danish state as well, as, since 1978, when it ceased to be a colony, Greenland has had a limited arrangement of self-determination. In practice, national sovereignty of a colonial power over the dependency is considerably different from the sovereignty of a "mainland" territory (which is, in turn, of course, also limited in practice by a host of other considerations, e.g., by peaceful arrangements, as in the suprastate entity commonly called the EU, which in fact represents a "sharing and pooling" of the member states' sovereignties, down to various threats and actual uses of political violence, including war, etc.) In short, the best way to summarize the question of sovereignty is this: "it's complicated." That of course is not a blanket justification for seizure of land, it has never been. But it needs to be said that the idea of snatching a dependency from another colonial power is not exactly un-heard-of in the history of the capitalist colonial world-system.


2 The US already has a military presence in Greenland and the current official US policy is that there are no plans to increase it. Coincidentally, the US troops serving at a base on Greenland have just started undergoing "diversity training." HOWEVER: Due primarily to global warming and the attendant, simpler, easier availability of northern Eurasian ports and shipping routes to cargo vessels (which provide often vastly shorter, i.e., less costly routes between long-distance trading partners, especially east Asia and northern Eurasia on the one hand and western Europe and north America on the other), the Arctic is fast becoming a venue of maritime trade--with the gigantic island of Greenland smack in the middle of the various emerging major shipping channels. Significantly, the Arctic routes, once fully developed, will allow avoidance of some geopolitical-military chokepoints (more on those below).

source: https://www.thearcticinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Arctic-Shipping-Routes-Map-legend-1.png 

3 The US federal government has indeed "built" the Panama Canal--it was a gigantic off-shore, infrastructural government subsidy to business, primarily, although not exclusively, to US business--but the story is slightly more complicated. For,

• canal construction was begun by the French state in the late 19th century (accidents and disesase killed approximately 20.000 workers in the process. "An estimated three-quarters of the French engineers who joined Lesseps in Panama died within three months of arriving." (ibid.) Most workers who built the Canal were from the Caribbean.)
• Panama gained independence in 1903
• the US acquired the canal-under-construction from the French in 1904 and undertook to complete the construction immediately, again mainly with imported labor from the Caribbean islands (Official records put the number of workers who died in the completion of the project at 5609.)
• the US Army Corps of Engineers finished construction of the canal in 1914
• 1977: the Torrijos-Carter agreement to return the canal to Panama was signed.
• Under the 1979 Neutrality Treaty the United States and Panama guarantee the permanent neutrality of the canal, with nondiscriminatory tolls and access for all nations. No nation other than Panama may operate the canal or maintain military installations within Panamanian territory 
• 1999: Panama finally has control over the canal . Panama is what the World Bank considers "a middle-income country," with 5-10% of the GDP coming from the canal.

For a succinct but detailed summary of the history and current situation of Panama, click here. 

source: https://assets.blog.siemens.com/uploads/2023/09/Panama-Canal.png 

In addition to other sea narrows like the Suez Canal, the Horn of Africa, the Straits of Melaka, and Hormuz, Panama is a potential chokehold on global maritime container trade. Also significant, especially for the EU and Russia, are the narrows of Gibraltar, the Bosphorus and the Danish Straits.

Considering those points, I can't exclude the possibility that, while Creep1 is, clearly, a creep, a common criminal, a sex offender, and he is acting / talking with a degree of unpredictability that is quite uncommon in the highly scripted world of "high politics" among major powers, there is a certain "old-fashioned, 19th-century," global-imperialist "reason" to his madness. I would be astonished if there had not been a coherent, extreme-right global geo-strategic think-tank that feeds material to his pronouncements.

GEOPOLITICAL LOGIC BEHIND CREEP1'S SPOKEN MADNESS OFF