From Tuchman's The Guns of August:
A question that [Brigadier General Henry] Wilson asked of [General Ferdinand] Foch during his second visit in January 1910, evoked an answer which expressed in one sentence the problem of the alliance with England, as the French saw it. “What is the smallest British military force that would be of any practical assistance to you?” Wilson asked. Like a rapier flash came Foch’s reply, “A single British soldier—and we will see to it that he is killed.”
People's attitudes often change when their sons and daughters are on the line.
Does anybody get the looming impression that the probability they'll die in war is approaching 1? I don't know which country / group of countries it'll be against, but I get the impression that a lot of our fates are being written out right now.
Advertisements around where I live are gradually all becoming about joining the military. My country is sending troops to territories as if they are tripwires.
> Does anybody get the looming impression that the probability they'll die in war is approaching 1?
No. If I had this level of anxiety, I would disconnect from news and online media for a little while to take a walk in the forest to clear my mind and calm down.
As things get worse, this advice gets less relevant. You no longer have to be addicted to social media or 24-hour news to be worried about what's happening. You don't even really need to be paying explicit attention at all.
To call the headline "US threatens to invade Greenland" unprecedented would be an understatement. You only need to see it once to be justifiably anxious.
I'm already there. I never use social media and I limit news consumption to once per week for catching up.
I'm seeing these messages in the real world. Adverts on the side of buses are telling me to enlist in greater frequency, and job sites have positions in the Royal Army pinned above everything else.
Not by colloquial usage of the term, which is often (and in this case) limited to the subset of larger global human-content firehoses where the problems inherent to that dynamic become more dramatic, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, shorts feeds, things like Instagram and Reddit maybe, etc.
HN is just as much an echo chamber as any facebook group or subreddit. You are making a mistake if you think you are immune from groupthink and herd mentality by limiting your online discourse to this platform only.
Unfortunately access to the forest is blocked by ongoing "immigration" enforcement action by masked secret police in the area. Stepping out of the front door under these circumstances may be treated as a crime, punishable by death.
Between war, climate change effects, antibiotic resistant bacteria and Alzheimer's, for myself I think I'd pick war. Hard to know what to wish for my children.
I'm too old for this: not only am I not going to get called up, I also remember the Cold War, where everyone really did think there was a significant risk of a nuclear exchange at any time.
Mind you, the logic of MAD was a lot more .. logical? The canonical example of a cold game theoretic perspective leading combined with enough irrational paranoia to make an unstable situation.
We're more likely to have a war over a dumb tweet.
It had logic to it. The issue is that the same logic that powered MAD led to WW1.
In short, everyone had treaties signed with everyone else which effectively guaranteed a WW if any nation attacked another nation. The thinking being "nobody would ever start a war because of what it'd lead to".
MAD suffers the same problem, one demented leader can end all life by being irrational.
> Does anybody get the looming impression that the probability they'll die in war is approaching 1?
Not that high, but I know what you mean. I think there's a reasonable chance that the US system successfully redirects Trump away from actually ordering an attack on Greenland, and a reasonable chance the US military has an actual coup if that order comes through.
But if he gets to take it… the consequences need to be extraordinary, and misjudgement will have already been a precondition and therefore more misjudgement is likely, therefore escalation can be almost arbitrary.
Probably not higher than in my lifetime, because I lived through the Cold War and nuclear annihilation seemed like a serious possibility more than once.
But definitely higher than any time since 1990. With a possible exception for the days immediately after 9/11, when it seemed like there might be follow-ups.
You probably should revisit your opinion about what wars would look like today.
- WW1 was a competition of troops: how many soldiers each country was willing to sacrifice for victory. Something like 50M soldiers participated.
- WW2 was a competition of hardware, less troops - how much industrial output could each country pour into the battle. Aprox. 300 000 tanks, 200 000 airplanes , 9000 warships (according to chatgpt), 2750 Liberty cargo ships (wikipedia).
- WW3 can't be a competition of troops (where would they get 50 million people, how would they train them, how would they feed them?), and it can't be a competition of hardware (who could make 300 000 tanks, 200 000 airplanes and 9 000 ships today?, where would they even get that much steel?).
World war today could be 1) nuclear and we're doomed, or 2) kids playing with toy drones breaking windows at each other's factories - you're mostly safe, unless you work there.
> World war today could be 1) nuclear and we're doomed, or 2) kids playing with toy drones breaking windows at each other's factories - you're mostly safe, unless you work there.
Cyber war, especially insufficiently defended industrial equipment control systems.
