https://www.theglobeandmail.com/
Peter Harmsen is a journalist and the author of Fury and Ice: Greenland, the United States and Germany in World War II.
The historically minded among us may have sensed a certain déjà vu this weekend when U.S. President Donald Trump talked to NBC News about the role military force could play in gaining control of Greenland, currently an autonomous territory of long-time ally Denmark: “I don’t take anything off the table.”
After all, in 1940, when the Americans were slowly waking up from their isolationist slumber to side with the Western democracies in the struggle against fascism, they took a break from this grand mission to threaten Canada and Britain with armed might to keep Greenland to themselves.
“If there is any more monkey business, we are going to have a destroyer sent up there and stop it,” assistant secretary of state Adolf Berle said at the time, reacting to intelligence that Ottawa and London were preparing to occupy parts of Greenland in a pre-emptive move ahead of a feared Nazi takeover.
For the rest of this column: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-americas-long-arctic-love-affair-is-culminating-in-trumps-designs-on/