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The great ice sheets are more valuable to the world than the oil that lies beneath them
One of the classic storylines of science fiction is the emergence of a mutant child, with powers far beyond those of adults and no understanding of their use. The theme is carried to its the extreme in Jerome Bixby’s story It’s a Good Life, where the omnipotent mutant is a toddler with no grasp of consequences. With Donald Trump in the White House, the whole world can get a taste of this capricious blundering. That he speculated about buying Greenland is not in itself remarkable: a very large and strategically important island with reserves of valuable minerals is the kind of place in which all great powers will take an interest. As far back as 1946, President Truman offered war-ravaged Denmark a sum in gold equivalent to a billion of today’s dollars for the island – and was promptly rebuffed. Truman did, however, secure an airbase at Thule, which is important to this day for the missile defence systems of the US. He did not, as Mr Trump has done, cancel a visit to Denmark in a fit of pique. That, as the Swedish former prime minister Carl Bildt tweeted, was “well beyond the absurd: Trump [has made] a state visit to a long standing ally dependent on that country being ready to give up parts of its territory.”
Mr Truman, and all the presidents who followed him until 2016, understood that nations other than the US had their own pride and even their own sovereignty. Mr Trump combines a belief that everything ought to be for sale to him with an inability to understand what it might be worth to anyone else. That helps to explain his numerous bankruptcies and later failures as a diplomat. Continue reading...