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Ramble On: The Perils of Invading Greenland

It would be catastrophically, existentially stupid.

Greg Olear Jan 16

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Here is the transcript, edited for clarity:

Good morning. It is Friday, January the 16th, five o’clock in the morning—the sun not yet risen here in upstate New York. I wanna talk to you today about Greenland.

I went on The Five 8 1/2 on Wednesday—Lisa Graves and Nadine Smith, back from their break. Great show. If you missed it, we’ll put the link here. But I went on to talk about Greenland and ranted a little bit. So thanks to them for letting me rant.

But I want to talk about Greenland a little more in depth, because I feel like it’s of critical importance. And I don’t think the level of importance that it is, is breaking through, what with all the other horrible stuff that’s happening.

I mean, obviously, ICE is occupying Minneapolis right now. It is a Gestapo. Gestapo is just the German word, a truncation of the German words for secret state police. That’s what these people are. They are Trump’s secret police. And they’re not there to enforce the law. They’re not there to do anything lawful. They’re there to terrorize us. They’re there to terrorize us. And Trump wants us to respond violently so that he can declare the Insurrection Act, as he’s already said he is itching to do.

I don’t think he’ll do that until closer to the election, which he also said he didn’t feel like having. But don’t worry, Karoline Leavitt said it was a joke. So I’m sure Trump joking about no elections is probably just a joke, like she said.

Also Venezuela—which even quote-unquote “normal people” are talking about. Down in Florida, where I was last week, it was, you know, the topic of conversation, what’s going on with Venezuela, what’s going on with the oil. Everyone’s suddenly an expert in heavy oil.

The oil in Venezuela is apparently super heavy, so people don’t really want anything to do with it. So it’s like Trump, in other words, right?

Anyway, I want to talk about Greenland, because I feel like it’s getting lost in the shuffle a little bit. And the implications of Trump sending troops to Greenland are catastrophic. It’s impossible to overstate how catastrophic this is. It would be existentially stupid for us to do this.

It would be such a gift to Putin. As I said on the show, Trump could fly to the Kremlin, get down on his knees, and lick Putin’s boots, and it still wouldn’t be an act of subservience as gratifying to Putin as the United States invading Greenland.

But first, why aren’t people talking about it in the proper way? Once again, we blame the media. I feel like the media is bending over backwards trying to present Trump as this sort of statesman, and that he has some sort of policy, and that he’s trying to impose this very well-thought-out policy on the Western hemisphere or whatever the fuck. He isn’t. He’s a thief. That’s all he is. He’s a mobster, he’s a thief, and he’s a Kremlin asset. He’s all of those things.

And if you look at what he’s doing in those terms, everything makes sense. That’s the only way that it makes sense. He’s not George Washington. He’s not FDR. He’s not Eisenhower. He’s not even Reagan or Nixon. He’s just a common thief. That’s what he is.

And I want to read a post by David Roberts, who runs a Substack called Volts, talking about green energy and stuff like that. He has an interesting account on Substack. And I feel like he expressed this really well. He says:

And I feel like that really sums it up for me—what I’ve been trying to express what the media is doing. It’s like, that’s what it is. You look at Trump’s cabinet, it’s just assholes everywhere you look—just cruel, sadistic, weird assholes…and Trump falling asleep.

I was talking to my wife about this last night. She made a good point where, you know when Trump is in his in his Oval Office, he’s like a little child, right? He’s surrounded by all these people. He’s sitting and they’re all standing around him. And he feels safe. He feels safe in his little bubble, his little cocoon. And then he feels so safe that [voice I use to talk to my cat] he go to sleep. He go to sleep like a little baby.

So that’s what we’re dealing with. An old man who falls asleep like he’s a little child, a bunch of rapacious, cruel assholes, and a media bending over backwards to pretend that that’s not the case. That’s what we’re dealing with.

But the reality in Greenland is something much, much worse. I want to show you a video made by Chris Murphy, Senator Chris Murphy. I give the Dems a lot of shit. When I give the Dems shit, I’m really talking about Democratic leadership, talking about Schumer—who again yesterday just…I don’t know who this guy is or what. I don’t even know who he’s working for at this point. Not the people of New York, not the people of the United States. He’s just so out of touch.

But I want to share what Chris Murphy said because I feel like this is really important to look at. So let’s take a look at this.

[MURPHY]

So what you were essentially talking about here is the United States going to war with NATO—the United States going to war with Europe.

