“May you live in interesting times!” was a famous sentence a century ago. Supposedly a Chinese curse, it was a sardonic jab — “interesting” days tend to be troublesome.
The “curse” was actually apocryphal. No such expression actually exists in China. But, in a way, it does seem to capture the spirit of our era. We certainly do live in interesting times — with Ukraine, the Middle East, Venezuela, and Taiwan also competing for our attention, it has been a while since the wheel of history has spun this quickly.
The drama surrounding the Danish territory of Greenland has come to bring even more bewilderment to our days. It is true that America’s self-confessed ambitions on the territory of a loyal ally are unjustified, even treacherous. Indeed, Greenland has been a part of the Scandinavian world since the 10th century, when Erik the Red first settled the land with colonists from Norway and Denmark; Copenhagen has held real, continuous sovereignty over the territory since 1721, half a century before the Thirteen Colonies launched their war for independence from Mother England. That Denmark is an old, tiny, and defenceless nation makes Washington’s appetites all the uglier — particularly when America’s potential acquisition of Greenland seems so utterly pointless. After all, the United States already enjoys a sizable military presence in the region, with Copenhagen unlikely to object to more.
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