Denmark was worried about US intentions toward Greenland even before US President Donald Trump sent his troops and bombers into Venezuela last week, but now the Danes are truly alarmed — and so they should be. Even if its vast island territory is not the next item on Trump’s acquisition list (which surely features Colombia), he seems determined to take it before leaving office.
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 was not 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 US.”
The problem for Danish 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. They are too dependent on US arms to resist as he tears it down, with a strong assist from the likes of Russian President 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 does not need to own the island to ensure US security, and that he would be acting against the democratic will of the autonomous Danish territory’s roughly 57,000 people if he tried. This is all true. It also entirely ignores what Trump’s weekend action in Venezuela so clearly crystallized — he does not care about any of those things.
This is not to rule out the possibility that Trump’s actions in removing Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro would not work out well for that country — the bar the dictator had set for improvement was criminally low. That would hardly be true of Greenland. In fact, it might 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.
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 small player in that trade at best), and that he needs to own Greenland for reasons of national security. If the latter were true, he would already have increased the number of US troops in Greenland from the skeleton crew of 150 to 200; during the Cold War, there were as many as 6,000 US soldiers there. Denmark has said it is open to negotiations to accommodate any proposed increase.
US Air Force staff and other personnel operate at the Pituffik Space Base on Greenland’s northwestern coast under a 1951 treaty that is contingent on both countries remaining allies within the NATO. Trump does not 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 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 US action on Greenland, assume it might come before November’s midterm elections to Congress. As for the method, Trump might not even know that yet, just as sending special forces to extract Maduro was not his first choice for getting what he wanted there (he first tried a negotiated exit for the Venezuelan dictator). What seems more likely for Greenland is some combination of the hybrid use of force, money, political pressure and disinformation Putin used to seize Crimea with hardly a shot fired.
The White House could pay as much as US$1 million to each of the island’s inhabitants to first vote for independence and then join the US, which would cost about the same as the US State Department’s annual budget. It is very unlikely to need to go to that expense. Denmark lacks the means to compete either militarily or economically with the US — which Frederiksen knows. Copenhagen is, like the rest of Europe, exposed to US retaliation on trade, support for Ukraine and its own security more broadly, making a showdown with Washington unaffordable.
What is emerging ever more clearly is that Europe is vulnerable because it remains dependent on the old US-led world order in ways that much of the rest of the world does not; lopsided trade deals, manipulations over Ukraine and now Trump’s threats to take Greenland are simply test cases that prove the point. At the same time, we do not yet have a replacement world “order,” just the grisly death throes of the last one. It seems clear that we are heading back to some form of 19th century great power competition, but without — as yet — any mechanism similar to the post-Napoleonic Concert of Europe to limit the rivalry and propensity to war that this would entail.
There are countless questions for such an arrangement to resolve. How much of Europe, for example, should be in Russia’s sphere of control? Where in the Pacific or Himalayas should China’s sphere end and US’ and India’s begin? What of Taiwan and its vital chip industry? And what would be the fallout in the Western Balkans, where in the 1990s the US and Europe prevented Serbia, the dominant regional power, from changing borders with its neighbors by force of arms and ethnic cleansing? Would the EU — the rule-based international order par excellence — be able to rearm and remain sufficiently unified to survive in a recognizable form?
None of these questions are fully answerable for the time being, because the Ukraine war is ongoing and Trump’s attempt to impose a new “Donroe Doctrine” in the US’ backyard does not yet amount to a new international order. All of those issues and more are very much in play.
Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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