Oh great, it’s Ryan.

The U.S. has always known about the strategic value of Greenland. The U.S. has always had access to Greenland from a military positioning standpoint. It has operated the Pituffik Space Base since the Cold War and can surge troops there at will. So what has changed? We are about to attempt decoupling with China. We are not sure how successful we’ll be. If we fail we will have to retreat to fortress Americas. The Europeans may attempt to exert what little leverage they have to get a better deal as part of a decoupling and various factions within Europe will further threaten to cozy up to China instead. So when you start from the premise that a decoupling is the end-state you come to the conclusion that you need to be a lot more overt about what is “yours” explicitly and what has been defacto “yours” in all but name since WW2. This is because when something is explicitly yours it can’t be leveraged as a bargaining chip and it changes the risk calculus for your adversaries. Same for Iran, Venezuela, Argentina and even Canada and Mexico. It’s one thing for China to know in theory you can blow up tankers of inbound oil the day after they invade Taiwan. It’s another thing entirely when you can turn off the spigot by calling the president, prime minister or shah that you put in power. It’s one thing to threaten to withdraw to fortress Americas when the Europeans get mouthy when China has heavy influence in Mexico and Canada. It’s another when you’ve cowed both countries so aggressively that when you say “jump” they ask how high. You can only make predictions when you have a proper reference for the motivations of the people in power. Hegemony is upstream of everything and once you have it again you can solve everything else fairly easily. Either we’ll have hegemony over the globe ex-China or we’ll have it over the West or we’ll have it over the Americas. But Washington will have hegemony. Or at least they’ll let the stock market burn to the ground in its pursuit. 🫡