Seems to me this was always a crucial question. Would the Greenlanders actually fight? Really? Turns out there’s an answer.
A cathartic read, but it’s also good news. Deterrence is the only way with the thugs currently running Washington. This should help.
Greenlanders own a lot of guns: more than 35,000 long rifles, on an island of 56,000 people. Everyone I met there in January knew how to hunt. And more than one person made clear to me that they were ready to stand their ground against a possible American invasion.
“I have 10 hunting rifles,” Finn told me when I visited his home in Nuuk. (He asked me to withhold his full name because “taking credit for things is not the Greenland way.”) “I am a decent shot,” he added, “but not as good as my friends, who can hit a seal in the water at 200 meters, from a moving boat.”
Nuuk, a city of no more than 20,000 people, is serviced by one of very few runways in a wilderness more than three times the size of Texas. Finn was born there, to a Danish father and an Inuit mother. “You must know,” he told me—after we’d sat for an hour or so over tea and salted musk ox, and he had come to trust that I was not one of the “other” Americans—“that I will defend my home.”
[…]
Throughout the settlement, I noticed animal carcasses nailed to the sides of homes. Most were small game—birds and hares—but I also saw a quartered reindeer. This was the local method of refrigeration, and the villagers survived on subsistence hunting. I found myself thinking about the gun culture back home—performative, based on a myth of self-sufficiency. In this Greenlandic village, gun ownership was rooted in the requirements of an unforgiving environment. Walking back to the boat, I saw a blood trail that led up from the dock. The hunting party had been successful.
In Nuuk, stores were running low on ammunition, not because people were afraid of one another, nor because they needed that much ammo to hunt. “The bullets are for the Americans,” one local told me, “if they come.” He assured me that the government was working to replenish the depleted ammunition supply.
The Greenlanders I met were warm and welcoming, but not without a fierce pride. Their ancestors had carved a civilization out of the ice with tools made from whalebone and meteorite fragments. They’d hewn garments from cured whale intestine, sealskin, and thick polar-bear fur—still the warmest insulation on Earth. Today’s Greenlanders are prepared to defend what they have built here.
“If we are pushed,” Finn told me, “we are ready to die.”
That’s a fight America has no reason to pick. It’s also one that America could lose.
No, America could not lose that fight.
They’d have total air superiority, thermal vision, the entire island in range of naval artillery, and they’d almost instant control over every port.
A few dudes with rifles won’t change that.Of course the USA could “win” like it won in Baghdad. But what next? Nobody could ever subdue Afghanistan. Vietnam similar. Russia is now struggling against Ukraine.
A better example. The USSR, with its almost limitless tolerance for casualties, had to come to terms against tiny Finland - coincidentally also an Arctic nation few in number but that knew its environment.
Important not to underestimate the difficulty of asymmetric warfare against a determined foe combined with a limited tolerance for casualties.
The USA is (still) a democracy. If there were to be serious ongoing pushback in Greenland, that’s a story that would end just as badly for America as every other time in the last century. Against an accountable government, the motivation of the opponent matters a ton. Hence this news, which I found interesting.
In Iraq, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Ukraine, it was a LITTLE BIT harder to block the local fighters’ supply routes.
Downvote this guy all you want, this is fact. Maybe in a decade or two china will be able to project force better than the us navy, but for now no one else even comes close. I doubt an effort would even be made to confiscate those long rifles after occupation.
It’s not Greenladers, it’s Danes. Maybe it feels better to talk about Greenlanders as some separate “Northern small nation”, but legally it’s Denmark, a EU country, member of all known treaties, official ally of US and many other countries, etc. But it sounds weird to attack a “normal country”, right?
In fairness to them, Greenland does constitute a nation with an aspiration to sovereignty. It’s also not in the EU.
Yes, but the question of their sovereignty is:
- in a narrow context, theirs only
- in wider context, it’s between them and Denmark
