The Russians Know We’re Stupid

Now even the Greenland question bears the hallmarks of Russian intel.

Image courtesy of PBS

Remember when the Russians fed disinformation to a rogue informant with an ax to grind against the Bidens, and Oversight Chair James Comer ran with it, falsely accusing the President and his son Hunter of accepting millions in bribes? That source, Alexander Smirnov, just got sentenced to six years for lying to the FBI, but the GOP has suffered zero political consequences. But it did teach us to be on the lookout for when the Russians may be manipulating our own officials to serve nefarious ends.

Now it turns out that all this crazy talk and even economic and military threats from Trump about the U.S. buying or seizing Greenland could be the Russians playing us again.

To understand what could be going on, we need to rewind a few years to when Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) rather weirdly first started beating the drum about buying Greenland from Denmark, then received a letter purportedly from Greenland’s foreign minister. As it turns out, the letter was highly likely a forgery from Russian intelligence.

Keep all of the below in mind going forward, especially whenever you see a headline about Greenland. The Russians entered the chat a long time ago, and we could be getting played.

A likely forged letter raises suspicions

There are whole divisions inside Russian intelligence whose job it is to sow division and discord in the West. It isn’t always clear whether they are the original instigators of such division or are merely amplifying the most extreme voices, as they recently did by funding right-wing influencers from Benny Johnson to Tim Pool.

When these operations strike at the heart of our representative government, the dangers grow exponentially because of the possible political repercussions and the close connections between Republican officials and the once and future Trump administration. The Smirnov example is a striking one, but now we have another possible one.

Kremlin watchers now suspect that the whole Greenland thing may be related to a Russian PsyOp. A Reuters report has resurfaced that, according to Danish intelligence, in October of 2019 the Russians forged a letter, supposedly from Greenland’s foreign minister, addressed to Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas. It falsely stated that Greenland was going to “organize a referendum on independence” as soon as possible.

It isn’t clear from the reporting whether Cotton knew this letter was likely a fake, or whether he ran with it. (If there are any investigative journalists out there reading this, this would be a good thing to follow up on.)

The letter clearly sought to leverage a spat between Trump and the Danish government from earlier that year, where the Danes had rebuffed Trump’s offer to buy the island, rightfully saying the idea was “absurd.” Trump had called the Danish Prime Minister’s remarks “nasty” and canceled a state visit.

Again, to be clear, we don’t know whether this was the first instance where the Russians tried to drive a further wedge between the U.S. and one of its NATO allies. But Sen. Cotton’s prior behavior deserves some new scrutiny.

Who started the whole Greenland thing?

It would be easy, and a mistake, to presume that Trump somehow randomly came up with the idea of forcing Denmark to sell Greenland. There have been news reports that one of the heirs to the Estée Lauder fortune, Ronald Lauder, a longtime friend of Trump’s, put the idea into Trump’s head.

But to hear the senator from Arkansas put it, it was originally in part Cotton’s idea. A local business news website, Talk Business & Politics, held a “power lunch” in Little Rock shortly after Trump had tweeted about the idea of buying Greenland. According to the site, Cotton claimed at that lunch to have proposed the idea to Trump in the first place, saying it was “obviously the right decision for this country.”

“You’re joking, but I can reveal to you that several months ago, I met with the Danish ambassador and I proposed that they sell Greenland to us,” Cotton told the crowd in response to a question. “I told the president you should buy it as well,” Cotton said, adding later that “He’s heard that from me and from some other people as well.”

Cotton elaborated on his thinking:

Cotton said Greenland’s mineral reserves and its strategic location make it an ideal strategy move for the U.S., noting that such reasons are why President Harry Truman offered $100 million in the 1940s. Cotton told the Red & Blue crowd that Greenland’s “economic potential is untold,” and the island is “vital to our national security.”

“Anyone who can’t see that is blinded by Trump derangement,” he said.

Or was it Cotton who was blinded by Russian intelligence? The notion that our own NATO ally needs to sell its territory to us in order for our national security interests to be protected cuts against the very idea of the Western military alliance. So where exactly did Cotton get the idea in his head?

Going wide

A week after making these remarks at the business power lunch in Arkansas, Cotton penned an OpEd for the New York Times.

In it, Cotton defended Trump, claiming the president was not “crazy” but rather “crazy like a fox.” He cited prior administrations’ efforts to buy the island from Denmark for strategic purposes (all of which pre-date Denmark becoming a part of NATO in 1949).

He also cited prior U.S. land purchases in an era of U.S. territorial expansion, including Alaska, Florida, the Louisiana Purchase and the Gadsden Purchase, as if Greenland were just another logical extension of that trend rather than a repudiation of the post-war international rules-based order respecting territorial integrity.

Cotton raised the bogeyman of China, noting that in 2016 Beijing had sought to purchase an old U.S. airbase and later tried to build three airports on the island, all of which, it should be noted, the Danish government declined to allow, but Cotton insists this was due to U.S. pressure.

And he made a pitch that the sale would somehow be good for all parties involved, never mind that neither Greenland nor Denmark wanted the transfer.

Cotton’s enthusiasm could explain why the Russians forged the letter to him to falsely imply that there was a strong movement on the island toward independence. But it is also fair to ask whether Cotton really has been staring at a map of Greenland this whole time thinking that it would be nice to paint it red, white and blue, or whether some folks in Russian intelligence with a mandate to manipulate U.S. politicians put the idea into his head and from there into Trump’s.

As a general rule of thumb, if it sounds crazy (“The Bidens took millions in bribes from Burisma!” “Russia invaded Ukraine because NATO forced its hand!” “Hey, maybe we should buy Greenland!”), check the source.

It’s at least even money that the Russians were there from the start, planting dumb but dangerous ideas into the heads of dumb but dangerous politicians.