Why Donald Trump’s pitch for Greenland makes sense
Beyond the bluster of a vanity project, in US hands, the minerals and seaboard of the world’s biggest island would strengthen the West.
If there is still a globe in the Oval Office after January 20, President Trump will no doubt give it a spin and wonder again about the huge, frozen landmass within shooting distance of American cities.
Greenland – two million square kilometres of it – is in geopolitical contention again.
China craves its rare earth minerals. It imagines the world’s biggest island becoming part of its Polar Silk Road, a crucial stopover for its vessels as they exploit the melting Arctic ice to boost trade between Asia and the West.
Trump has an answer to that: he wants to buy the place.
Rebuffed by Denmark and Greenlanders in his first term, he is ready for a second go. Donald Trump Jr has just touched down in Greenland to start the ball rolling. Two questions, then. Will he succeed? And what changes if the United States, literally, grows?
His first attempt was treated as a joke, an act of flamboyant Trumpian overreach.
Greenland’s prime minister – it has home rule while remaining part of Denmark, which runs its foreign policy and hands out subsidies – declared the island was not for sale. But Trump understood this as a bargaining manoeuvre and never gave up on the idea.
After all, Harry Truman considered buying Greenland after the Second World War as a way of cutting off a potential Soviet attack. The purchase never went ahead but America was allowed to build a network of bases, including Thule, which became a key early missile warning station. That gave both Washington and the Greenlanders a sense of security.
The end of the Cold War in the 1990s thinned the American presence.
Greenlanders missed the jobs and the dollars but they did not miss the Americans: the thunder of aircraft, the pregnant girls and the occasional scare, such as in January 1968 when a B-52 carrying four hydrogen bombs caught fire and plunged into sea ice just outside Thule.
The Danes furiously demanded that all the sunken unexploded bombs and the irradiated ice be packed up and flown back to the US for dismantling. If not, Denmark would shut down the Thule base. The US grudgingly agreed.
The world, however, has changed for the US, Denmark and the Greenlanders.
Since Trump won the election, China has been flexing its muscles.
It has conducted its largest naval exercises in decades, launched the world’s biggest amphibious warship, been accused of sabotaging undersea cables in Asia and Europe and hacking the US Treasury, unveiled four new advanced aircraft, rehearsed a naval blockade near Japanese islands for the first time and intensified espionage activity in the West.
The point? To help Beijing negotiate with Trump from a position of strength.
To counter this, Trump needs to evolve an approach of his own.
The Greenland ploy, coupled perhaps with attempts to regain control of the sensitive Panama Canal, represents a kind of recognition by Trump that the global climate really is changing the strategic environment.
After all, a melting Arctic means easier mining access to nickel and cobalt, essential for batteries. And it will break western dependency on China for the rare metals needed for microchips and sonar systems. That represents a learning process from the days of Trump 1.0.
Expanding America might seem like a vanity project – the acquisition of Greenland would be almost as significant as the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. It would certainly be a sign of a confident superpower. But if not negotiated with sensitivity, it could put him in the same basket as land-grabbing Vladimir Putin’s pursuit of a New Russia.
At the moment, he seems to be trusting in his powers of persuasion over Greenland’s puny population of 56,000.
An old signpost at Kangerlussuaq airport points to Copenhagen (4 hours 15 minutes’ flying time), North Pole (3 hours and 15 minutes) and New York (4 hours).
Trump may bet he can make the whole island more prosperous with US investment; make a shopping weekend in New York as feasible as it became for the Icelandic middle class.
Denmark subsidises Greenland, but locals say it comes with too much thinly disguised interference. Above all, there is deep resentment about the colonial haughtiness of the Danes.
The latest spat is about forced contraception that was pushed on teenage native Greenlanders in the 1970s by the Danish authorities.
Denmark, understandably, does not want to lose face or land. King Frederik has recently adjusted the royal coat of arms to include a much larger polar bear representing Greenland. Islanders regarded this as a bit of trolling.
Trump could be placing his bets on an independence referendum being held in April. If the Greenlanders vote for it persuasively, it might open another debate: whether the island, with more power to determine its foreign policy, could in some way affiliate with the US.
What a signal to China! MAGA made flesh. And yet there will be some around Trump who may caution him that facilitating a split with a NATO ally is not a good look. It is, after all, a longstanding ambition of Putin to rule by splitting the western alliance.
A more rational goal for the America-expanders may be to reach an arrangement with Greenland and Denmark that allows the US to use those western Greenland territories closest to the US eastern seaboard as a security cushion.
Prosperity for Greenlanders, enhanced security for the US and a partial loss of sovereignty for Denmark offset by the offer of a deeper relationship with Washington. A grand bargain?
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