Monthly Archives: January 2026

Arts, Books, Denmark, Europe, Greenland, Society, United States

Book Review: Polar War

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: As Trump sets his sights on Greenland, Kenneth Rosen’s new book asks whether the Arctic region is the next site of global conflict

Following the extraordinary rendition of Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, Donald Trump has ramped up his threats to seize control of Greenland. The acquisition, which he clearly perceives as a “large real estate deal”, has been on his mind for almost a decade. “I think we’re going to get it,” he said in an address to Congress last year. “One way or another, we’re going to get it.”

Polar War by Kenneth R Rosen is provocatively titled and hugely timely. It contends that the whole Arctic is warming up for a fight. Eight nations, including Russia and the United States, already maintain “research” bases in the region. All five military academies in the US now offer a course on the Big Northern White, and in 2021 India declared itself “a near-Arctic state”. “The possibility of conflict” up there, Rosen declares, “now feels inevitable”.

But does it? In a series of short chapters arranged loosely by circumpolar geography, Rosen makes a mostly convincing case that trouble lurks behind the bergs. The Arctic is warming four to five times faster than the rest of the world, and the author demonstrates how “complex dovetailing of national interests and disinterests” – hydrocarbon extraction and strategic ambition – poses far greater dangers now that it is paired with rapid climate change. In today’s world, as the commander of the Norwegian navy tells Rosen, “What happens here, happens everywhere.”

Russia, rather than the US, is “leading the charge”. “With more military bases in the Arctic, greater competency in cold weather operations, and a fleet of icebreakers that dwarfs the maritime Arctic fleets of every other nation,” it has become far and away the region’s biggest player. Another Norwegian naval commander tells Rosen, “Putin is saying, ‘I’m the boss in the Arctic,’ and he is.”

Russia has raised concerns, as in their 2020 Arctic Strategy report, about the region’s declining population, inadequate development, and hobbled natural resources exploration industry posing threats to their national security. However, Rosen thinks that the invasion of Ukraine, along with “interventions in Western elections” and so on, “might indicate that Russia thinks as far as the Arctic is concerned, (that) it has already won” the polar war, and can therefore move on to other zones of strategic value.

Meanwhile, China is building icebreakers (four are already in service) to open up an exciting “Polar Silk Road”. Rosen suggests that the nation is “teaming up” with Russia to spy on NATO on or off Norway’s northern rim, citing a new Chinese satellite in Kiruna, Sweden. Its spectral exterior is enough to rouse suspicions of covert surveillance. In the same area, Russia “is probing Sweden’s defences” with “hybrid attacks” that “remain deniable on Russia’s part”.

American unpreparedness is a major theme that runs through the book, and hawks in the White House might (but won’t) take heed as they turn their eyes to Greenland. The author points out that “historically, the American desire to control Greenland has existed nearly as long as America itself… It was not Trump’s rhetoric of a takeover that struck me… It was the ineptitude surrounding the idea.” Such failure, incompetence even, might allow rivals to secure control of the Arctic, or trigger clumsy, uncoordinated US manoeuvres that tip a tense region into the war of the book’s title.

And, yet, who is paying attention to these tremors? Rosen paints a good picture of polar talking-shops, at which delegates emit hot air in the saunas of five-star hotels viewing the Northern Lights. At the 2023 Arctic Circle Assembly in Reykjavik, the US delegation numbered 160. An increase in militarised fishing vessels across the region (warships, essentially, in disguise) also merits serious attention.

Although the UK doesn’t have a permanent military base in the Arctic, these troubled polar waters could break on our shores. Rosen doesn’t mention it, but recently a House of Lords committee picked out the “evolving interests of Russia and China” as a key reason why Britain must keep its Arctic strategy under review.

The author is an American reporter who has spent several years up on the ice, and he’s at his clinical best when he extrapolates from experience. In one thrilling chapter, he does a two-week stint on a US Coast Guard cutter on routine patrol in Alaskan waters.

In more abstract sections, however, his prose style can be opaque. Pages gain immediacy from the narrative present tense (“we head north”), but at the same time lose gravitas, or any notion that the author has reflected on the issues he is reporting. To some extent he has reflected, but why, the reader should ask, has he chosen to limit his prescriptions to an eight-page Appendix framed as a “policy note” to Washington? It would have been much better to have seen this woven into the main text. This would have allowed the book to present a coherent, argued whole.

