What Just Happened
The Vance family vacation
Welcome. Common Sense and Whiskey a short, sharp, once a week look at the world out there. This week we consider the Vice President’s family fun trip to Greenland.
CS&W started out as a travel blog, so with all this American interest in the High North, today we’ll share an excerpt from my 2017 book about a trip to remote eastern Greenland.
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Let’s get to it:
Quickly, before we get to Greenland, two quick things:
CLASSIFIED COMMS: The other huge story this week was the Trump national security team sharing an intimate war planning conversation with Jeffrey Goldberg via the messaging app called Signal. You’ve heard the details.
Just something to consider. The lack of tradecraft and disregard for procedure ought not come as a surprise. It’s a basic tenet of the second Trump administration, and indeed the whole MAGA movement, that your rules of behavior, decorum and long-established protocol don’t apply to me. For that matter, they don’t apply to convicted MAGA insurrectionists either.
BLACK SEA CEASE FIRE: The new administration is trying its best to pin Russia down to an agreement, any agreement. The Trump team this week heralded a cease fire it tried to negotiate in the Black Sea, then backtracked because the Kremlin had further demands.
A couple of points: an agreement in the Black Sea isn’t something Ukraine has been clamoring for, or even particularly needs, since it has already run the Russian navy off from the occupied Crimean peninsula to seek safety in points farther east. More importantly, consider this:
This document from the Trump administration indicates that the United States, acting as an agent for Russia, will seek to ease sanctions on Russia. It declares the US will “help restore Russia’s access to the world market for agricultural and fertilizer exports.” Just watch how many Russian exporters and banks will overnight become active in fertilizer and agriculture.
The US also pledges to “enhance access to ports and payment systems for such transactions.” This means Russia’s return to the SWIFT banking system. The Biden administration, reluctant at first to effectively disconnect Russian banks from the global financial system, initially removed only select Russian banksed from SWIFT, and then broadened those sanctions over time, to get where we are now.
Any Trump administration move to ease Russia back into SWIFT will run into problems. SWIFT is run out of Brussels and the European Union appears unwilling to relax sanctions, at least among its members. The Telegraph reported on Wednesday:
“(A) European Commission spokesman said: ‘The end of the Russian unprovoked and unjustified aggression in Ukraine and unconditional withdrawal of all Russian military forces from the entire territory of Ukraine would be one of the main preconditions to amend or lift sanctions.’”
•••••
NOW TO THE THE HIGH NORTH: The second Trump administration this week visited its signature thoughtful, methodical American diplomacy on Greenland.
Greenland’s week of all-American fun started Sunday with the arrival in Nuuk, its capital, of two US Air Force Hercules aircraft bearing bulletproof limousines for Usha Vance’s family visit. But by Wednesday, they were gone.
On Monday America’s Senatorial font of clarity and concision, Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), explained everything. He told us the administration’s plans to frog march JD Vance’s wife and one of their children, ages three to seven, into Greenland this week to learn about dogsleds was, well, "It's as much about for the people of Greenland as anything. If you just listen to them talk, when they interview them, they're all in on it. Now we're gonna have problems with the other group across the water.”
That was Monday. On Tuesday, by golly gosh, the Vice President explained further:
“There was so much excitement around Usha’s visit to Greenland this Friday that I decided that I didn’t want her to have all that fun herself.”
“A lot of other countries have threatened Greenland, have threatened to use its territories and its waterways to threaten the United States, to threaten Canada and of course to threaten the people of Greenland, so we’re gonna check out how things are going there.”
“Unfortunately, leaders in both America and in Denmark I think ignored Greenland for far too long. That’s been bad for Greenland; it’s also been bad for the security of the entire world. We think we can take things in a different direction, so I’m gonna go check it out.”
That was worrisome, the thing about the threats. Thought I’d better find out more, so I asked ChatGPT:
Hmmm.
There was some wilder speculation online this week from people I don’t normally think of as conspiracy theorists. Have a look:
This was worrisome because unlike Senator Tuberville, both Snyder and Frum have extensive knowledge of international affairs. Snyder is a historian and professor at Yale and Frum was a speechwriter for W. Bush.
But never mind about all that because by Wednesday, everything changed. As the Washington Post had it:
“Second Lady Usha Vance was scheduled to arrive in Greenland this week to take in the cultural sights and attend a dogsled race with one of her children. Scratch that. Plans have changed. Now Vice President JD Vance is joining his wife for a one-day tour at the isolated U.S. space base intended to defend America against ballistic missile attack.”
By now it seems, the Danish leadership (Denmark once ruled Greenland and retains responsibility for its foreign affairs, defense, and monetary policy, although Greenland has a say) was spending the week learning the MAGA concept of ‘alternate facts,’ introduced in 2017, at the beginning of the first Trump administration.
