The reasons for Denmark’s concern go beyond even Trump’s repeated demands to hand the island over, made all the more real just before Christmas by the appointment of Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry as his special envoy for making it happen. The message wasn’t subtle: Louisiana gave its name to a vast US purchase of territory from France in 1803, and Landry stated clearly that he had volunteered “to make Greenland part of the United States.” The problem for Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen is the same as for Europe writ large: They have few cards to play in the world of might-makes-right that Trump is ushering in. They built their entire economic and security postures around the rules and alliance-based order that the US created for its friends after World War II.
Now they’re too dependent on US arms to resist as he tears it down, with a strong assist from the likes of Vladimir Putin. Frederiksen has tried hard to push back against Trump’s latest claims to Greenland, but the language she used is telling. She pointed out that the US has no right under international law to seize Danish territory, that the two nations are close allies, that Trump doesn’t need to own the island to ensure American security, and that he’d be acting against the democratic will of the autonomous Danish territory’s roughly 57,000 people if he tried.
This is all indisputably true. It also ignores entirely what Trump’s weekend action in Venezuela so clearly crystallized – he cares about none of these things. This isn’t to rule out the possibility that Trump’s actions in removing Venezuela’s President, Nicolas Maduro, won’t work out well for that country – the bar the dictator had set for improvement was criminally low.
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But that would hardly be true of Greenland. In fact, it may be more useful to think of its case in terms of Crimea rather than Venezuela. Crimea is the peninsula Putin seized from Ukraine in 2014, using every method short of a declared war, and citing every possible reason for doing so but the truest.
Those motivations were to project Russian power in a region that Moscow sees as its rightful sphere of influence, if not imperial possession, and to control resources including the oil and gas fields under Crimea’s territorial waters. The spheres of influence in Arctic waters. The US aims to control Greenland as a bulwark against Russia.
Trump has made similarly misleading claims about his aims, saying he acted in Venezuela because of Maduro’s involvement in trafficking drugs to the US (even though Venezuela’s a minnow in that trade), and that he needs to own Greenland for reasons of national security. If the latter were true, however, he would already have increased the number of US troops in Greenland from the current skeleton crew of 150 to 200; during the Cold War, there were as many as 6,000 American soldiers there. Denmark has said it’s open to negotiations to accommodate any proposed increase.
US Air Force staff and other personnel operate at the Pituffik Space Base on Greenland’s north western coast under a 1951 treaty that’s contingent on both countries remaining allies within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. But Trump doesn’t care about alliances and security is not his primary goal in Greenland. As in Venezuela, and echoing Putin in Crimea, what he cares about is access to resources and reestablishing an exclusive sphere of influence in the western hemisphere.
Greenland has a landmass three times the size of Texas under which there are thought to be large quantities of untapped, if hard to access, rare earths, among other minerals that Trump wants. This vast island also has oil and gas beneath its undisputed territorial waters, and more within the near-Venezuela-size territorial claim to the Arctic – including the North Pole – that Denmark has filed at the UN’s Commission on the Limit of the Continental Shelf. The Danish application conflicts to varying degrees with competing ones from Canada, Norway, Russia and the US.
For a possible timeline to American action on Greenland, assume it may come before November’s midterm elections to Congress. As for method, I doubt even Trump knows that yet, just as sending special forces to extract Nicolas Maduro wasn’t his first choice for getting what he wanted there (he first tried a negotiated exit for the Venezuelan dictator). But what seems more likely for Greenland is some version of the hybrid use of force, money, political pressure and disinformation Putin used to seize Crimea with barely a shot fired.
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