And about those drones: the category scales up and down, all the way from toys to things that rip apart apartment blocks.
And about quantity, Ukraine is estimated to be at the scale of millions of units last year, expended like munitions rather than like vehicles.
Can anyone articulate any rational reason for the threat of the US invading and annexing Greenland? Aside from economics, there is nothing preventing US or international mining interests from mining there today, is there? What are the other possible reasons?
The president is kind of impressionable and flips his position depending on who he talked to last. The Russians have an influence either directly or through others he speaks to and would love him to invade Greenland as it would break NATO and legitimise their whole strategy of being able to invade and annex their neighbours of the basis of some bs excuse. The Russians really want NATO to collapse and to take back Ukraine and the Baltics. Or at least Putin's lot do.
The whole rationale is quite Russian in style - they have to invade Ukraine because it was an existential threat - it never was - they have to denazifi it - it's run by a democratically elected jewish comedian. And similarly Trump has to take Greenland before Russia or China does - there's no way that was happening. The whole thing is rather mafia style in that the reasons are ridiculous as a way of showing power, like we need money to protect you in that case.
That said the US has been interested in acquiring Greenland for ages.
I think it's about the Northern Sea Route (NSR) which is opening up cause of climate change.
A Chinese Panamax ship recently completed the NSR transit in just five days, showing that it's a viable alternative to the Suez Canal route.
The NSR is basically a conveyor belt for Russian-Chinese trade, most of it passing in or near Russian waters. However for that traffic to reach the global markets of the Atlantic, it has to pass through the GIUK Gap (between Greenland, Iceland, and the UK).
Right now Russia is so dependent on China they're transferring valuable military tech. So that just leaves Greenland if you want to isolate China (and Russia).
It doesn't have to be touching, it just has to be significantly closer than Maine, so it's much easier to monitor everything or set up a chokepoint if necessary.
And if I know anything about Trump, he'll start talking about Iceland next. Give him an inch he'll take a mile.
There is no rational reason. The US can put as many military resources as it likes there, and the fact that they haven't probably points to it not being a great place to station a larger force because of the climate. US companies can mine there if they're able - it's not currently economic to do so due to the climate and glacier.
There have been news speculation that Trump saw Greenland on a Mercator projection map, saw how big it was, and decided the US should have it. It is so stupid that it might be right.
> However, the European Nato deployment consists of only a few dozen personnel as part of Danish-led joint exercises called Operation Arctic Endurance. While heavy in symbolism, it was not immediately clear how long they would stay.
Like, we came, we saw, we gone? How many ppls can they deploy in the long term?
This is a tripwire to spike cost of taking by force. Europe doesn't have the blue-water navy or air power to fight a peer war with America but also does not need to.
Europe cannot fight a peer war with America: on day one the Americans cut off our cloud services, and all government administration falls over.
(logical consequence of this is that the US invading Greenland is really bad for any US startups, such as one might find on HN, because it makes the EU much more likely to respond with "local only" rules)
That's a two way street. Tens of thousands soldiers on European soil becoming PoWs. US Equipment in European bases like Air Force or Preposition Army Stocks impounded by Europeans. Logistics going further east via Ramstein - effectively whole Middle east cut off from US reach. Access to early warning radars in Europe also gone. Ability to rearm and refuel ships pushed all the way back to USA.
We switched their email off would be a political joke compared to tens of thousand soldiers stuck behind enemy lines. And that's all working with assumptions that EU won't nationalize European part of AWS/Azure/GC/(other US cloud providers) to force it to continue its operation.
Don't forget things like cutting off trade with the US, or trying to organize a dump of their debt to attack the currency. Or, trying for hack-attacks on key US network components. None of these involve "traditional military" but they'd affect the randos at home quite a bit.
Europe isn't the US and it isn't China, but it is collectively one of the preeminent military and economic powers in the world. So, as long as they'd like.
Ironically, the US military has historically had more military personnel deployed in Greenland than Denmark. The US has continuously operated a military base at Thule for the better part of a century.
These kinds of joint exercises are pretty common and largely symbolic.
(The wikipedia page about this contains blatant partisan propaganda. Gross.)
How many "ppls" did Afghanistan deploy, long-term, against TWO different superpowers, with only discreet, behind-the-scenes support from other nations?
Invasion and control of another country that has more than paleolithic technology is pretty damned hard. Harder than anyone who attempst it ever guesses. ("They will welcome us as liberators!" - the stupidest thing ever said by a pre-Trump POTUS.)
