Greenland: Trump vs. NATO

After the Danish and Greenland foreign ministers came out of a meeting in Washington on 14 January convinced that Donald Trump really intended to seize Greenland, things moved very fast. Except in Canada.

“We didn’t manage to change the American position,” said Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen. “It’s clear the president has this wish of conquering Greenland. And we made it very, very clear that this is not in the interests of the [Danish] kingdom.”

Within a day, European members of the NATO alliance were promising troops for a Danish-led military force to strengthen the giant island’s weak defences against the alleged threat of invasion by other, more distant conquerors: Russia (around 6,000 ice-choked kilometres from Nuuk to Murmansk) and China (about three times as far, Nuuk to Shanghai).

Oddly, not even the keenest strategist looking for plausible reasons to buy more submarines or whatever had hit upon this particular excuse before. But that was Donald Trump’s pretext for taking Greenland: “The US needs Greenland for the purpose of national security…It is vital for the Golden Dome that we are building.”

Hardly anybody actually believes this. The ‘Golden Dome’ is a proposed space-based anti-missile defence system that, like former president Ronald Reagan’s fanciful and ultimately abandoned “Star Wars” project, would protect the United States from attack by nuclear missiles.

It consists of an early-warning system based on a constellation of satellites in orbit and interceptors, also space-based, to shoot down incoming missiles. It would cost around a trillion dollars but no contract has been signed yet, even for initial design work. Trump would probably be dead long before such a system became operational, if it ever did.

However, it does let Trump claim that he is ‘protecting US national security’, which plays much better domestically than ‘seizing rare earth minerals’. Average American voters will never know that bases in Greenland are completely irrelevant to a space-based system, so they might go along with it.

Why is Trump himself so obsessed by Greenland? The best guess in NATO circles is that it’s an extension of his old mania for putting his name on every hotel he owned. He can’t actually put his name on Greenland, but it would get him in American history books as the man who increased the extent of American territory by a quarter. As simple and as stupid as that.

NATO’s European members realised they had to react to the verbal beating that the Danish and Greenland foreign ministers got at the hand of Trump’s two principal consiglieri, J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio. Moreover, they had to do it within the framework of Trump’s pretended Russo-Chinese threat to Greenland, or else openly recognise him as an adversary.

So in two days they scraped together a small ‘reconnaisance force’ from eight European NATO members  (France, Germany, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands) and sent it to Greenland to figure out what kind of European forces would be a convincing deterrent to hypothetical Russian and Chinese invaders.

It didn’t work. Rather than thank the Europeans for finally picking up the load, Donald Trump blasted them for having “journeyed to Greenland for purposes unknown.” He warned that “these Countries, who are playing this very dangerous game, have put a level of risk in play that is not tenable or sustainable.”

In fact, they were trying to take away Trump’s pretext for invasion, and they were severely punished for it. In the same Truth Social post last Saturday, he imposed 10% tariffs on all the countries that contributed to the Greenland mission, to begin on 1 February and continue until “such time as a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase” of Greenland.

Only a few weeks ago it looked as if the charade of NATO unity still had a couple of years to run before it collapsed irrevocably, but suddenly it could be just a couple of weeks – or, at the latest, 1 June, when Trump will raise the tariffs to 25% on NATO members that are still refusing to sell the Greenlanders out.

And to one side stands Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney, giving cautious verbal support to European military support for Greenland but abstaining from any Canadian military contribution to its defence. Bizarre, in a way, because Canada is far closer to Greenland than any other NATO country. (It has a short land border on Hans Island.)

The problem is, of course, that all the (false) arguments the US uses to justify annexing  Greenland apply equally to Canada. And Trump has used them in the past about Canada as well. Stay low and pray.

Gwynne Dyer’s new book is ‘Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers’.  The previous book, ‘The Shortest History of War’, is also still available.