Category Archives: Society

Denmark, Europe, European Union, Government, Greenland, NATO, Politics, Society, United States

The reasons behind Trump’s desire to acquire Greenland

UNITED STATES – GREENLAND

It is said that Donald Trump’s much-vaunted desire to acquire Greenland is all about US national security.

First, the US president claimed the Arctic island, a self-governing territory of the Kingdom of Denmark, was being swarmed by Russian and Chinese vessels. Then he said ownership of the sprawling territory was vital for his planned “Golden Dome” missile defence shield.

There are hints of truth in both claims, but security experts have broadly argued that a US acquisition of Greenland is not necessary to address the national security concerns.

The sparsely populated island plays an outsized role in the United States’ and NATO’s wider air defence architecture. It sits smack bang in the middle of the shortest flight path between Moscow and Washington – known as the great-circle distance.

Technically, the island is 2,000 miles from Washington and 2,000 miles from Moscow.

Since the end of the Second World War, the US has had military personnel stationed at Pituffik Space Base, on the far north coast of Greenland. It serves as the US military’s northernmost base, about 900 miles from the North Pole and is home to about 150 troops. It is a key cog in Washington’s early warning system for missiles. If Russia or China were to fire a ballistic missile at the US, its path would probably cross directly over Greenland, which is why the primary role of the personnel at Pituffik is to scan the skies for incoming aerial threats.

However, America’s military footprint on Greenland has significantly dwindled since the end of the Cold War.

At its peak, Washington had 17 installations and 15,000 soldiers on the island, hunting for Soviet submarines and ships, as well as being ready for a feared invasion.

This was underpinned by a 1951 agreement signed between the US and Danish governments. Copenhagen has repeatedly argued this deal still stands, and there is nothing preventing Mr Trump from deploying more soldiers to Greenland without the need to acquire the island.

This includes hosting any assets that would contribute to the US’s Golden Dome project – a $175bn (£131bn) air defence system that would mimic Israel’s Iron Dome, but on a vastly larger scale. Mr Trump had not mentioned Greenland, however, as being vital to this decade-long project until just recently – suggesting it has become a convenient excuse for the White House to use.

The Golden Dome project, it has been claimed, would also involve a system of satellites – some that track missiles and others that fire their own projectiles to shoot them down.

While analysts have questioned whether such technology even exists, or is likely to exist any time soon, US ownership of Greenland would not be a prerequisite for an American satellite defence system.

In real terms, Pituffik’s importance is expected to grow as climate change reshapes the polar Arctic by opening up new trade routes close to North America.

Greenland sits where the Arctic Ocean meets the Atlantic.

Russian ships and submarines leaving the country’s Arctic region bases to head south have to pass nearby to do so. One of the main routes sees the Russian vessels pass through the waters between Greenland, Iceland, and the UK – known as the GIUK Gap.

A second gap, the Bear Gap, between Norway and Iceland has also emerged as a favoured option.

Since Vladimir Putin ordered his invasion of Ukraine, NATO has increased its aerial and naval patrols in the area. Denmark says it will invest £1.73bn to bolster its Arctic Command with new ships, drones, and surveillance aircraft to guard the region. The spending was announced in January last year to deter Mr Trump’s interest in Greenland.

Again, as with missile defence, bolstering security in the waters around Greenland does not require acquisition of the island.

Denmark insists Washington could use existing treaties to address those national security concerns.

Greenland’s geography might provide the easiest route to explaining Mr Trump’s desire to acquire the territory. The island’s capital is closer to Washington than it is Copenhagen.

But it could be down to the maps drawn by Gerardus Mercator in the 16th century, and still commonly used.

On the Mercator Map, areas near the poles are greatly exaggerated in size.

Greenland can appear to be the same size of Africa, despite being 14-times smaller. South America also appears smaller than the Arctic island.

Mr Trump has publicly spoken of his love of maps, and for the size of perceived regional superpowers, such as the US or Russia. To some, the Mercator Distortion could just make a combined US-Greenland landmass look bigger than Russia.

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Britain, Europe, European Union, Government, Greenland, Military, NATO, Society, United States

UK troops could be sent to Greenland to ease fears

GREENLAND

Intro: European allies have been in talks to deploy a force to Greenland in countering the growing threat from Russia and China. Sending a NATO force might help to ease President Trump’s security fears

The UK is in talks with European allies about deploying a force to Greenland that would guard the Arctic and ease anxieties in Washington.