It's even harder if a majority of the invading population hates the idea, and a significant part of the military doubt the constitutionality of their orders.
Oh, and two nuclear powers would be openly defending Greenland.
It would be cheaper and more popular to pile $9B in bills on the National Mall and set them ablaze.
I think US rapidly crossed from being a useful ally, through being an unreliable one to a genuine hindrance for NATO, from Europe's PoV. Not sure about Canada, and I feel for them.
I'm confident Europe can get its act together against Russia. It has more people, far more GDP etc. But it's stuck an an awful trance of defeatism.
US meanwhile seems to be setting fire to so much of the world that they may soon be calling on allies to help them out. Ironic that the only NATO collective defense response was Europe joining the US in Afghanistan.
Somehow Europeans care more about Greenland than Ukraine, so maybe this is the final straw.
>Somehow Europeans care more about Greenland than Ukraine, so maybe this is the final straw.
"Somehow" makes it sound like a strange situation, but it seems quite normal that the EU would care more about its own citizens than a foreign land, even if it is a close neighbor.
I'm sure the Greenland Inuit people are very nice, I'd love to visit their country one day, and they don't deserve to be Trump's ego booster.
My immediate instinct is that the average European has far more to do with an average Ukrainian than the average Greenlander. But that might not be right. I'm just surprised at the psychology here. I'm glad Europeans are veery slowly standing up to the new reality, be it through Greenland or Ukraine or anywhere else.
Europe has provided massive aid to Ukraine, mostly financial. Their hesitation has been committing themselves militarily to the war, which, if they did, would be a huge benefit to Ukraine. But their current level of support is still very substantial (and necessary).
Greenland isn't important because it's Greenland, it's important because taking it shatters NATO. As an attack on Denmark it's actually less important than the deathblow to an alignment that has been foundational to the world order for the last 80 years. If the US takes Greenland, the whole international order breaks down, so yes, they're taking it very seriously.
> Greenland [is] important because taking it shatters NATO.
It's even more striking to me then that the Europeans would draw the line, rather than seek some kind of Trump appeasement. Standing up to Russia in Ukraine does not affect the credibility of NATO, but standing up to Trump does.
There's no reasonable debate about whether the US has the capability to capture Greenland. Obviously they do. It's in their backyard in an area the US military has been patrolling for decades, with (admittedly decrepit) US bases already present.
The question is whether the US is willing to pay the costs to do so. Sending European troops is attempting to raise the costs of invasion so that any rational actor would decide against it. Of course, we wouldn't be in this situation if all the parties involved were rational actors.
We had the capability to capture Iraq and Afghanistan too. Occupying a territory is the actual hard point. For one, Greenland is in the middle of nowhere compared to everywhere else the US has to keep eyes on, whereas its in the back yard of Canada and the UK.
More importantly though, its an incredibly cold and unhospitable place thats inhabited by 50k people whose little kids have more arctic survival skills than US special forces and who really, really don't want us there. Unlike Afghanistan, you can't patrol the skies nonstop with drones either due to the cold.
Basically, this isn't a choice between owning Greenland or keeping all our allies. Its a choice between keeping all our allies vs getting bogged down into the ultimate guerilla war and suddenly having nothing but hostile neighbors to the north.
Are the Greenlanders really up for a guerilla war? Resistance in Iraq and Afghanistan was driven by a common religion and a long history of wars.
If Greenland really did become a state, they'd actually have a fair bit of political power. At least, until oil companies shipped in tens of thousands of employees. I can't see the Greenlanders laying IEDs for American troops, but I suppose I can see them making life very, very hard for civilians.
This has worked very well in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
It is a giant island in the Arctic Ocean, populated by Inuit and people born on a pair of skis. If they don't want you here, they will make sure you freeze to death in a troop transporter stuck in the snow.
It would destroy NATO, the global financial system, our supply chains are so intertwined that pharmaceuticals, air transport, and most advanced technologies would be completely disrupted for years.
Intellectual property rights, judicial cooperation, international recognition, and all those things would be dead.
I doubt it raises the costs of invasion very much. I don't expect the Danish to fight to the last man. If shooting starts, they will evacuate quickly.
But it meant that the US will have fired shots at NATO soldiers, rather than just walking in and declaring themselves in charge. That raises the political and economic stakes, if not the military ones.
It's making absolutely clear that this means the end of NATO, and puts all EU/US relationships in doubt. It could even mean that we were automatically at war. They're hoping that somebody around the President will consider that too high a price to pay. Which is a long shot, but is probably the least-worst option.
