The Suicide Pact: what happens the moment we invade Greenland | Hacker News Reader

The Suicide Pact: what happens the moment we invade Greenland

substack.com

22 pointsEric_WVGG22 comments

Even if the invasion never happens who is going to trust the United States anyway?

What everyone is missing is the tactical situation. How does this invasion work when Greenland had less than 100 miles of paved roads? If anything, this would be an occupation of their very few (just nine or ten) mining locations. And those don't move, so you cannot hide them from aerial bombings.

It would be an odd sort of invasion as the US has permission to have troops in Greenland anyway. So I guess the troops would be there as usual but say "it's ours now"?

Maybe we can reduce it to a new Whisky war? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisky_War]

I don't have a very thorough understanding of the international money markets.

If Europe "dumps the dollar" - what does that mean in practice?

This article suggests that Europe could also call in US debt. Presumably the US could grandstand and not pay it. What are the consequences of that?

It is not possible. Europe's financial markets are the size of Europe's military.

Europe needs US financial markets (dollars) to finance its debt as all European bank together could fit into JP Morgan.

Switching away from SWIFT or Visa/Mastercard is also improbable as Europe lack tech skills to run such complex systems.

#8 + #9 by assets are combined bigger than JP Morgan (which is #5 on the list) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_banks]

SWIFT sits in Belgium, why would anyone in Europe need to switch away from it? Is the US able to handle their (international) financial transactions without access to SWIFT?

The financial market being significantly smaller, sure, but will it stay like that?

Quickly summing up total spending of the European countries on this list, the Europeans seem to spend about half of what the US spends on the military, quite a lot more than I expected. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_highest...]

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-09-02/does-e...

As for SWIFT it is US executive branch that decides who to take off the system

But that's a political thing, not a technical.

> SWIFT’s data centers, located in the United States, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, act as the network’s central hubs, processing and routing messages across the network. The centralization at these data centers is critical for swift (no pun intended) and secure data transmission. These data centers are designed with redundancy and failover capabilities, so if one center is disrupted, the others take over, ensuring no interruptions to the SWIFT service.

[https://ahrvo.substack.com/p/how-does-swift-really-work]

To me, this sounds like SWIFT would posibly be split into 3-parts, without any redundancy. A US and a EU datacenter handling "local" business, with Switzerland possibly be able to interact with either?

Pretty sure half of that stuff can’t happen. I’m as against it as the next guy but it serves nobody to make a bunch of unrealistic predictions.

This is one scenario. But, there is another. More right wing elements of Europe (Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Italy) will refuse to join the boycott and we will have both a loss of NATO unity and a loss of EU unity. Chaos!

It will make the USA look like a dictatorship and evil, and NATO nations will boycott the USA and USA products.

Trump might be the best thing happening to the EU in a long while after all. That is, if the EU gets its act together and fights this as one. Or he's the final nail in the coffin. Not sure I really want to find out.

The left confuse "Random shit demented Trump comes up with" with "Things that will happen".

Please, people, let's deal with the latter. That's crazy enough.

Trump putting tariffs on nations supporting Greenland is really committing to the joke.

What about "Invade" is hard for you to comprehend ?

I only learned 20 letters of the alphabet, guess which one I skipped!

I refer you to “Liberation” day.

Appeal to Trump Derangement Syndrome is the right's denial of how unstable and unethical he actually is. Time and time again it's been invoked and Trump's critics have been proven correct.

Even if Trump never actually invaded Greenland everything he's done so far has been completely insane anyway, in violation of ethical norms and international laws, and counter to the treaties in function. He's already crossed lines that shouldn't have been crossed ever.

No, some people on the left cannot talking about Trump, even when he is not pulling crazy shit, and we call that TDS and it has, for example, made CNN unwatchable.

That does not make Trump sane, it does not defend his actions, it is merely stating a fact.

It would be nice if facts mattered here.

I can’t tell if this is accidentally wrong or deliberately wrong for some unknown purpose. Either way it’s very wrong.

You are wrong, I might be proven wrong in the future.

To be clear, the article it is a comment on was entitled "The Suicide Pact: What Happens the Moment We Invade Greenland".

That has since been changed to "The Suicide Pact: What Happens the Moment We Touch Greenland".

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