Military chiefs are drawing up plans for a possible NATO mission on the island, which President Trump has threatened to seize for security reasons.

Officials from Britain have met with counterparts from countries including Germany and France in recent days to start the preparations.

The plans, still at an early stage, could involve British soldiers, warships, and planes being deployed to protect Greenland from Russia and China.

It is hoped that by significantly stepping up their presence in the Arctic European nations would persuade Mr Trump to abandon his ambition to annex the strategic island.

It is believed this would allow him to claim a victory for American taxpayers by arguing that Europe was paying more for the cost of policing the Atlantic.

Mr Trump has threatened to take ownership of Greenland through the use of force. It is a self-governed island but is territorially part of Denmark, a NATO member.

He has cited concerns that Moscow or Beijing will seize the island if he does not, insisting that “we’re not going to have Russia or China as a neighbour”.

Greenland is also rich in natural resources – including copper, nickel, and rare earth minerals crucial for powering modern technology.

Sir Keir Starmer is taking the threat from Russia and China in the area “extremely seriously” and is said to have agreed that action must be taken. There is increasing acceptance by the UK Government of President Trump’s view that growing aggression in the High North must be deterred, and Euro-Atlantic security be strengthened.

Mr Trump has also floated the idea of effectively buying the territory by offering each of its 30,000 citizens up to $100,000 to switch allegiance to the US.

Purchasing Greenland may be Mr Trump’s preferred option, but he has not ruled out using military force in annexing the island, insisting that “we are going to do something on Greenland whether they like it or not.” Ominous language.

His pursuit of the territory has plunged NATO into crisis and prompted speculation that the 75-year-old alliance could fall apart.

While plans are at an early stage, European countries are hoping to pull Mr Trump back from the brink by offering to station a military force on the island. This idea was discussed at a meeting of NATO allies in Brussels.

Members instructed the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, the alliance’s military headquarters in Belgium, to determine what more could be done to secure the Arctic.

It could be a full-blown troop deployment or a combination of time-limited exercises, intelligence sharing, capability development, and re-routed defence spending.

Any operation would likely be carried out under NATO’s banner and would be separate and distinct from existing missions in the Baltic and Poland.

Preparations in Britain for a greater role in Arctic security have already started. These include commandos and Royal Navy ships taking part in Exercise Joint Viking, a joint NATO drill in Norway’s sub-zero temperature.

This year, 1,500 Royal Marines will also deploy to Norway, Finland, and Sweden for Exercise Cold Response, a training mission on defending frozen terrain.

It is also understood the European Union is drawing up plans for sanctions on US companies should Mr Trump reject the offer of a NATO deployment.

US technology giants such as Meta, Google, Microsoft, and X could be restricted from operating on the Continent, as could American banks and financial firms.

A more extreme option could be to evict the US military from its bases in Europe, denying it a key staging post for operations in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Analysts said the president’s actions were typical of his negotiating strategy, which involves making maximalist demands to extract money from other countries.

Examples include his threat to impose massive tariffs on European pharmaceuticals but exempting countries, including Britain, that agreed to pay more for US drugs.

In recent months, the White House has also suggested that it wants Japan to pay more towards covering the cost of the 55,000 American troops based there.

Sibylline, a risk analysis firm, said Mr Trump was “likely weighing the unity and resolve of European nations” over Greenland. It said allies could “call Trump’s bluff” by proposing a NATO force in Greenland, implying security wasn’t the president’s real reason for wanting the island.

It came as a former RAF chief cast serious doubt over Britain’s ability to protect the Arctic, saying the nation’s defences had become “a flimsy façade”.

Air Marshal Edward Stringer said that the gap between the perception of the UK’s military strength and its actual capabilities had become cavernous.

In a report for Policy Exchange, he warned that not a single formation in the British military was currently sustainable in combat in its own right.

He wrote: “Now the US is signalling strongly that it is putting ‘America First’ and the rest of NATO will have to look after its own defences.

This fundamentally challenges the model that we had semi-accidentally slipped into – our national defences have been revealed to be a flimsy façade.

The ‘Say-Do’ gap between the image of ourselves we have come to believe, and the reality of the hard power we can project in practice, is stark.

The first necessary step is to recognise that, and recognise that the methods that got us into this mess have to be discarded ruthlessly.”

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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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