Remember, the US already has treaty rights to build bases: the defence strategy of Greenland before this nonsense was "be a member of NATO, nobody would be dumb enough to attack us because if they did the USA would defend us".
We would see exactly what people in the US have been dealing with for 10 years. Everybody would wring their hands and say "unbelievable!" and then nobody with the actual capability to do anything about it actually does.
The entire world is just rooting for Father Time on this particular problem.
I believe that's true: if Trump attacked Greenland, NATO would fall apart (regardless of Europe's response, if they allow it or not), and then Putin would have a once in a generation chance to take the baltics, maybe mess with Poland. He would have to take that chance, and then Europe would have to retaliate, and its effectively WW3.
Spooky times, let's hope things fizzle out back to a rule based Pax Americana.
Edit: Interestingly, the likelyhood of things fizzling out would jump up quite a bit if Trump or Putin were to die. I think the US system of government is prone to electing Trumps, but it's not a given, I think the cult of personality would die and things would relax for now.
> Putin would have a once in a generation chance to take the baltics, maybe mess with Poland
No resources for that. Russians are increasingly using horses instead of mechanization like IFVs or APCs. If he would try it, then it would open second frontline with Europe in Baltics while still fighting with Ukrainians. Awfully stupid idea.
From the UK: I suspect the response would be the same as the response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and the use of chemical weapons in the UK: a stiffly worded letter and some legal action, followed by efforts to disentangle economically. Maybe we'll sanction an oligarch or two.
France sends 15 soldiers, Germany sends 13 soldiers - tiny numbers, sure, but 15 and 13 more, respectively, to defend against a possible threat than either of those countries sent in the years since Russia rolled into Ukraine.
They're not there to defend Greenland, they're there to die if the U.S. invades. The U.S. keeps small numbers of soldier on the border with North Korea for the same reason.
I understand, though there is a marked difference between the couple of dozen European troops deployed in this fashion and the 25,000 US soldiers deployed in Korea.
In any case, the point stands: I would argue that France is willing to put a dozen soldiers in Greenland because it is pretty sure that they won’t be killed by the US, as opposed to sending even a single soldier to Kiev where there is a reasonable chance that they might get killed and we might have to do more than just send money and guns.
The amount of money and guns that have been sent to Ukraine have been critical to its survival. They still have a functioning economy just because of all the financial aid they've received. It would obviously be better if French, British, or German troops were in Ukraine, even if they were just securing the rear areas. But the fact that no one in Europe has voluntarily joined Ukraine's war against Russia isn't comparable to putting a tripwire deterrent in place.
If the U.S. seized Nuuk, and Europe mustered a counter-invasion, it would be comparable.
Biden was ostensibly too old when he became President, but he hadn't started the obvious decline that we all witnessed in 2024.
And I still would much rather have had Biden for those four years than have had to face what we're facing now with Trump back then. Except with Trump being 4 years farther away from death than he is now...
We did have that discussion and almost certainly the DNC also had it with more than a handful of media appearances written off as gaffes. They decided their best chances were to stick with Biden.
After the U.S., Germany is the largest donor of money and kit to Ukraine, approximately 1/3rd of what the U.S. gave under Biden. The cost of 13 soldiers hanging about in Nuuk is a footnote.
Scenario 2: US troops land and would now have to deal with some NATO soldiers.
Regardless of how many NATO soldiers we're talking about, the geopolitical stakes in S2 are orders of magnitude higher than in S1. And so is the political backlash, problems at home, reasons for other nations to respond, etc.
So yes, these few troops, being there, in an official capacity as a NATO deployment no less, matters. Alot.
Why jump directly to conclusions ? Just take some popcorn and enjoy the development.
From my POV the whole "show" looks a lot like a cheap porno with a gangbang at the end. /s
Europe experiencing what LATAM, SE Asia and Africa have had to deal for a long time but now the shoe is on the other foot and it's a huge deal all the sudden.
I've been saying that the re-election of Trump firmly turned the US into a Latin American country: repressive right-wing government run for the benefit of US corporate interests, with questionable election integrity and widespread paramilitary violence against street protests.
France is sending 15 soldiers, Germany 13. Not sure how much the other countries are sending, but at that rate, they seem to expect a US invasion force of 100 people and probably a few dogsleds?
The US has done this historically for allies, too, a small deployment along with a public reiteration of a defense commitment isn't saying the troops are intended to be sufficient to resist a threat, it is intended to show that going from threat to war means war with not just the territory attacked, but the power deploying (even small) forces, and potentially all of their available capabilities.
