Episode 21: Greenland Isn't Optional - National Security in the Arctic Age

This episode of The Reagan Faulkner Show argues that Trump’s insistence on acquiring Greenland is a matter of national survival, not a vanity project. Reagan explains the strategic value of Thule (Pituffik) Space Base in Greenland as America’s northernmost missile early-warning and defense installation, central to detecting and intercepting intercontinental ballistic missiles, hypersonic weapons, and space-based threats from adversaries like Russia, China, and North Korea. The discussion details Trump’s proposed “Golden Dome” — a massive aerial defense system designed to make the United States essentially untouchable from missile and drone attacks — and why Greenland’s Arctic geography is indispensable to making that shield effective.​

The episode then expands to trade, geopolitics, and sovereignty. Reagan warns that melting Arctic ice is opening new shipping lanes that could slash transit times from Asia to the Atlantic, making control of those routes as vital today as the Panama Canal was in the last century. If the U.S. does not control Greenland and the emerging Arctic passage, China or Russia will, allowing hostile regimes to dominate critical trade chokepoints and missile detection corridors right next to America’s backyard. Drawing on Trump’s real-estate view of “owning vs. leasing,” Reagan argues that merely basing operations in a NATO ally’s territory is dangerously naive; only outright control of Greenland can guarantee U.S. security, economic competitiveness, and another 250 years of American sovereignty.

Transcript

0:03

What's up, guys, and welcome back to the Reagan Faulkner Show. Today, we're going to be taking a deep dive into Greenland and why President Trump wants to acquire the country. So a little bit of background. I'm sure we all remember the end of President Trump's campaign where he just kind of out of nowhere said, by the way, if I become president, I'm going to take Greenland. And it seemed very absurd. It seemed a little sudden, a little surprising to many people. But the geopolitical value of Greenland is absolutely unmatched. So first of all, President Trump has come out and he has said that we will either take Greenland through purchase or we will take Greenland by force. So the purchase would have a price tag of about 700 billion dollars to basically buy out the entire island from the Kingdom of Denmark. And then the other potential would be to take it by force. But this would be a far less politically savvy move on the president's part, with 71 percent of U.S. citizens fundamentally believing it's a bad idea. Now, the 700 billion dollar purchase is also not pulling very well with Americans, but acquiring it by force and sending our troops in to conquer the island that's a territory of a NATO ally is pulling a lot worse than just the purchase. I mean, if we look at the fraud, we could buy Greenland with the amount of fraud that comes out of our our reserves every single year, which is honestly kind of crazy. But with these costly ramifications, with, quite frankly, very little support from the American people and from politicians at large, why is President Trump still moving forward with his desire to acquire Greenland? Like, why does it he just drop it if it's pulling so poorly and if it's something that American citizens and politicians don't want? Well, first of all, it is absolutely imperative and absolutely critical to our national security. So since 1951, we have operated Bidoofik. I'm so sorry if I butcher any of these names, but Bidoofik Space Base, which in 1951 up until recently was formerly known as Thule Air Base. And this base is the Department of Defense's northernmost installation. So it is the farthest north installation that the Department of Defense operates. And we do operate it in a foreign territory that is the territory of another country. So very similar to some of the bases that we operate in other countries in the Middle East. It is critical to our national security. And the reason that it is so critical to our national security is because it is where the early detection of intercontinental ballistic missiles, missile defense and missile warnings is housed. So this base exists via a treaty between the Kingdom of Denmark and the United States after World War Two. And it was really heavily utilized during the Cold War, where we had multiple other bases and multiple other stations throughout the country, which dwindled down post Cold War to this one base that is now left, but is indeed integral to maintaining our country and keeping it safe from any aerial threats. Now, Trump is committed to constructing the Golden Dome, as many of you know. Now, what the Golden Dome is, is it is a one hundred and seventy five billion dollar project that will protect the United States from foreign aerial threats. So that can come in multiple different forms, whether it be long range missiles, whether it be intercontinental ballistic missiles, whether it be hypersonic missiles or other forms of aerial attack like drones and specifically a developing technology or weapons that travel into the lower regions of outer space. And they're very hard to detect. And then they come down and they strike a country or even maintaining watch, I suppose you could say, on different satellites and different other items that foreign countries put into the orbit of planet Earth. So this base and bases like it perform very, very critical infrastructure to securing the United States. And the Golden Dome will basically be a helmet, I guess you could say, to the United States to protect it from any aerial threat, because as technology is developing, as technology is growing and becoming more sophisticated, it