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Radio War Nerd EP #498 — Greenlandia, feat. Jakob Stenfalk (Patreon)

Published:
2025-02-08 01:59:45
Imported:
2025-02
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Guest: Jakob StenfalkRecorded: February 5, 2025

We talk to Denmark-based friend of the show Jakob Stenfalk about Greenland, Trump, Erik the Red, shipping lanes & Empire...

*Maps-A lot of us grow up thinking Greenland is bigger than Africa

-it's still big...

-Geological map

-Perfect place for a Trump golf course

Total time: 1:26:28Direct link to this episode's mp3 here

*

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Sound production by Telescope Audio

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Files

Comments

David Andrews

Very creative topic and appropriate guest.

Peter Z

Tak for det. Love the dry Danish sense of humour. The dodgy reality show "Ice Cold Gold" showed them mining for precious stones there more than 10 years ago. Apparently there's two active mines today for rubies/sapphires and for anorthosite. But I absolutely think this is about China and rare earth competition, of which Greenland is thought to have some of the largest deposits and has a large controversial Kvanefjeld project rejected due to high uranium "bycatch". The US EXIM bank is already funding projects in Aus/Brazil so imagine it's a big issue on their minds. BTW, I thought Denmark got rich by using Baltic toll booths! 😉

Hans Anders

Apologists for colonialism often refer to frequent bankruptcies of plantations to argue no money was made. But of course, the planters taking out huge loans to start a plantation and get yellow fever on another continent were never the real winners. The money made was in the banks and the colonial plunder was in the homes of the European metropole.

a clash of purple

My father actually went out to Thule (now Pituffik) to clean up after that American bomber carrying nukes crashed in Greenland. He was in the part of the U.S. Navy that dealt with nuclear weapons (it was an Air Force base, like Jakob said, but the Air Force can't do anything for themselves). He talks about spending a lot of time scanning the icefield for alpha particles (alpha radiation is funny, it can be blocked by human skin or even a sheet of paper, but it's extremely toxic if inhaled or ingested). Bent over, running the device along the ice for hours at a time, in those arctic conditions... sounds pretty miserable to me. The bomber smashed through the ice, which then refroze over it. I assume they recovered any sensitive material from the bombs it was carrying, but who knows. I donno if anyone ever bothered to dredge the plane up out of the water or if they just left it there. My father was only part of the operation early on, then other guys took over later. Apparently the crashed bomber was part of some dumbass American project to test the Soviets' ability to detect and respond to incursions into their airspace over the arctic circle. I have no idea what the point was besides to waste taxpayer money and make a few hundred guys freeze their balls off hanging out with the Danes. If we could blow up, like, Murmansk and Arkhangelsk without warning, so what? Not like it'd stop them from nuking us back.

Jakob Stenfalk

Denmark did get rich briefly from the Sound Due, yes. But then Sweden broke off from the Kalmar Union, and there were a couple of wars, and by the end of those wars, the only part of Denmark that wasn't occupied by the Swedish was the capital. At which point the English and Dutch sent an expeditionary force and kicked the Swedes out, because from their perspective a re-unified Kalmar Union under Sweden would be bad for business. They wanted a small, weak country sitting in the Sound, precisely so it would be harder to collect dues there. The way Denmark got rich in modern times was the usual Western European way: Slaves and sugar. Denmark was majorly into the Atlantic triangle trade. And then there was a bit of selling food and fertilizer to both sides of the first world war, which is always a lot more profitable than getting your own guys blasted in some godforsaken trench (the Danish learned that indirect fire artillery is no fun when Prussia resolved the Slesvig Question in 1864, and were not keen to repeat the experience).

Jakob Stenfalk

And most of it is never even accounted for. A large part of the benefit of having a colony is that you get to suppress prices for the goods you get from it. So a colony that produces a thousand ducats of sugar *at the sugar price set by the empire* might have been able to get two thousand ducats for their sugar, if they had been allowed to set prices more freely. So even if that colony is running at a 500 ducat "loss" (however you even calculate that), the metropole is still getting a third again as much cargo as it would under a trade system with no colonies. There's a million different places to hide that ball, all the accounting conventions take the assumption that prices are trustworthy representations of value, and constructing the counterfactual where there is no colonialism is probably impossible. So "the colony runs at a loss" is IMO not even a meaningful statement in most contexts.

Benjamin Glover

john finally getting social security just as the system bricks is extremely on brand

Conor O'Rourke

+1 for the episode about how empires hide the ball about colonial resource extraction

William

Does the US attacking Denmark trigger article 5

William

This guest is just the war nerd doing a danish accent. You can’t fool me, John!

