Ben Taub

And so he told Trump that he would do some research and get back to him with options.

But actually, what followed was a kind of

As Fiona Hill, who was serving as the senior director for Europe and on the National Security Council, put it to me, it was all done in a slightly clandestine cloak and dagger way, where Bolton summoned her into his office, ashen faced and essentially said, look, Ron Lauder has told Trump that he needs to buy Greenland.

We've got to head this off before he announces this to everybody.

So it is absolutely true and important that the Arctic is becoming a really serious site of national security interest, not just for the United States, but for Russia, for China, for Norway, for all of the Arctic nations, or as China likes to call themselves, China.

somewhat questionably, a near Arctic nation.

And, you know, basically, this is a region that has not really been useful or traversable for any military or commercial purpose, except for Cold War era submarines going under the ice cap.

But as it melts, this opens up new waterways that are very strategically important to a lot of countries.

And during the Cold War, it was primarily viewed through the lens of the direct pathway for nuclear ballistic missiles to travel from Russia or from Soviet submarines in the far north.

Correct.

So the U.S.

essentially took over Greenland militarily during the Second World War.

It was at the request of the Danish consul in Washington, D.C.

at the time who was essentially acting alone in what he regarded were the interests of his country while the actual government in Copenhagen was under Nazi occupation.

And so he encouraged and essentially allowed the US to build military facilities in Greenland to defend those critical waterways and the northwest sort of coastal areas from Nazi incursion.

This was an incredibly important and valuable thing.

And then during the Cold War, the agreement between the United States and Denmark, which is in place since 1951, was that the US could stay here.

could continue to maintain its military presence and could expand it pretty much however it saw fit in coordination with the Danish and Greenlandic governments.

That's been true since the 50s.

It remains true today.