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Comment by OgsyedIE | Hacker News Reader

There aren't that many frozen land grab disputes to begin with AFAICT. Tiny parts of the US/Canada border, Venezuela/Guyana, Kosovo, Cyprus, Armenia, Angola, India/Pakistan, Taiwan, Timor. Even if all of them went, wouldn't the sum of these be relatively contained?

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USA/Greenland was never a land dispute.

In fact, people thought it was a joke all the times he mentioned it.

So if it does become a real thing, it sets the stage for new “disputes” to be created, which aren’t actually disputes but larger countries deciding to take over other countries’ land simply because they can.

It’s the sentiment. It changes everything. The world generally stopped annexing countries after WW2 because the US set the rules.

Now that the US is annexing countries again, then other countries will consider as well.

Obviously, China will take Taiwan in this case. But what’s really stopping China from annexing Vietnam? Japan next? SK? They can claim the same “security need” that the US is claiming for Greenland.

If the US does this, the next 100 years will be similar to the 1800s in terms of expansion by super powers.

In the case of Vietnam the PLA had a deeply-unsuccessful attempt in 1979 and they had a strategic deterrent the last time, too, so it's unclear if anything has changed for them.

1979 China is different in capabilities from 2025 China.

Russia seems to have designs of the rest of the planet, pretty much.

There's no historic dispute involved over Greenland.

Russia will press on to claim the entire eastern Europe.

China will grab Taiwan.

And of course, countries will simply invent new disputes. Trump is already ahead by bringing up Panama and Canada, but more will follow.

These events could very likely lead to WW3 and you want to call that "contained"? Give me a break.

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