is becoming harder and harder and harder to detect these aerial threats. And the United States has bases on every single coast. So it'd be very hard to implement, I suppose you could say, any type of land invasion or anything like that. The best way to take out anything in the United States would be through an unmanned aerial attack, intercontinental ballistic missiles, nukes, things like that. So the Golden Dome will protect us from any threat like that. So we will be unable to be touched via aerial attack through the Golden Dome. And then we will be unable to be invaded via military attack. I know you're thinking, oh, we've already been invaded at the southern border. Yeah, we kind of have. But you know, in a military type of sense, we can't be invaded because of the bases that we have on our coasts and throughout the rest of our country. So the Golden Dome is imperative to maintaining U.S. safety from anything that can harm us from the air, from outer space, missiles, et cetera, et cetera. So Greenland operates as what's called a natural early detection site, meaning it's geographically equipped to be a strategic site for the detection of space and aerial threats because of its position within the Arctic Circle. So any threats that are coming from Russia or even from Eurasia or Europe and Asia, Eurasia, any missiles coming from those areas most likely will have to pass through some region of the Arctic Circle or they will have to pass through somewhere around the Arctic Circle through outer space. So Greenland is geographically predisposed to being the best location to detect, intercept, and take out any of these forms of aerial warfare, specifically from where our enemies lie, i.e. China, North Korea, Russia, anywhere along that realm. So aerial warfare is the number one strategic threat to the United States, especially by our adversaries, like I just said, Russia, China, North Korea. We all know that their main idea of warfare would be through missile and aerial and spatial attacks. So that is why in order to protect ourselves from those that are enemies, those that have been our enemies since the Cold War, it's essential to maintain a strong nuclear missile defense program, the best of which is to have stations around Greenland and within the Arctic Circle within the northernmost points of the Northern Hemisphere. So now another sort of geopolitical disagreement is that Trump continues claiming that Chinese and Russian submarines have been seen all around Greenland. Now NATO disputes this and says that that's not true. It has been many years, I believe. One of the last things I read about sightings was 2022, which that was four years ago. But I believe there might have been another one in 2024, which was only two years ago. And that's, you know, saying that they were actually detected. They have quite good technology. So how many of these aren't detected? How many of these does President Trump know about because of superior U.S. intelligence and U.S. technology that perhaps NATO doesn't know about? And NATO has threatened that if the U.S. does invade Greenland, then they're going to stop allowing the United States to be within NATO, which honestly is a win-win to me. I know we want to leave NATO anyway, and NATO can't really survive without the U.S. So it's kind of a funny threat to me because we don't need them. But that is kind of NATO's take on the Chinese-Russian submarine issue versus President Trump's take on it. Now, he's also claimed that these superpowers have had their eyes on Greenland. Maybe far less vocally than President Trump has had his eyes on Greenland. But all the same, Russia and China have both been looking to put installations on Greenland or to utilize Greenland. In fact, China has even made a new submarine that's engineered to be able to pass through ice and very, very cold weather, the likes of which you would find in the Arctic. So obviously these countries are looking more and more to the Arctic Circle and warfare within that region. It's always been a strategic location, even since World War II and even since the Cold War, more so now than ever because of rapidly developing technology. Now, the 1951 treaty allows the U.S. to maintain personnel, construct bases, control military aircraft, and even anchor ships almost at the will of any time America wants to, just at our whim. We can say, oh, we want a base here. We want a base there. We want personnel here. We want to start running these air exercises. We want to maintain ships in this region. We want to build a military port. Whatever we want to do, we quite frankly can do because of this treaty. So it leads many to wonder, why not just do that? Why not just not risk ruining our relationship with allies, destroying NATO, and facing potential economic and manufacturing consequences because we're tariffing countries and they're tariffing us back over threatening to invade Greenland or invading Greenland? We have a precedent that's been here for 75 years. Why not just maintain that precedent, put more military installations on the island, and move forward with the status quo that we've been maintaining? Well, that's a great idea in theory, except the U.S. has been taken advantage of historically every time we build infrastructure in other countries, every time we pour economic resources into other countries, every time we do anything to benefit ourselves or to benefit other countries that is not within the territories or the states that the United States holds. So President Trump has come out and explained this multiple times, discussed this multiple times, specifically what he calls the detriments of quote leasing. President Trump is a very successful real estate mogul. He understands the benefits of ownership