By the end of this volume, compelling as it is, the reader should think whether polar war is “inevitable”. Grandstanding is one thing, but surely nations would pull back from costly all-out war on the unforgiving ice. Many leaders have spoken in defence of beleaguered Denmark in recent days, the UK referring to Denmark as an “allied nation”.

Rosen says little of those on whom conflict would have the most devastating effect. He dedicates the book “To the people of the north, from whom we have taken so much and granted little” – but their voices are not heard. The polar indigenous peoples are powerless in the global skirmishes over the land of which their ancestors were proud custodians. That is the real tragedy of this new Cold War.

– Polar War by Kenneth Rosen is published by Profile, 320pp. The author is a veteran correspondent known for his reporting from conflict zones like Syria, Iraq, and Ukraine

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Economic, Europe, Government, History, Military, Politics, Society, United States

If we are unable to defend Greenland, then Europe is finished

UNITED STATES – EUROPE

Intro: Once you are reliant on foreign forces for safety you must abide by their decisions, like it or not. What is so difficult to understand about that?

IT WAS some two decades ago when Robert Cooper, Tony Blair’s foreign policy adviser, wrote: “The rest of the world… reacts to America, fears America, lives under American protection, envies, resents, plots against, depends on America. Every other country defines its strategy in relation to the United States”. And, in turn, the United States defines its foreign policy aims as effective “invulnerability”.

Fast forward to today, and Donald Trump is ruthlessly pursuing this same policy. Bombing Iran, deposing Nicolas Maduro, threatening war with Colombia, and now musing on the annexation of Greenland. “We need it for defence”.

Presidents change and domestic policy changes with the incumbent; as with the British Empire before it, however, the interests of the American state are eternal and perpetual. It is the duty of the White House to follow them, and the role of others to respond with envy constrained by their dependence or fear. In this case, the reaction in Europe to an explicit proposal for the annexation of European territory has been muted by both.

Denmark has complained that Trump has failed to show sufficient “respect for international law”, and Keir Starmer has politely asked Trump to stop musing on the prospects of conquering part of an allied nation. Beyond this squawking, however, there has been no response because Europe has no response to offer beyond hoping that Trump forgets about this issue and moves on. We are not going to see US forces conducting midnight raids to capture Danish politicians, or shots fired in anger over the fate of Greenland. Europe is not going to fight America because it can’t, and America is not going to fight Europe because it has no need to: if Trump really wants the territory and isn’t just enjoying the sight of European politicians scrambling to cover their shame, then he could apply deeply painful leverage until he gets his way.

Despite all the rhetoric about the US military and how it intends to be used in the future, the continent’s security is still guaranteed by American boots on European ground, and the outcome of the conflict on its eastern flank by the flow of American weapons and intelligence to Ukraine.

If push comes to shove, no one should be betting against Trump using this leverage to get what he wants in Greenland through some means short of outright annexation: declaring that in the absence of new US installations and treaties that deployments to Europe will need to wind down to preserve forces for the protection of the US homeland.

The diplomatic side will be smoothed over, but the faultlines will still exist. Read the responses from European leaders, and there will always be a hint of rulers who have relied on outsiders to maintain their forces, and have belatedly understood that the interests of those outsiders do not always align with their own. In this, at least, they are in company: the last Western Roman emperor was deposed by foreign allies garrisoned within his territory when their demands for land were denied. The Normans entered southern Italy as mercenaries and ended up ruling over swathes of territory. The Mamluks began as foreign slave-soldiers, and became sultans. The European nations of the present day have spent decades freeloading on US defence spending, paying lip service to the American political obsessions of the day on diversity, migration, democracy, and other cultural issues in exchange for this defence. Geir Lundestad coined the term “empire by invitation” to describe this process: embracing dependence and ever greater American intervention in the life of the Continent.

When American and European interests were aligned, this dependence and intervention was tolerable. The constraints rarely chafed. As American relative power has waned, though, the tasks necessary to secure the homeland and to secure Europe have begun to diverge. As one expert previously said some three years ago, the United States did not “have the military capacity to remain so heavily engaged in Europe while ensuring effective defence in Asia”.