Paula M. Løvås

Thank you, Mark, John, Brendon and Jakob! This was a great episode with a level-headed attempt at teasing out some of the dynamics at play regarding all of this. Left media (or whatever) in the Anglosphere is uninterested in anything beyond what this says about Trump and what it means for the US. It doesn’t really get any better over here, most Scandi media in general is seemingly unable to conceive of any geopolitical perspective or curiosity that decouples itself from the terms laid out by the imperial core almost a century ago. We should all be so lucky if you came across another reason to brush up against the workings and history (naivety, hypocrisy??) of the NATO goings-on around here 😇🥹🇳🇴🥴 Once again, tusen takk!

William

I think I missed it, but is the mineral wealth of Greenland inaccessible to exploitation?

Philip Girvan

Well done, Jakob. The No More Mr Nice Guy Trump 2.0 vindictiveness, DOGE brazenness, and the risk aversive, don’t make waves tendency of the civil service is playing out in fascinating/horrifying ways, and I’m glad this was touched upon. Appreciated Jakob’s comments contrasting the likely Goldman Sachs approach to a similar assault, and the hypothetical breaking point. Curious and terrified at how this will play out and look forward hearing further discussion on RWN.

Jonathan Penn

First, a small nit- the film "Greenland" had people fleeing to Greenland to escape an on-coming comet, not a nuclear war. Second, the US has something of a history of stealing Greenland's minerals. In 1894, Peary took three large fragments of the Cape York meteor (Ahnighito, The Woman, The Dog) from Greenland to the American Museum of Natural History in NYC, where they remain on display to this day. Apparently the Inuit people had used them as a source of metal for several centuries but never mind that. Lastly, given that Trump wants to generate maximum distraction, sending a few platoons from the 10th Mountain Division would be enough to take over Greenland at almost no cost and would generate the kind of apoplectic headlines and coverage he craves. It is a totally crazy idea, but that is well within his wheelhouse. That this is even a subject for discussion is mind-boggling. A line from the song, "The Bum Won," in the musical "Fiorello," "who would guess that the people would go to the polls and elect a fanatic? People can do what they want to but I have a feeling it ain't democratic."

Trevor Kroger

"They're testing in production like the Oceangate guy" - that just fucking killed me.

Peter Z

Not inaccessible (two active mines today) but expensive with logistical ingress/egress issues, mechanical breakdown in tough conditions, highly-regulated (which is fine), Uranium levels exceed legislated 100ppm levels in some Rare Earth areas.

Peter Z

As Jakob said - does it matter? US as the angry teenager: "Do what I want"

a clash of purple

I thought he sounded like Danish J.R.R. Tolkien. I half-expected him to exasperatedly call someone a fool of a Took.

a clash of purple

If Greenland has all these valuable minerals, why hasn't America already conquered it? What's the point of this stupid empire if we can't even seize control of all these delicious exploitable resources with only a few Danes in the way? Sheesh.

HarshMalarkey

Nothing like a podcast can undeceive.

triplevalaska

I think they missed how it going to happen there has been a bunch of articles about how Greenland wants independence which America will obviously fund, then once that happens trump has won, it won't happen immediately but america will swarm in

J P 3

Great episode. Some good insights too regarding Trump's motivations. A follow-up episode regarding the balance of payment/trade, which was also alluded to would be a good follow-up episode some day too (e.g. colonies that are "money losing" enterprises).

Jackm

I don't visit facebook and hadn't seen Jakob's posts on Patreon. Quite the revelation! Much looking forward to the next time you bring him on. ASAP maybe?

etienne

I have a pet theory about the Panama thing, I was reading that the lake has had a drought for years and have been on and off with cut backs on the number of crossings allowed to save the water, so this could come into Trump's weird fixation with the water, and how technocrats aren't letting people use the water that's there. I remember during his first run he mentioned the low-flow bathroom fixtures, now earlier there was the stunt where he foced the Corps of Engineers to open some random dam in the central valley to absolutely zero effect. Folks they're keeping the water for themselves! We're going to get our water back!

R Renaldi

Remember him leading chants at rallies about how many times you have to flush the toilet? Four, five, six times! People loved it

James Johnson

Great episode, and to add a humorous episode in the history of Yankees in Greenland, Camp Century was planned to be a nuke-proof base under the ice until they realized 1) that the ice moves and 2) they would quickly be drowning in their own poop. Surprisingly of all podcasts, Boonta Vista did an episode on it that you can find by searching “Theo Philes V,” I highly recommend

fw

Great, really informative episode, great guest, "we could spend a whole show on [shipping flow]" - genuinely, absolutely yes please! Would adore this, it's really not covered at all. Very relevant to war - see Maersk involvement in gaza genocide for one example. One note: many Inuit people consider esk*mo a slur (some self identification with the term aside), similar to GRT people and the term g*psy (hence the asterisks).

fw

Sorry, hadn't heard of this, sounds incredible though, is there footage of this one?

fw

yes aside from being very sharp, Jakob is extremely funny, I laughed a lot this ep

CR

Greenland was dogshit even compared to Butler’s typical output.

