Tag Archives: Donald Trump

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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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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