I can’t believe that I’m gonna talk to you about the consequences of invading Greenland. But I am because you have to take Trump seriously now. Nobody thought that we were gonna be invading Venezuela or running their country a few months ago, and now we are.

So he says he wants Greenland. He says he’s keeping the military option on the table. So let’s just talk about what that means. Here’s what you need to know…Greenland is part of Denmark. Denmark is a NATO country, and the NATO treaty says that if any member is attacked in all the other members have to come to their defense.

So you’re essentially talking about the United States going to war with NATO—the United States going to war with Europe—the US and France being at war with each other over Greenland. Like, that is what we’re talking about here.

Every NATO country would have to make a decision whether they were going to rush troops to Greenland to fight America…that’s where we’re at right now: the President of the United States entertaining an attempt to take Greenland by military force, which by definition might end up putting the United States in a shooting war with France.

So that’s Senator Murphy. Again, going to war with NATO, like France and Germany and England and Canada. These countries that are our allies, in other words—our allies.

But I want to read something that Malcolm Nance wrote on Twitter. Malcolm Nance, intelligence guy, fought as a volunteer in Ukraine, has been on Trump/Russia for longer than I have, has books about it. Super smart guy. So this is what he has to say. He’s responding on Twitter to somebody who is sort of rah rah about the idea of taking Greenland:

CONSEQUENCES FOR DUMBASSES: You are an F'ing idiot. If we invade Greenland we go to war with 31 nations. NATO stays together but without us. Its HQ is in Brussels, not the Pentagon. Our global reach across the Atlantic will end with our closest refueling base in Israel or Egypt. 100,000 American soldiers will be forced to board civil airliners and sent home or be taken as POWs/Detainee sWITHOUT WEAPONS OR EQUIPMENT. Canada will close its airspace and sea space. US Ballistic Missile Defense at Pettufik and Fylingdales ENDS, which means we see nothing except what space sensors can see. US Intelligence is reduced to Fort Meade, Ft Gordon and Colorado Springs and Hawaii. CIA spies will be rolled up by their former friends in HOURS. NO ONE WILL SHARE ANYTHING WITH US. ALL GLOBAL SHIPPING WILL BE CLOSED TO US. Denmark operates the largest shipping company in the world. SIX OUT OF TEN global shipping companies are in Europe ... Worlds Biggest container ships? DENMARK!
Australia, NZ, Canada are Commonwealth so they will cut ties with us or be neutral too.

PS Denmark & locals tun all life support and generators at Pittufik and Canada resupplies it ... all 150 US Spece force personnel would become POWs to guys on sleds. FYI They have troops there now and 35,000 Caribou hunting rifles.
FYI France and UK have nukes. Hundreds of them so you cannot intimidate them with that.
Oh and they collapse the US economy by sanctioning us and selling off 2.3 Trillion in US treasuries simultaneously. Also no Botox, Ozempic or insulin. Its made in Denmark.
Ya fucking dope.

And as somebody else said, so are Legos.

So those are the ramifications—and that’s just off the top of his head. There’s probably other unforeseen things. It would be catastrophically bad.

There is no pretext for doing this. There’s no pretext. Now we can sit here and say that Trump doesn’t have the legal right to go get Maduro. He doesn’t, but even that has some historical precedent for us with Noriega.

Hitler had a better justification for invading Poland than Trump would have taking Greenland. Think about that for a second, okay? At least Hitler had a reason. It was a lie, but it was an attempt at justification. This is just plunder. There’s no reason. It’s pure plunder.

And for who? Ronald Lauder, who’s been mixed up in this Kremlin stuff for decades. In fact, it was at his party where Trump first met the the Russian ambassador and started this whole Moscow, Trump/Russia thing years ago. This nepo baby, whose mother was the perfume lady. We’re gonna destroy the entire United States for that fucking guy?

JD Vance is salivating about it. He doesn’t care. He’s just a lapdog for Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Because there’s some sort of weird rare earth mineral that they need to do their little AI creepy shit. For that, we’re gonna destroy everything. Everything. Okay? For Nepo Baby Perfume Boy, who’s a little bit too close to the Kremlin for my liking. And for two other rich assholes who are basically Sauron. And those two are, you know, white supremacist Nazis.

Does Trump think that Greenland’s bigger than it is? Does he think there’s gonna be an ice shortage and we can’t just make ice? Everything’s about ice these days, right?