CR

The problem is that the people who know useful details about shipping, especially the oil and gas industry, never talk.

Aditya V

Fantastic episode

a clash of purple

Well, "Eskimo" is an exonym, like "Indian" for native americans, so obviously it's not the term they'd prefer to use. But didn't you hear? That dragon wokeness is dead. It's okay to call people retards again, and I assume at least some racial slurs have also been released from cancel culture jail. The n word is still no good, I assume, but eskimo and gypsy are probably acceptable again. I would say I'm being ironic, but irony is also dead, so who knows, frankly.

a clash of purple

fw, this isn't the toilets, but it's foreshadowing the water crisis we have in California today. Apparently Gruesome Gavin Newsome in California was diverting millions of gallons of water into the Pacific Ocean in order to save a tiny fish that wasn't doing well anyway(?) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHo7aKgHo-s This isn't a rally, but he's talking about needing to flush the toilet ten times https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGChTEfeeC4 and then he repeated that line about needing to repeatedly flush the toilet at a few rallies

fw

I only mentioned it because I assumed that, like most Americans, Ames wasn't even aware it was considered a slur at all; whether racial slurs are en courant isn't really something I assume people who listen to RWN would care about. CR - Exactly!

Tom Warner

"in a country with a real opposition" is SUCH a key point imo, ain't nobody dying for the shambling remnant of the Obama/Biden/Harris dynasty. even in 1991 people died trying to save the Soviet Union! not many, but more than zero

Noah Karep

Was Mark joking, or does he not know Häagen Dazs is an American brand?

radiowarnerd

Not to mention that--why did it have to have a real nuke on board? Couldn't they just have had a couple of dumpsters full of sandbags?

etienne

yesterday he was talking about siphoning canada's water for the US

a clash of purple

I mixed up the details. The bomber that crashed was part of Operation Chrome Dome, where nuclear bombers were kept flying continuously in various regions so that, in case of a Soviet attack, the U.S. could guarantee a retaliatory strike. I don't think Annibale mentioned Chrome Dome specifically in his eps on nuclear bombers and the Valkyrie, but it's part of that world. The crash at Thule in 1968 was only one of the multiple nuclear accidents associated with Chrome Dome, but it was the last one; the Air Force finally shut down the operation after that (McNamara had already tried to nix it in 1966 because ballistic missile technology had rendered nuclear bombers redundant). Fun fact: during the crash the explosives in the four atomic bombs in the B-52 did go off (without causing a fissile reaction; they were just regular explosions that scattered radioactive debris around), and the remains of only three were recovered at the time. The fourth was never definitively recovered. The recovery teams tried to use a submersible to look for it, but they experienced a lot of technical problems and eventually gave up. At the insistence of the Danish government, we boxed up most of the contaminated ice and water and shipped it back to America for disposal, but I'm sure some of the stuff is still there. The half-life of Plutonium-240 is only 6,600 years, though, so it'll only remain dangerous for another 6,540 years or so. Unfortunately Uranium-238's half-life is 4.5 billion years, so we'll have to wait a little longer on that. Hopefully none of it found its way into any Greenlanders' food or drinking water. I don't know if the fact that the bomber was flying this Chrome Dome patrol route years after everyone understood that ICBMs were good enough to render nuclear bombers unnecessary makes that explanation better or worse than what I incorrectly said before about testing the Soviets' radar capabilities. I'm not sure I understand what Chrome Dome was supposed to accomplish, besides just wasting taxpayer money and causing nuclear accidents and potentially spooking the Soviets. By the 1960s I would think it would be practically impossible for a Soviet first strike to remove America's ability to launch a decisive retaliatory strike, regardless of whether we used ICBMs or manned bombers. The flights from Thule had a secondary purpose of visually confirming the integrity of BMEWS (Ballistic Missile Early Warning System), a set of radar installations intended to detect Soviet aircraft intruding over the Arctic. At that time their connection to the base could be spotty (I think it was just a big cable that ran back to Thule), so they wanted to check on them with airplanes every so often (I guess if the pilot reported back that the radar dishes had become smoldering craters, America would launch everything). Not sure why they thought they needed B-52s carrying nuclear bombs to look and see whether some radar sites were still intact, but maybe it was just on the way for their patrol route.

Mark Ames

I kept coming across the term "Paleo Eskimo" while researching for the episode, far as I can tell it is (or was until the last 5-10 years) more of a standard term for pre-Inuit peoples whereas no one really uses "Eskimos" to describe indigenous peoples in Alaska.

Jakob Stenfalk

Yes, we didn't get around to that - that's absolutely how they would do it if they were being savvy about it. But Trump likes woofing and he thinks being savvy is a gendered slur.