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Comment by r00fus | Hacker News Reader

For those who (like me) were bewildered by the claptrap coming out of Trumps mouth regarding 51st state and "owning Greenland", I listened to a podcast that made the case that:

a) since China has essentially supplanted the WorldBank/IMF in providing loans to a lot of the "global south" specifically Africa

b) and since the US Empire essentially needs to keep growing in order to maintain solvent

c) and Russia/China are really bullish on the Northern sea routes - they have icebreakers all ready to open channels in an already weakened polar ice

Suddenly Canada and Greenland have outsized geopolitical importance as those might become trade hubs in a climate changed world.

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Or, easily aggrieved, petulant chaos monkey with a penchant for bullying flings poo because...reasons.

That seems to correlate better with observational evidence.

That sounds like sanewashing Trump. Just consider this: if Greenland has a such a strategic importance to the US, all the US had to do is to ask Denmark nicely to house a dozen more US military bases there, and Denmark (pre-Trump) would've been happy to follow along.

All Trump did was to make sure that Greenland will not see another US base in the near future. Which would, when you think about it, make Russia quite happy if Greenland is strategically important.

So basically don't look up and planing to mine a comet about to destroy the Earth.

There won't be any trade in a climate changed world.

Why not?

It's worth parsing out valid whys any approach could be applied, from the whys that drove the approach chosen.

For example, in my opinion Trump seems distinct in recent world politics. Instead of power being expressed through relationships, cultural exports and economics, Trump's notion of power is expressed through the property you have, how it looks, and that it is used or how it is used.

That example would be a theory that explains why the approach of "51st state" or "Rivera of the Middle East" is chosen.

(Though there is more you could theorize here: from ego, urgency, or trolling, to things like strategically preemptively folding on competing in a multipolar economic world and settling for simply western hemisphere sole influence and control)

Russia has been planning for utilizing arctic routes for a while now. there was at least one Russian oligarch (Igor Sechin of Rosneft) essentially championing global warming for that reason.

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