Today, that military expert is at the heart of the administration’s defence policy and is putting this policy into action. Subsequently, Europe is now finding that by having a dependence on a nation with interests different to your own is a deeply uncomfortable position to be in. It is also a deeply difficult one to get out of. For all Europe’s talk of strategic autonomy, at every turn it has baulked at paying the costs that this would entail. It left security to the Americans, comforting itself that they would always be there to pick up the bill.

This dependence reaches beyond the military sphere. America and the EU might enjoy the world’s largest bilateral trading relationship, but it is not an even one. The economic might Brussels hoped to rely on is a partial illusion: US companies provide the payments systems that many European nations rely on, the cloud storage their citizens store their secrets in, the search engines, AI models, and social media platforms which determine the information landscape for the electorate. If a dispute really escalated, the kill switch is in Washington. The EU scramble for alternatives is a result of this realisation.

Yet, the mistake politicians made was a simple one. Ariel Rubinstein’s book Economic Fables makes the point that there is more than one set of rules that the world can operate on. What we think of as immutable features of society are nothing of the sort. Rubenstein was elaborating in the context of how we teach economics to students, but there is no doubt this point can usefully be taken much further.

Underneath the logic of economics and international law the base level of reality still exists. The law of the jungle does not operate in gold and contracts, and it is not tamed by them. It only sleeps, and the market is only in charge until it wakes. Wealth is only power until the men with guns decide that it should be redistributed in their favour, and their agreement to forego this only holds if you can create more wealth than they could otherwise take. Europe’s leaders are now relearning at their cost these lessons their predecessors could have taught them for free. Once you are reliant on a foreign force for safety and a foreign power for prosperity, you are no longer completely sovereign. All the cultural soft power and economic heft in the world won’t do you any good if your outsourced military decides it can insist on more favourable terms than you are willing to provide.

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China, Economic, Taiwan, Technology, United States

Taiwan’s disintegrating £7.5tn secret weapon

TAIWAN’S SILICON SHIELD

Intro: The term “Silicon Shield” refers to the geopolitical theory that Taiwan’s dominance in the global semiconductor industry acts as a deterrence against a Chinese invasion. But the dynamics are complicated; there is now a diversification risk, and experts differ on the safeguards of Taiwan’s security

Behind the nondescript grey buildings that line the streets of Hsinchu lies one of the most important pieces of technology in the world.

Whirring away inside are rows of white machines that are so advanced – and so secretive – that only a select few have ever been allowed inside.

This is Taiwan’s “Silicon Valley” and these facilities produce the majority of the world’s semiconductors – small microchips that power virtually every electronic device in use today, from coffee machines to fighter jets.

Every country in the world relies on these chips, including China, which despite threatening to “reunify” Taiwan by force, imports nearly half of the island’s semiconductors.

Economists warn that an invasion of Taiwan would cost the world’s economy £7.5trillion. That’s far more than the cost of the Russian invasion of Ukraine or the Covid-19 pandemic.

It is argued that this very fact would act as a key deterrence against Beijing following through on its threats. China knows, too, that if it does invade, its economy would take a direct hit from the fallout.

Known as the “silicon shield”, the theory implies that Taiwan’s semiconductor industry offers a de facto security blanket, which would stop China from invading – both because of its own dependency on the computer chips and the US’s, which would come to Taiwan’s defence.

Taiwan’s former president, Tsai Ing-wen, popularised the theory in 2021 when she wrote that the silicon shield “allows Taiwan to protect itself and others from aggressive attempts by authoritarian regimes to disrupt global supply chains”.

Nonetheless, leading Taiwan companies within the semiconductor industry have been moving production sites to countries such as China and the US.

Experts have warned that this is effectively disintegrating Taipei’s valuable economic deterrence, making it more likely that Beijing would attack Taiwan.

The monopolistic position

Taiwan produces approximately 60 to 70 per cent of all the world’s semiconductors and more than 95 per cent of the advanced chips.

While thousands of companies are involved in semiconductor production, in Taiwan the industry is synonymous with one name – Taiwan’s Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).

Founded in 1987, the company now makes up more than 60 per cent of the global market share and 9 per cent of Taiwan’s GDP. It is the most important company to the country’s economy and, in many ways, its national security.

