What does Trump want with Greenland? Nothing short of full annexation
Maduro who? It has been a little over (checks calendar) two weeks since Donald Trump’s raid on Venezuela and yet you would be forgiven for struggling to remember the full details of the US’s abduction of that country’s president. South America is old news; today it’s all about the Arctic. Over the weekend, the US president announced (Truth Socialed?) a new round of 10 per cent tariffs (potentially rising to 25 per cent) against eight European countries (France, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland) until they change their minds about supporting his designs on Greenland.
Cue a global poring over of the 1951 Greenland defence agreement between Denmark and the US to find out what exactly those designs might look like. In this regard, I speak from experience – I too was buffing up on my Greenlandic history. As you read this sentence, depending on where you are in the world, I am either in Nuuk or on an Air Greenland A332 over the North Sea. All week, I and two of my colleagues, Andrew Mueller and Lily Austin, will be reporting from Greenland, speaking to the Danish territory’s leaders, business owners and ordinary residents to find out what Trump’s threats might mean for the world’s largest island and its people.
Before we hear their views, we must ask the question about what the US president’s calculus is when it comes to Greenland. In one way, this is easier than it might be with any previous holder of his office. Trump appears to conduct all of his negotiating in public and often via social media. Since the 1951 agreement puts no barriers on Washington increasing its military presence on the territory – and it is highly likely that Copenhagen (or Nuuk) would kowtow to any American efforts to be granted favourable extraction rights of the supposed treasure trove of oil, gas and rare earth minerals buried beneath its frozen scape – it must be that Trump wants nothing short of annexation. Indeed, he has essentially said as much.
At the moment, the leaders of those aforementioned European nations are taking a stand, somewhat shakily, against Trump’s calls, while Greenland’s prime minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, continues to insist that, were they given such a binary choice, his people would choose rule from Copenhagen over Washington. The view from the ground, however, seems to show majority support for an eventual move towards full Greenlandic independence. A small contingent of troops from European countries including France, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Finland, the Netherlands and the UK arrived in Nuuk last week, though the numbers are hardly enough to fill a commercial flight, let alone defend a vast landmass against the world’s most powerful military.
Would it ever come to that? Probably not. Europe seems not to have the strength to even engage in a war of words with Trump, let alone actual combat, and its dispatching of soldiers is merely a gesture meant to satisfy Washington’s claims that it requires Greenland to counter the Chinese and Russian threat in the Arctic. And yet, the European move seems to have provoked Trump more than it has assuaged his apparent concerns. Could it even cause him to do the unthinkable? A US invasion of Greenland, constituting as it would an attack by one Nato member on another, would spell the end of the world’s largest military alliance, and would surely be a gift to America’s rivals. Even if Europe caves in before then, the humiliation that it has endured might have damaged Nato beyond repair. In two weeks, we could well all be looking back on the furore around the Nicolás Maduro kidnapping as a moment of quaint serenity.
Alexis Self is Monocle’s foreign editor. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.
