Adam Tooze

And at that point, I think a kind of national mercantilism, Japan as the bad guy, merges with a social resentment, which is driven by the real stagnation, indeed deterioration of the standard of living of the American working class.

And you begin to get that hard hat coalition

these labor, populist, nationalist, protectionist forces gaining quite a lot of strength.

By the 90s, Buchanan and people like this can really begin to make a powerful case along these lines.

And he doesn't understand the economics, right?

Because if you were serious about Greenland's resources,

Anyone could have invested in Greenland.

America has a great treaty, 51, the wartime treaty renewed.

Those resources are not somehow lying fallow, hidden behind a protective wall of Danish anti-American nationalism that prevents good American businesses from... No, no, no.

It's just...

It's a weird, my personal favorite interpretation is it's the map of the game Risk.

I mean, it's Venezuela and Greenland are very large on that map.

I mean, depending on what you saw earlier in the day, you saw the opposite logic.

The common denominator is it's as though the Americans forced the Europeans to actually come up with a concerted investment strategy for Greenland.

Which they've never previously have and the Europeans are actually going to do, they're going to make the movie and he's made the trailer.

Well, they're going to make the sequel to the film that he never made and so they're going to end up doing some sort of weird actual European program.

Greenland, it's 56,000 people.

It's a territory the size of both Alaska and California put together.

It currently runs entirely on Danish public money.

So 25% of its GDP, half its 50% to 60% of its public budget is coming from Copenhagen and Danish taxpayers.