Trump vs reality; the Greenland episode

[hidetheelephants]

While the Tangerine Tyrant's wibblings about Greenland have been his usual fantastical fact-free, thought-free stream-of-unconsciousness bks, the articles about it have contained a common thread of what appears to be uncritically regurgitated rubbish; for example this Guardian piece mentions Rare Earths several times and has this as the last paragraph;

Grauniad said:

China sees Greenland as a possible source of rare earth minerals and other resources as well as a location for a port to ship through the Arctic to the eastern US.

China already has as much RE sources as it needs; you could make a devil's advocate argument that they might want to buy the rights to Greenland's RE deposits to keep other miners out, but REs are, contrary to their name, not very rare so buying up the rights to the world's RE deposits is a losing strategy even if it were possible. The same applies to the US or any other national or corporate player; buying the rights is pointless as the stuff is abundant. The bottleneck for the US is thorium; there's plenty of RE deposits in the US(indeed there are REs sitting in mine tailings, you don't even need to dig the stuff out of the ground), but as with REs more or less everywhere they appear with varying amounts of thorium, thorium is a source material and therefore regulated up the yingyang as though it's the same as uranium. Unmanageable liability via thorium caused US RE mines to either shut or never open in the first instance. Similar liability issues arise in other countries.

TL;DR if the US(or anyone really) dealt with thorium on a evidence/science-lead basis rather than as if it can be made into nuclear bombs(which it can't) the Chinese monopoly of RE problem could be made to go away, or at least be dealt with far more easily; wibbling about Greenland will do nothing about it at all.

Why the Chinese would want a port in Greenland is unclear, the reason presented is bks. Does anyone in medialand actually think about what they're writing, or is it just one ill-informed and very busy writer whose work gets cut-and-pasted into the Daily Bugle by Phil Space?

[hidetheelephants]

Eric Mc said:

He would have preferred to buy Norway but the best he could come up with was Greenland - white people, cold, no black or brown people - what's the difference?

Greenland pop is mostly inuit, so probably as brown as the Puerto Ricans.

Derek Smith said:

The UK wanted to take over Greenland during the war, with the assistance of Canada. There was a large area in the middle of the Atlantic that was unprotected by aircover needed to protect convoys. The USA exerted political pressure to stop such an unprincipled actions. Once the USA entered the war, they set up a number of bases in Greenland, using the method that the UK and Canada did in Iceland.

The justification for taking over Iceland - it was just bases, very much in the same way that there were USA forces based in the UK - was that it was to stop the Germans doing the same. I doubt it was on their 'to do' list, at least not until Russia was subdued. It would have provided a useful base if Germany had won in Russia and then had to deal with a belligerent UK.

Aside from the strategic basing aspect Iceland was offered a tacit deal of "Look what the germans just did to Norway; let's avoid that happening to you", albeit delivered by a boatload of Royal Marines.