“Do you want me to send you back to where you were, unemployed in Greenland?” – The Princess Bride
Think Trump wants to Make Greenland Green Again?
Greenland. All of this post started by thinking that pretty soon we might be handed the keys to Greenland, so we should get up there quickly to measure to see if our stuff fits.
I’ve written several times about the coming political/economic crisis that the United States is facing, and back in 2018 I said the earliest year would be 2025, and the latest would be 2040. I’m sticking by those figures. The most likely period for this crisis I’m still putting at 2030-2035 because things tend to go on a lot longer than we think they will – inertia is real in physics, and it’s just as real in political economic systems. Things go on a lot farther than they should, and in hindsight people say, “Well, how in the heck did that last so very long.”
History is filled with many such examples:
- The Ottoman Empire,
- the system under Czarist Russia,
- the Chinese Emperors, and
- my first marriage.
Watching history unfold right now with the dawn of the second Trump Administration, I wanted to give a quick glimpse in what might be an offramp to the collapse. I’m calling it, “The Caesar Offramp.”
Or was it Sultan Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band?
It is very clear that the political situation more than rhymes with problems taking place in the very late Roman Republic. Cicero (the dead Roman, not Porky Pig’s® nephew) even gave a speech about groups called the Optimates and the Populares.
The Optimates were the elite of the day – think the people who take jets from their Aspen house to their superyacht that they just had shipped in to Port Hercules in Monaco so they could be with all the other people who had their superyacht shipped to Port Hercules in Monaco. These are the princes of the world, the folks who fly to Davos to get together to tell you that you’re using too many hydrocarbons and probably shouldn’t be legally allowed to have air conditioning.
The Populares? Let’s be real – these were also the elite of the day, but they at least pretended that the rank-and-file people were important. They had superyachts, too, but pretended they didn’t like them and also ate cheeseburgers.
Hmmm. All of this is sounding familiar.
Man, I wish our local McDonald’s was as generous with the cheese.
Let’s skip forward, a bit. At the end of the Republic, Rome was on the verge of civil war, and Julius Caesar, certainly the most famous Roman identified as a Populare, broke the system, and became the prototype for what would become an Empire that would last for the next five hundred years in the West, and the next nearly 1,500 years in the East.
What really made me think about this is the very real possibility that the United States will become the controller of Greenland. Yup. Whereas the United States has had territorial expansions, the last really big one was over 150 years ago when Seward negotiated for Alaska, and the last significant territorial acquisition were some islands we got after World War II, but they’re tiny.
I can see Trump in the movie Dune: “Fremen. Great people. Funny suits, but great people. Really mistreated by the Harkonnen. Many such cases.”
Regardless, it’s been nearly 80 years since we added territory to the United States, and it certainly wasn’t the largest island in the world, rather batches of small islands in the Pacific that were taken from the Japanese after, um, some nuclear persuasion. To me, this is a symbol of a world in flux, where nothing should be taken for granted.
And, it provides the basis for an offramp – a Caesar.
Trump is certainly not that man. Trump is about, as he told us plainly, The Art of the Deal. Trump didn’t seize power, he talked himself into it. His Populare sentiment contrasts with the Optimate culture of the RINOS and GloboLeftElite, and he used exactly that to springboard himself into power.
Twice.
The sentiment is there, and given the relative polarity and unpopularity of the various members of the Optimate class, there exists a big opening, right now, for a Populare leader to rise up, seize power, and completely overhaul our systems. Just the fact that we’re talking about absorbing Greenland to better surround Northern India (formerly known as Canada), the idea that our institutions, both financial and political can be remade is also on the table.
I think Trump wants to turn Greenland into an ICE detention center.
I think that this isn’t the most likely scenario, a Caesar without a civil war – I still think that Civil War 2.0 is the mostly likely outcome. Here are the variations that immediately spring to mind:
- Civil War 2.0 followed by regional Balkanization
- Civil War 2.0 followed by Ceasar 2.0 (and likely a North American Unification)
- Civil War 2.0 followed by a Revitalized Republic
- World War 4.0 (counting Cold War as 3.0) followed by some version of regionalized Balkanization, Caesar 2.0, or a Revitalized Republic
I find the regional Balkanization the most likely, still, since people are already self-segregating away from the Red/Blue state they don’t like, and that the polarization has essentially already created two countries within a single border.
Caesar 2.0 after Civil War 2.0 would require an extraordinary man with a military background, but also one of public service to step up at the right time with a message of unification. Think Napoleon, but taller and with a better public speaking voice. I’m betting Napoleon sounded like a mouse squeaking when he talked.
People called me a monster for feeding my kids frozen pizza rolls. Should I have microwaved them first?
The Revitalized Republic, while most personally desirable to me, seems the least likely since we don’t like each other very much, any more and the residual community that created the space for the Republic seems missing. I’m not sure that the resolve exists for the mountains of skulls that would need to be stacked in order for the Republic to be reconstituted.
So, an off ramp may exist. There’s a vanishingly short time for that to occur, so if it doesn’t happen by 2030, I’m betting that it’s not in the cards.
But, we’ll always have Greenland.