It is one of more than 400 companies based in the Hsinchu Science Park, a concentrated industrial zone in central Taiwan often compared to Silicon Valley in the US.

The park’s unique “ecosystem” is one of many reasons that Taiwan has become a global leader in the semiconductor industry. Analysts speak of the “cluster effect” because of the availability of spare parts, equipment, material, design, software, integrated circuit manufacturing, and assembly tests all situated in one place. There is a complete supply chain, a complete ecosystem.

TSMC’s monopoly over the industry in Taiwan and around the world is often linked to its unprecedented structure as a foundry model. This means it manufactures chips for other companies but is not responsible for the designs. Instead, companies like Apple and Nvidia come to TSMC with orders for products they want to build. By choosing not to design, manufacture, or market any semiconductor products under its own name, the company ensures that it never competes with TSMC’s customers.

A wake-up call to the growing threat

While most of its production is still based in Taiwan, the company has gradually been opening fabrication plants, factories where semiconductors are made, in China, the US, and Japan.

There is one under construction in Germany, which is set to begin operations by the end of 2027. TSMC announced in March that it plans to invest an additional $100bn (£75bn) to grow its US manufacturing operations.

It is believed that TSMC and other companies in the supply chain are moving production out of Taiwan in response to the growing threat from China. Beijing’s increasingly hostile rhetoric towards Taiwan, and its routine shows of force toward the island, has spooked foreign governments and semiconductor customers.

Researchers on Taiwan at the US-based Hoover Institution, propagate that the Covid-19 pandemic served as a wake-up call for many companies reliant on chips from Taiwan and had to scramble overnight when their supply was interrupted.

It offered an insight into what would happen if China launched an attack against Taiwan, which could result in the supply of chips being permanently cut off.

The Institution says that by having over-concentration from one supplier located in one place is a big problem for TSMC’s business model in the new world. It also points to the economic benefit of having some supply or some production that’s closer to its ultimate customers.

Kowtowing to the US

Pressure from the US government and the Trump administration specifically has also been a factor in moving production out of Taiwan. Trump’s MAGA – Make America Great Again – is wholly directed to bring manufacturing back to the United States. That’s a prime reason why America intends to build its own manufacturing infrastructure for semiconductors.

But this means that Taiwan could lose an element of its deterrence. If the US is making its own semiconductor chips, rather than relying on Taipei’s, it may be less likely to come to Taiwan’s defence in a war.

The US is Taiwan’s main defence supplier, responsible for equipping the island with virtually all of its military technology. Taiwan is beholden to the US in its ability to make or break a future conflict with China.

War game simulations have shown that the US’s decision to come to Taiwan’s defence could be the difference between the country remaining autonomous and it falling under the auspices of Chinese control.

However, TSMC has kept an insurance policy. It has made sure that only its mature chips will be manufactured overseas. The production of advanced chips will remain in Taiwan.

In fact, in October, Taiwanese officials criticised and highlighted a proposal by the US commerce department, who said that Washington was talking to Taipei about a “50-50” split in semiconductor manufacturing. The response from Taiwan was swift: “No one can sell out Taiwan or TSMC, and no one can undermine Taiwan’s silicon shield”.

Diversification risk

While the diversification of TSMC’s production and the semiconductor industry more generally offers a safety net for other countries, experts disagree on how this affects Taiwan.

Some believe that increasing the number of TSMC fabrication plants around the world strengthens Taiwan’s ties with other nations. By investing outside of Taiwan – such as in Europe, America, or Japan – these countries become bonded with TSMC. Others have also said that by operating fabrication plants in other countries will give them a stronger incentive to care about what’s happening in the Taiwan industries and provide increased vigilance of security threats than previously would have been known.

In theory, at least, this could support the second branch of the silicon shield argument. This stipulates that the US and allies are more likely to come to Taiwan’s defence in the event of a conflict, thereby deterring China.

However, other experts are concerned that if reliance on Taiwan’s chip production decreases, and China is able to source its semiconductors outside the country, there will be less standing in Beijing’s way.

Those within the industry are also worried about Beijing’s habit of stealing innovations from other countries. Building a competitor that can beat you through technological pilferage are efforts to undermine the island’s defences.

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