versus leasing. And he feels the same way about foreign countries. He feels the same way specifically we see how he feels about Venezuela and about our economic additions to their fuel and to their oil refining back in the 1990s where we completely lost that. We lost all of that investment and that entire agreement about helping their oil for them to provide us with oil for cheap. So the same kind of goes here with Greenland. There's absolutely no point to invest in and to grow and support anything that we don't fully and completely own, because if you don't own it, it can never be fully guaranteed. It can never be fully secured, and it can never be fully protected. There's always an opportunity to lose out. There's always an opportunity for someone to come in and take it, or there's always an opportunity for, say, Greenland to revoke that treaty that's been in place since 1951. So the idea, quite frankly, is that why would the U.S. invest billions and billions of dollars into military installations and military infrastructure in Greenland when we have no return and we could potentially lose it in a conflict or potentially use it because Greenland or Denmark, I guess Denmark is the ruling body over Greenland. They're just like, no, we can't do that anymore. We refuse to do that anymore. There's absolutely no point unless you can protect it and secure it. Let's say you had a job where you needed a vehicle to go to your job. You had to go there at a certain time every single day, and you're borrowing a car from a buddy, and one day your buddy gets up and he's like, oh, I need my car for a date, and you get fired because you can't get to your job because your buddy just woke up one day and decided to break the agreement. Well, he has ownership of the vehicle. He has every right to do what he wants with the vehicle, but you needed it and you knew you needed it. You would have been better off to work two jobs and to face some hardship, to face some lost free time in order to buy the vehicle and ensure that you had the better job than to have an arrangement with your friend and then have him potentially break or violate the relationship because he does in fact have ownership. The same general idea, the same precedent kind of lies with Greenland. Why would we want to use it when we literally need it for our survival, where we literally need it in the event of nuclear war, and we leave it in the hands of somebody that can just say, oh, actually, I technically own this. No, you can't use it anymore, and we lose A, billions of dollars of critical infrastructure and economic investment, and B, our opportunity to make sure that we survive if we ever get attacked or nuclear war does actually happen. It would be really dumb to do that. It would, quite frankly, be extremely stupid to put heaps of billions of dollars of economic investment into something that we can't protect, guarantee, or secure. So that is why Trump wants to buy Greenland is so that he can own it and then put X amount of whatever portion of the $175 billion of the Golden Dome on Greenland and not have it in the hands of a foreign body. Secondly, comes trade. Of course it comes trade with President Trump. When does it not come trade with President Trump? So as polar ice caps are melting within the Arctic Circle, and science shows that they are melting, now whether this is a result of climate change or whether this is a result of historically how the Earth heats and then it cools and we have an ice age and then it heats back up, I'm going to go with the fact that it's the cyclical, you know, the world heating up and then cooling down and then heating up and cooling down because it's been doing that since it's existed. I don't think it has anything to do with climate change or fossil fuels or any of that, but the fact of the matter is the polar ice caps up in the Arctic region are in fact melting and they are in fact creating new routes within the Arctic Circle for trade from Asia, from Europe, and from Russia. So as these new trade regions are developing as ice is melting and there is opportunity to now trade through the Arctic Circle, this is something that people have been looking for for hundreds of years since they were looking for a Northwest Passage. It's finally come to fruition due to how the Earth warms and cools and now claims say that these new routes could reduce the amount of time it takes for a ship to travel from China to the Atlantic Ocean by about 20 days, which is extremely important for growing trade and the growing globalization of our countries around the world. So U.S. focuses on manufacturing. Trump is pushing for us to focus more on manufacturing than ever before and to manufacture things to trade with other countries instead of us taking in products from other countries. He wants us to be more self-sufficient in the event of a war or a global conflict or something that could break supply chains. So as we're focusing more on this manufacturing, as we're focusing more on this production, and specifically as we focus more on limiting China's influence within our hemisphere and we're focusing on ensuring that conflicting forms of government like communism and socialism don't find their way into our country and disrupt our lifestyle. It's really important for us to maintain this trade route and keep it under U.S. control because if it falls into the control of another country, a country that is an enemy, a country that doesn't hold our values, a country that has a form of government that conflicts with our values, then we are having enemy thoughts and enemies that hate us in our neighborhood controlling our ability to trade with foreign countries that aren't that enemy. That enemy can prevent us from trading with allies, from