Donald Trump’s laughable bid for Greenland reveals a great power tussle over the Arctic that’s deadly serious

As climate change makes the Arctic Ocean navigable and opens up access to fisheries and buried minerals, the fight over its riches will only intensify. Outrageous and comical as it may seem, Trump’s proposal to buy Greenland is unlikely to go away

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An iceberg floats away as the sun sets near Kulusuk, Greenland, on August 15. As warmer temperatures cause the ice to retreat, the Arctic region is taking on new geopolitical and economic importance, with the US, Russia, China and others all wishing to stake a claim. Photo: AP

Published: 1:00am, 24 Aug 2019Updated: 2:48am, 24 Aug 2019

As gloom seems to bear down on us from all sides, the imperative this week has been to search for something comical that might lighten the mood. But the search has reminded me of something that every brilliant writer knows in his or her bones: that comedy and tragedy are awkwardly close companions.

At present, the entanglement of comedy and tragedy are screamingly obvious. It is hard not to be distracted by the comedic antics of US President Donald Trump, even as he inflicts harm on the world economy, and on his own people. It is hard not to gaze at the dishevelled British Prime Minister Boris Johnson speaking alongside the immaculately groomed French President Emmanuel Macron and not think “buffoon”, even as he drives the hapless British people off a cliff.

So, too, with the week’s sickest joke: the proposed US acquisition of Greenland from Denmark. The classically Trumpian deal was immediately dismissed by Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen. An offended Trump, who said people should not talk to the US in that way, attacked Frederiksen’s rebuttal as “nasty”, and promptly uninvited himself from dinner with the Danish monarch Queen Margrethe II.

Ludicrous as the deal may seem to most common folk today, I suspect it will not go away very quickly. And for someone of Trump’s ilk, we should remember that the suggestion need not be ludicrous at all.

Remember that Trump harks from New York, where Manhattan was first acquired from native Indian tribes by the Dutch West India Company in 1626 for the princely sum of 60 guilders, and where another 60 guilders were spent in 1630 buying Staten Island.