Steve Forbes really thinks the U.S. will get Greenland


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“Here’s the way for President Trump to get Greenland!” Steve Forbes exclaims, before generic, cheery corporate music plays over the Forbes founder and editor-in-chief’s policy commentary video. He’s part of the latest in American news, policy and political commentators swarming in on the possibility of President-elect Donald Trump buying or taking Greenland (he has not ruled out using force to obtain the Arctic territory).

Forbes acknowledges that buying territory is out of style, but then immediately backtracks by saying, “here’s how we can pull it off now, and save money as well!” He goes on to list how this plan can be done: having Greenland get a referendum for independence, as soon as April (these words themselves near identical to those said during the Crimean annexation). “The next step is the big one. Have Greenland apply for statehood. Voila! The deed is done!” The sheer simplicity of Forbes’ genius should not go unnoticed, but then again, his magazine’s history of peddling con artists has perhaps tempered people’s positivity. Forbes cites the precedent of Texas: it was a part of Mexico that seceded into an independent nation, then joined the U.S. in 1845. Forbes considers that this would obviously make Denmark feel quite cheated, but says that at least Denmark would not be paying its annual subsidies to Greenland or a $1.5 billion package to beef up its defenses. “Trump gets the satisfaction of achieving the greatest territorial expansion in U.S. history […] Democrats would love granting statehood! The electorate is left-wing, meaning two more Senate seats for Democrats, as well as additional seats in the House of Representatives.”

The mask comes fully off without a break in tone or even syntax when he says this: “Greenlanders should quickly come to see the virtues of such a move […] certainly the new state would do very well from massive mineral investment from the rest of the U.S. Ecotourism would boom. Unemployment, which is high, will fall.” Forbes ignores the general irony that most ecotourists tend to visit mining areas only after they run slower or dry up. He adds that the low population of Greenland would not be a major detrimental factor, this time by referencing Nevada in 1864, when Congress admitted it into the Union when it had a population of 40,000; Greenland has 56,000 people.

“Statehood for Greenland? Let’s get it done!” Forbes declares at the end, as if this highly optimistic geopolitical violation of the brother European nation of Denmark, and for some of Greenland itself, was nothing more than a cheerful pitch on changing an office layout.

Personally, I did replay the video multiple times to see if an Onion or Babylon Bee logo would appear somewhere, but apparently that wasn’t the case. Forbes has chosen to align himself (and by extension, his company) with the new talk from Trump and his base with a rationalized pitch on how to, essentially, invade a European nation for the explicit gain of pillaging its resources. This is ironic of course, given how a popular platform among the disaffected voter base who went to the Republican party in 2024 was “no more wars!” The line of thinking Forbes presents is asinine when you consider that deeper negotiations with Denmark and Greenland could have simply happened for American mining rights and other business investments. Not only that, but the U.S. already has several bases in Greenland, notably a Space Force one at Pituffik, and is geographically reinforced by Canada and the U.S. as well. Likely the admission of Greenland as a state would see a rush of Americans, such as miners, investors and dare I say settlers that may simply outnumber the locals to a point where their culture will be subsumed entirely into a mass of McDonald’s.

Forbes’ words sound less like an American policy watcher and businessman commenting on facilitating the freedom of a nation and more like the ramblings of 1800s-era Manifest Destiny men such as James Polk with a tinge of Hitler-esque “Lebensraum” thrown in; albeit it will be more of a “Bergbauraum,” with room for the mining concessions for those sweet rare earth elements — which, of course, could have been negotiated in a more productive fashion instead of all this possible invasion talk.

We will see what plays out in the coming months and years; whether this is simply posturing, or something more genuine. What can be said, however, is that big media’s repeating of 2002-2003 certainly hasn’t gone away and unfortunately now seems to be applying not just to unfriendly Middle Eastern states, but neighbors on our own continent and friends in Europe.