trading with potential allies, future allies, or from just trading with even people we don't like because we make money from it. So why wouldn't we trade with them? So kind of think of it like the Panama Canal. Think of it like the U.S. thought of the Panama Canal when that happened. We invested about $375 million to construct the Panama Canal. We held it for about 20 years, and then we lost it in 1999 after $375 million and owning it or controlling it for about 20 years. We lost it in 1999, and now China exerts extreme economic influence and extreme strategic influence over it today, and maybe we can get it back, but there's not much that we can do about that. China decided that they didn't want us to use the Panama Canal anymore. More than likely, they could cut us off from it. Do we really want to be cut off from this brand new Arctic passageway and from the Panama Canal? Do we want China controlling both of these potentials for trade, both of these passageways for trade? Because I don't think we do. We could get practically locked in our own Atlantic Ocean where we can't trade with anybody. It would be extremely time-consuming and extremely costly to do so, and we wouldn't be competitive with other countries. Specifically, we wouldn't be competitive with China if they can do things faster, cheaper, and better. That's the premise of business, isn't it? Faster, cheaper, better. If China can do it faster, cheaper, better because they own the main trade passageways, then where is the U.S.? Where is our competitive advantage in trade? We don't have one. That is why it is exceedingly important for us to own Greenland and have control over this new passageway, to be able to maintain it, to be able to ensure that it is ... We built the Panama Canal. What's to say that we don't construct something in that region to ensure that it doesn't refreeze or that heavy-duty ships can get through it, like dredging and things like that? It's very imperative for the U.S. to control this, make sure it's excellent. Make sure that everybody has access to it instead of having another country that could just cut it off from any of their enemies or just the rest of the globe in general. Lastly, the Monroe Doctrine could also be argued in this case, which we've touched on this just a little bit, but it's a lot like the case in Venezuela. Greenland is shockingly close to the U.S., a lot closer than most of us realize, yet it only has a population of about 58,000 people. Now, it is the largest standalone island on the entire globe, but about 80% of it is covered in ice and glacier, and it's just not livable because of how cold it is. But if ... Well, let's back up a little bit. They are increasingly looking for independence. They have said that they want independence from Denmark. They want to operate as their own country, and what countries are going to be there to help them that have the military strength? Russia, China, and if they do gain independence, but they gain it with the help of Russia and China, then again, we have this foreign enemy, this ideological enemy, this governmental enemy in our neighborhood. We have them controlling the main strategic, based on geography, the geographically strategic location for sending missiles, for intercepting missiles, for detecting missiles, and for detonating missiles before they reach other countries. So if our enemies have that key strategy, if they hold this new trade passageway, the U.S. is in a real, real danger. We can't be competitive at trade. We can't launch our missiles without other countries seeing the launch. We can't detonate missiles because we may not have a strategic location to detonate them before they reach our country. We can't protect ourselves the way that we could with Greenland, and the people that can protect us are our enemies. That is a really bad place for us to be in. We would lose our superiority. We would lose our position as a global superpower, and we would be beneath China and or Russia because we would need them. We would need them to allow us to maintain our bases on the island for detection, or we would need them to detect it for us, which is just a position that I don't think any of us want to be in. So the issue of Greenland doesn't boil down to whether or not it's good or bad policy, whether or not it's a good or bad decision for the president to make. It really boils down to whether or not the U.S. wants to continue being a global military superpower, whether or not we want to continue having independent sovereignty where we exist on our own and we don't really need the help of anybody else, where we continue having the best surveillance, the best military, the best missiles, and we can be sovereign in that without people helping us detect or detonate, and whether or not we want to keep communism and enemy values and enemy influence out of our neighborhood and out of our hemisphere. It boils down, quite frankly, to whether or not we want to see another 250 years because the fact of the matter is that warfare is aerial now, and if we can't detect and we can't shoot aerial missiles, aerial forms of warfare, then we're not going to survive a nuclear war or any type of war. So it boils down to whether or not we want to continue being sovereign and whether or not we want to see 250 more years of the United States. Thank you so much for joining me on this episode of The Reagan-Faulkner Show. If you want more, be sure to check us out at The Reagan-Faulkner Show on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and X, and check us out at The Wilmington Standard on X, Instagram, and Facebook, and be sure to check us out at reaganfaulkner.com and thewilmingtonstandard.com for more. 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