Judging from its incredulity that an American adminstration would act this way, it appears Copenhagen missed, ladies and gentlemen, Kelleyeanne Conway, Senior Counselor to the President, the day after inauguration day 2017:
Official Denmark didn’t react well to the pushy Americans acting just like their national stereotype. The British Guardian newspaper put it this way:
Fury in Denmark over US senator's comments Greenlanders are 'all in' on US plans
Republican US senator Tommy Tuberville claimed in an interview with Fox Business earlier that Greenlanders are “all in on it,” referring to US plans to take control over the semi-autonomous Danish territory.
His comments sparked a furious reaction from Danish diplomats and lawmakers, adding fuel to the growing frustration with what they see as the US interference in Danish and Greenlandic politics.
Danish ambassador Jesper Møller Sørensen told Tuberville in a social media post that he “simply got this wrong.”
“You have to revisit your facts on Greenland, including what the people want.
It is not respectful to send a delegation of senior officials at this time, when the Greenlandic politicians say that they do not want this visit.”
Rasmus Jarlov, outspoken chair of the defence committee in the Danish parliament, went further saying “it is very hard to deal with this.”
“The leader of Greenland viciously says no. Every single member of the Greenlandic parliament says no. They just had an election two weeks ago. No one who wants to be American was elected. Not a single one,” he said.
He added that a recent poll showed that 85% of Greenlanders are against leaving Denmark, and only 6% backed the move towards the US.
He continued:
“It is almost unanimous. Never has a NO been clearer.
Yet these [expletive] people just continue to lie and tell the American public that people in Greenland want to be part of the USA. And the American ‘journalists’ let them get away with it.
It is unbelievable.”
That’s plain speaking.
By Thursday the British Independent newspaper explained everything. Sort of. Maybe:
“The US Consulate initially reached out to Tupilak Travel in Nuuk ahead of the days-long visit, during which the second lady and one of her children would ‘immerse themselves’ in Greenlandic culture and visit the annual dogsled race.”
But Tupilak Travel later changed its mind:
“When the American consulate called yesterday to ask if the wife of the U.S. Vice President, Usha Vance, could visit our store on Friday, we replied that she was welcome.
“After all, everyone is welcome in our store.
“However, upon further consideration, we have now informed the consulate that we do not wish to host her visit, as we cannot accept the underlying agenda and do not want to be part of the media spectacle that will inevitably follow.
“No thanks to [a] nice visit… Greenland belongs to the Greenlanders.”
•
This week of Trump administration diplomacy ends with the Vances scheduled to fly into and out of the Pituffik military base in northwest Greenland on Friday. Before a captive press there, a thousand miles from Nuuk, Mr. Vance can further develop the anti-Europe rhetoric he introduced in Munich (and continued in the Signal chat with Jeffrey Goldberg) without the potential embarrasment of protests by pesky locals.
But in the process, it looks like the Vances will miss that dog sled race. Sympathetic members of the press will have us think the wholesome, holiday seeking vice presidential couple (with still unspecified child) is just making nice after realizing they’ve maybe pushed a little too hard on the whole Greenland thing.
But not the White House. As the Vances packed their extra snuggly gloves on Thursday afternoon ABC News reported that the president told reporters in the Oval Office that the U.S. will "go as far as we have to go" to get control of Greenland.
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Now, here’s a bit of the story I wrote about a visit to Tasiilaq, on Greenland’s east coast, excerpted from my book Out in the Cold, Travels North: Adventures in Svalbard, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland and Canada.
Getting to Tasiilaq
First thing we have to do, we have to find Robert.
The men smoking outside the concrete block airport terminal are not Robert so I ask around inside. The man behind the check-in counter might as well be collecting Arctic tumbleweeds. No flights are pending; no one is checking in.
He does not know Robert.
Together we lean over his counter to look down to the harbor. One boat is speeding away and there don’t seem to be any others. He flips his palms up and shakes his head, “I think you just go down there and wait. That is your only chance.”
•••••
Humans inhabit the fringe, the perimeter of Greenland not flattened by the ice cap, and I mean flattened, literally. Even with its thinning, ice reaches three kilometers deep at its thickest, pushing the bedrock into the mantle such that if the ice disappeared, the island would become an archipelago.
You can’t fly to Tasiilaq, the biggest town on the eastern side of Greenland, for lack of sufficient flat space for an airstrip. So we have flown to a gravel strip called Kulusuk airport. To get to Tasiilaq we must traverse the mouth of the Ammassalik fjord. We booked that online and all we know is, get to Kulusuk and ask for Robert.
We can see our destination twenty kilometers across the fjord behind a few icebergs and a coastline of precambrian rock thrust from the sea long before humanity, possibly even contemporaneous with the first life on earth.
We invade and insult the silence with our prissy roll aboard carry-on bags, scraping and skipping the damned things down the rough gravel. Show more respect and stand still, and the quiet closes up around you as a vehement, absolute thing.
