Yes
i have an apple or Any round fruit on hand, peel it and try to give the entire skin a consistent flat shape. That is, try to extend it along a rectangle that you can then fit without problem between the pages of a book. It is not difficult, it is simply impossible, to the nightmare of cartographers who have been facing the problem since the Basque Juan Sebastián Elkano completed a trip around the world and confirmed that we live in a sphere.
Gerardus Mercator dedicated part of his life to solving the problem. The first trip around the world fascinated him during his childhood and in 1552 he set out to create a global atlas, a task to which he dedicated 17 long years and the result of which was a complete cosmography in which he drew the foundations of the world map that, 500 years later, we still have in mind.
Geographer Michel Foucher has just written an interesting piece about this cartographer in The Grand Continent and remember: “If maps distort space, it is not due to the negligence of cartographers, but out of necessity.” All maps transform and, in a certain sense, hide the reality they wish to capture. Even the full-scale map of an empire that Borges imagined in one of his stories could not help but obscure the real world.
In the case of Mercator, its projection distorted the poles, favoring the northern hemisphere, so that an island like Greenland appears larger than all of South America when, in reality, it is little larger than Mexico.
Foucher recalls that Mercator was persecuted and imprisoned by the Inquisition, which accused him of heresy for daring to adopt a divine point of view. He did it, furthermore, at a time when the most enlightened Europeans were beginning to wonder why the peoples who populated the American continent, whose existence they had just learned, did not appear in the Bible. In the Reformed Church they were not very happy with Mercator and his historical and geographical atlas.
But despite the Inquisition, the Mercator projection has arrived in great health and its defects intact to the 21st century, to the point of being one of the projections used, still today, by the most used map in the world: Google’s. And it is quite likely that, as Foucher suggests, Trump, a capricious child who likes to play god, has this map in mind when he tries to explain his hunger for Greenland.
This is how he explained it, already in 2021, at the end of his term, to Susan Glasser and Peter Baker, journalists from the New Yorker and of Times in Mar-a-Lago: “Why don’t we have it? Just look at a map (…) I haven’t stopped repeating it: look at the size of this island, it’s gigantic and should belong to the United States. It’s nothing more than a real estate operation, just on a slightly larger scale.”
For the wrong reasons, but perhaps the Inquisition was somewhat right in its qualms with world maps. They are a danger in the hands of children with power.
Because the truth is that Trump’s geopolitical arguments for seizing Greenland are stupid. Since the end of the Second World War, Europe has already been dancing to the tune set by Washington, and a forcible appropriation of Greenland would only implode the main tool with which the United States keeps it militarily tied: NATO.
The specific case of Denmark is textbook. Truman already tried to buy the island in 1946, claiming that it was “a vital area for the defense of the United States” and pointing out that this would relieve the Danish economy of having to support the island. Carlos Hernández-Echevarría has remembered these days in The Vanguard the Danish government’s response: “That is like suggesting to a man that he cure his toothache by cutting off his head.” Leaving aside the colonial logic with which Denmark operates in Greenland – we will return here another day –, the truth is that Copenhagen refused to sell Greenland, but it laid out a red carpet for the US in the bilateral treaty of 1951, still in force, granting a patent of marque to the US army to do in the enclave what it deems appropriate, with the only condition that the flag flies at the entrance to its bases, along with the stars and stripes. Danish.
Since then, Denmark’s alignment with US foreign policy has been millimetric. He was a founding and enthusiastic member of NATO, he sent his army to Afghanistan for two decades and participated in the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, to give three examples.
This will continue to be the case, given Trump’s crab maneuver, which has backed down with the threats of tariffs against eight European countries that maneuvered with some vigor against his annexationist aspirations. The experience does not encourage us to be very optimistic, because this retreat does not mean that the desire to appropriate Greenland has subsided, and because there is no news of a deep reflection on what happened in the European capitals. But these could at least draw a small lesson: it is when Trump is confronted that negotiation begins to be possible.