This is especially the case when the tripwire force is deployed by a nuclear power on the territory of a non-nuclear power facing a conventional threat from a nuclear power.
The above comment referencing Guns of August has it: the point is not to put up significant resistance, but, like the Minnesotans, force the US invasion force to have to kill or capture them in a way that produces as much negative publicity as possible if they do want to take Greenland.
Indeed the key point is to make sure it is not a bloodless operation. Maybe some pictures of dead white people on the TV will short circuit the part of the republican brain that worships strongmen.
MANPADS are designed to be used against small CAS aircraft. Attacking large transport aircraft effectively requires a considerably larger air defense system. That also assumes you can move a MANPADS within range; the US already controls a large military airfield on Greenland.
In 2006, the big 5 Western European states (UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain) had a similar share of global GDP PPP to the US, double China's, and 4x India's. In 2026, their share is now half of the US and China's and is comparable to India's.
The "rules based" model that the EU promulgated only worked in the 1990s-2000s when we lived in a unipolar world where the US and the EU represented the bulk of global production and those 5 countries had the economic power to successfully negotiate or pushback against the US.
The rise of Asian economies, EU expansion leading to the inclusion of hybrid regimes like Hungary and Poland under PiS who monkeywrenched procedural work within the EU, and the EU+UK's lost decade due to the Eurozone Crisis and Brexit degraded their comparative power.
Additionally, countries like the US, China, Russia, India, Japan, South Korea, etc also began strategically leveraging FDI in order to negotiate with subsets of EU states unilaterally, which reduced the EU's aggregate negotiating power.
Edit: Can't reply
> Why does being rules-based have anything to do with it?
Access to markets and capital along with defending IP are predicated on mutually agreeing to those terms. When the EU (then including the UK) was at it's peak in the 2000s, it was able to drive favorable IP protection and market access agreeements to help underwrite innovation. The European "rules-based" system also eschewed large scale subsidized industrial policy, viewing these as potentially accelerating trade wars.
This is less true now in the 2020s, with countries like the US, China, Japan, India, and others adopting large scale industrial policy and subsidy programs (IRA/CHIPS, Make in China, GX 2040, PLI) and co-opting pillars of European industry like Volkswagen, BMW, Stellantis, Renault, ZF, Bayer, Sanofi, GSK, Dassault, Airbus, Leonardo, Safran, Rolls Royce, Siemens, EDF, TotalEnergie, etc to join these programs on their terms and having them lobby for their interests in Brussels.
> I think the main "culprit" is energy
Industrial energy prices in Europe only began spiking in 2022 following Russia's escalation of it's invasion in Ukraine (it started back in 2014). The trends I mentioned began all the way back in 2007-12 when energy prices were at all time lows.
Why does being rules-based have anything to do with it? Innovation industries, especially software, have been the massive driver of GDP growth globally since the 1990s. The US and China have been excellent at nurturing those industries domestically (China with its heavy hand of government, the US with the rawest capitalistic structures to support innovation investments) while Europeean countries haven't.
I think the main "culprit" is energy. Europe has had expensive energy prices for decades. Even poor countries in Europe pay 2-3x more for gasoline than Americans do (because of taxes - The EU requires a minimum of $1.47 of excise taxes per gallon of gasoline). I think these energy prices compound to a lot of manufacturing and business not manifesting in Europe.
All the other stuff matters too, but it's crazy to think that paying 2-3x more for fuel wouldn't show up as a negative influence on the economy somewhere. This is particularly the case because Europe didn't go heavily into nuclear and it is one of the worse places for solar power.
Does your partial amnesia also affect the part where US tech companies such as Facebook actively embedded engineers within political campaigns who then ran fake news campaigns for extreme candidates, resulting in the two-time refusal of US voters to vote for a woman?
There was also significant Facebook involvement in fake news concerning Brexit, Rohingya genocide, anti-EU and anti-Ukraine sentiment.
Now that we have established that US tech workers have significantly harmed free people and societies in various countries, I have to point out that also your reasoning is all wrong.
Brexit, Hungary, and Trump are not an example that the EU "rules based" model is not working, quite the opposite. When the EU flourishes as a free society due to free trade between people with extremely different cultural backgrounds, the people living under autocrats notice that this is could also be an option for their own future.
Due to this fact, the EU has been under massive attack by autocrats for quite some time, and workers at US tech companies have played a vital role in amplifying these attacks.
People's attitudes often change when their sons and daughters are on the line.
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