A man from Cologne with a massive backpack walks ahead of us. He has arrived with no itinerary beyond walking for two weeks. His pack reaches up past his head, bulging with two weeks of freeze dried food and powdered milk.
Once he walked from Ilullisat to Sisimiut in western Greenland, and that is far, far farther than from here to Tasiilaq and then clear around the island, but that time he was advised that there was no danger of polar bears and he has yet to be so advised here. His itinerary may have to be revised based on local information. Right now he plans to circumambulate Ammassalik island. He puts great store in the advice of Robert, but none of us know how to find him.
Airport to harbor, perhaps a twenty minute walk. No boats in sight. Either side of the gravel path, just rock and a little but not much tenacious flora. Our destination across the water is low and bare with mountains rising snow capped, glaciers embedded toward the top. Clouds tease the ridges but do not suggest a threat of rain. In between individual icebergs, not a field, rise like several-story buildings.
It turns out that two tiny Danish-built fiberglass Poca speedboats, so low slung that the dock hides them both, bob in the sea beyond the dock. Two Greenlandic men stand down there on the shore below the dock, neither in so much as a jacket, enjoying the northern summer.
We ask, “Robert?” and the younger man, with no English, shakes his head no, “Christian.” We and the backpacker, who is expecting the same ride, are at a bit of a loss until we work out, through gestures and good will, that Christian is on behalf of Robert. For us, that is good.
The dock is too high for the boats, and so we scramble down onto rocks to climb aboard, and Christian takes the backpacker, my wife Mirja and me screaming across the fjord toward a similar spot on the far shore. Christian, hair stood up to a greased crown, drives standing, and stops us dead in the water alongside this iceberg, then that, so we can take photos.
We clamber out on a rock where there is no dock at all. Christian motions without words, “up that way,” and makes no move to leave the boat. So off we scramble, not having paid anybody for anything, off to find someone who wants our money. Robert, maybe.
Inuit folks seldom keep individual dogs as pets, but rather tether them in groups outside in summer, and we rouse the mild attention of a pack of tethered dogs as we troop up the hill. Inuit sled dogs have two layers of fur, the inner short, like wool for insulation, and the outer longer, coarser and water repellent. That may make them hot today but overall, they are surely chillin’, taking the warm season off, lounging all day except when growling and snapping over territory.
A vehicle makes its way down the hill picking its path, for the way is gravel and bumpy. A slight girl stops to ask that we wait here, drives down the road to drop some camping supplies and returns to drive us to the Red House, a tour shop and hostel run by the famous Robert.
Robert’s reputation should have preceded him. Turns out in 1983, extreme explorer Robert Peroni from the Italian south Tyrol walked across the Greenland ice cap, all the way across the island at its widest point, some 1400 kilometers, on an 88 day journey.
Now 72, Robert stands before us trim and erect, and above all relieved to find we aren’t planning to stay in his hostel, for he is booked solid as he would hope to be in a very short high season. We pay him for the crossing from Kulusuk, bid farewell, and the girl drives us up the hill to the Hotel Angmagssalik.
•••••
There was a time when airline passengers celebrated successful landings. I remember applause in 1986 when my Lufthansa flight landed in Frankfurt from Moscow. I thought it was as likely for getting the bloody hell out of the Soviet Union.
We came over from Iceland today on a brand new, gleaming Air Iceland Bombardier Q400 prop plane, twenty rows two by two. Bustling their baby refreshment cart up and down the aisle meant actual work for the flight attendants, compared to the doorman role they play on short domestic flights.
Come time to land, the plane took on a buzz incongruent with today’s humdrum air travel. In a small plane you’ve more of a sense of flying, and when the pilot maneuvered to dip under the clouds and between the mountains, we all craned to be the first to see icebergs, and phone cameras filled the windows. The runway at Kulusuk came up fast and we rode it right to the end lights.
About fifty of the seventy aboard were here for a day trip. Over in the morning, touch the soil, check Greenland off your list and fly back. I met a taxi driver in Reykjavik who said he did it as a fifteen year old.
What did they do?
They deplaned, someone took them around the side of the terminal and they watched a man in a costume play a drum and a fat woman dance.
Some months ago he drove a man to do the same and picked him up later that day. What did they do? A drum and a dance.
Read the rest in my book Out in the Cold, Travels North: Adventures in Svalbard, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland and Canada.
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Bill
Guess what's a happy happenstance? Greenland is also one of the few parts of the Earth that will survive the first of the desertification of our planet. Republicans are hypocritical about the climate, but this emphasis on this now cold, but later much much warmer part of the world reveals how serious they know climate change to be. Many of them don't really understand, since they disdain science. But if Greenland is where the last season of Survivor will play out, then somebody is planning to profit from it.
Also, your esteem for the current administration is evident. ("font of clarity and concision") Well, what else are you going to do with swasti-cons?