Greenland..Really?

Yes, really..and it’s not nearly as crazy as the usual suspects make it sound.

Looks like Donald Trump just had his Reagan moment after all.

In 1986, against the advice of his advisors, Ronald Reagan walked out of nuclear weapons talks with Mikhail Gorbachev once the Soviet leader demanded an end to the Gipper’s Strategic Defense Initiative or SDI.

Reagan had already surprised the nation with a speech on ballistic missile defense (BMD) three years earlier and the dangerous proliferation of nuclear weapons had worried him for years.¹

As it turned out, his media-maligned ‘Star Wars’ plan led to the financial arms race that broke the back of the Soviet Union. The Berlin Wall would fall, the U.S.S.R. would unravel and at long last, 45 years of Cold War between two nuclear-armed superpowers would end.

Or would it?

Ever since 1991, what President Dwight D. Eisenhower called the ‘military industrial complex’ has been doing its best to keep it alive. Ike—who as supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force during WWII, knew a little bit about the horror of war—warned about a permanent arms industry whose influence would extend from Capitol Hill to the halls of academia.

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades. In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government…