Ben Taub

That trust cannot be rebuilt.

It's something you can only break once.

And it is broken.

At the same time, there is this kind of resilience in the society to influence operations, partly because they have such a unique language and such a small population that

So everyone really does know everyone else.

And so there is a kind of domestic resilience in that everyone can instantly identify what's going on around them.

But it's sad because there's also a great suspicion now and a great deal of alertness that, you know, they can't just regard American businessmen coming to invest in their businesses.

as pure interest in their future or in a joint venture.

They have to be on their guard and be suspicious in ways that are actually unhealthy, unhelpful, and might actually divert legitimate business interest in their country for mining or minerals or other activities altogether.

Yeah.

If there's one consolation that people can take from that, it was articulated to me quite well, I think, by a man named Jakob Carlsbo, who was a Danish former senior military intelligence officer who worked alongside the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq for 15 years.

And he was saying the absurdity of that scenario, a full scale invasion of Greenland, is in some ways kind of reassuring because he thinks that the rank and file of the US military, the generals, the intelligence officials are still very closely integrated with European allies.

There's daily operations and work together and they are close allies, even as the politics are what they are.

And his sort of solace that he takes in this scenario is that it's so absurd that it would definitely get leaked if there was a sort of plan for an amphibious assault.

An amphibious assault would take time.

You have to get ships in the vicinity of Nuuk to pull that off.

And so by that point, you know, this is the kind of thing that would be all over the New York Times and the press in the United States and forcing congressional hearings if this was really something that was on the table.

And so what he's more concerned about is this kind of quick and dirty takeover.

The 2 a.m.

version, as he put it, where a couple of planes with the flight plan that says Patufik Space Base suddenly just veer towards nuke.