So one more thing that I wanna talk about with Greenland, though. Murphy brought this up, and Nance brought it up. We’re gonna be at war with 31 other countries. We’re also gonna be at war with ourselves.

It is point blank illegal to invade Greenland. There’s no military reason to do so. The consequences, as we discussed, are dire—dire, like beyond five alarm fire. It’s just unthinkably awful what would happen. So if any military person goes into Greenland, that’s obeying an illegal order. And in fact, the military—reporting shows that the military has resisted so far even planning this, which is great news for us.

But if Trump can find some members of the military to go do this—and maybe he will; he found people to, you know, shoot fishermen in boats in Venezuela for fun—then it really triggers something else. Because we’re also part of NATO.

It’s illegal for the US military to invade Greenland. But what is lawful is for us to abide by the fucking North Atlantic Treaty. So the rest of the military has the legal obligation to defend Greenland from the invading force—even if the invading force is American.

Does that make sense? I don’t know what that’s going to look like, but it seems like a recipe for civil war. Because I’ll tell you right now, I ain’t going to war with Europe. I would rather New York secede from the Union and tell these people to go fuck themselves than go to war with our allies. And I think I’m not alone in feeling that way. And if lots of military people agree that, you know, abiding by a lawful treaty outweighs a patently illegal invasion that would have catastrophic impact on the United States and probably end it, then the country is going to fracture. It just is.

Which, again, is what Putin wants. And that’s what I mean when I say Trump could go to the Kremlin, get on his knees and lick Putin’s boots, and it wouldn’t be more humiliating and more of a gift to Putin than this.

So one of the great points that Nadine Smith made on The Five 8 1/2 on Wednesday: after I went into my Greenland rant, she said, “Greenland is like the Archduke.” And I was like, “Wow, you’re right.”

Because that’s how World War I started. That was the trigger point—when Princip assassinated the Archduke and his wife in Sarajevo. And it was a little thing in the grand scheme of things, but it caused all these dominoes to fall and we wound up with the entire world at war.

That’s what would happen here. No doubt about it. There’s already troops in Greenland now. The Danes have sent troops. The Danes are the fucking Vikings! We don’t want to mess with these people! The Danes have sent troops. You know, France, the Canadians. Europe is not taking this sitting down.

The people of Greenland uniformly do not want us there. And if we think sending JD Vance somewhere to try to, you know, warm up, try to get them on our good side, then we’re really less in touch with reality than even I think.

Nobody wants us there. This is a terrible idea, and it will result in the end of the United States. That’s it.

I may be wrong. I may be wrong. I may be wrong about my fear of the elections not happening in November, which Trump has now openly joked about several times. I may be wrong. I may be chicken-littling here a little bit. But I don’t think so, because I’ve been right about everything so far.

And even if I’m wrong, it’s far better to err on the side of caution than not. We have to assume the elections will not happen and behave accordingly. And we have to do everything in our power to stop this Greenland madness—everything. It’s not sustainable, and it will destroy the United States, destroy our standing in the world, hurt everybody in ways that people can’t even imagine in terms of day-to-day life.

And it’s also just a shitty thing to do, which makes sense because, like Dave Roberts pointed out, Trump is shitty and he’s surrounded by shitty people. We’re a government of shitty Nazis. That’s what we’ve become. And it’s incumbent upon us to try to remove the shitty Nazis from power.

And I would like the Democrats to follow the lead of people like Chris Murphy and Ron Wyden and others and, you know, boot out Schumer and Jefferies. We need voices in there that actually understand the threat that we’re up against. And those two guys have no fucking idea. Or they do and they just—I don’t know, maybe they got promised a little piece of Greenland? You know, like Otis in Superman II. “Otisburg!”

My god, that’s where we’re at. We’re making we’re making parallels to Superman II, the film with General Zod.

And again, I don’t want to alarm everybody. I don’t think this is gonna happen. I think cooler heads will prevail here. But it’s definitely a possibility. And I want to make sure that everybody understands how dire it would be. More dire than anything.

So that’s all I’ve got for this week. It’s plenty. So stay safe out there. If you’re going to the protests, know your rights. Be careful with these ICE guys. They’re Gestapo, and they’re to hurt you. That’s what they’re there for. So be aware of that. Film everything, stream everything, document everything. Make sure people know where you are.

But keep protesting. Keep letting your voice be heard, because it’s working. It’s working. And despite of all of this horror around us, I still feel like—and maybe I’m being naïve—I still feel like we shall prevail.