In all the hand wringing, pearl clutching, wailing and gnashing of teeth brouhaha over Donald Trump's rather undiplomatic announcement that the USA intends to take over Greenland the strong strategic reasons behind Trump’s Greenland ambiions have not really been scrutinised in world media.
Before we get into any debate about international law and the state of the US President's mental health it is necessary to look down on the world from above the North Pole like this one published in Encyclopedia Britannica:
The normal Mercator projection map of the northernmost part of the world does not give the perspective needed to understand the security concerns of Trump's foreign policy and defence advisers in the light of China's expansionism.
Very few countries have coastlines within the Arctic circle.. The main coastline is Russia. The United States (Alaska), Canada, Greenland and Norway provide the rest of adjacent countries. China is claiming that it has ‘adjacent status’, but it has no Arctic coastline. However Russia owes /beijing a few favours in return for the tacit support China has provided since the start of the Ukraine war in 2022.
The legendary North West Passage, which was dismissed as a myth until only a few decades ago is now navigable for at least part of the year. It is a sea route around the north of Canada linking down into the Bering Strait between Alaska and Russia. The entrance to this route is between Greenland and Canada.
In recent years marine technology has advanced sufficiently for Arctic sea routes, including the economically important North West Passage to be viable the year round. To that end Russia has built nuclear-powered ice-breakers, and has between six and eight of them running (depending on various reports) in its fleet of 60 ice-breakers, because opening a sea route along its northern coast would be very advantageous.
The North West Passage brings us back to Greenland. With its vast oil and mineral deposits this is clearly an territory which could be developed to the advantage of the USA and its allies. And with a population of only 67,000 led by a bunch of far left malcontent Danes and crzy Inuits, with both grouos showing an inclination to cosy up to China, if it carried out its threat to declare full independence from Denmark and became a chinese client state that would make life very diffiult for the west. No wonder Trump is so interested in acquiring Greenland, which would be key to his strategy of securing a good legacy for his country. Defensively too, the US is interested in a defence system capable of detecting incoming missiles further away from the US. Greenland would provide this.
To step away from Greenland and allow its vast wilderness to fall under the influence of the People's Republic would far outstrip Starmer's attempted Chagos Islands giveaway in terms of gross stupidity.
China aims to get back the entire Eastern Siberian part of Russia which were stolen from Chinese empire in the 1800s. The People's Republic is already well under way doing it economically via long-term leases and illegal resource extractions and moving citizens into new settlements there. Re-integrating Eastern Siberia back under the full Chinese ownership will give China a fully-legitimate claim to the Arctic it wants and needs.
China could then get all oil and gas from the russian fields in Siberia, why would the two want or need to build pipelines from the Arctic anytime in near future. The problem now is the lack of Western technology to transport oil and gas from Siberia to China in sufficient quantities - plus that little detail that Russia is preoccupied by that useless war for now.
Other than that, there is no love lost between the two nations which are not natural allies and have little in common culturally
Far from wishing to dominate Europe, as has been claimed almost daily by mainstream news commentators since 2022 the Russians want nothing so much as to get clear of it. They've re-orientated their trade and adjusted their supply lines and are now focused East. As many people have said, the old 'rules based order' is dead and in truth it was never really alive.
Not long back Putin held an important meeting with Russian industrialists. Those industrialists wanted assurance that the new Russian status quo would hold. They didn't want to invest in finding new customers and setting up new supply chains only to find, after the war, that the Europeans would come back into the Russian market and render those investments pointless.
Putin stated the Europeans were unlikely to want to occupy their old position in the Russian market and if they did, they'd find themselves up against trade barriers that would prevent them from doing so to any great extent. The shift to self-sufficiency and to trade with their Asian and other partners was discernible well before the war, is now irreversible.
So the old fear, that the men with snow on their boots would be seen marching through Bielefeld or Tunbridge Wells grabbing our stuff, is out of date. There's no longer that much stuff to grab. "The Russians Are Coming!" is merely a politicians' scare story to keep us all in line. We Europeans are making fools of ourselves pretending the Russians would ever want to come. The way things are, they see us as more of a nuisance than a source of booty.
We should, in a more civilised way, support Trump's bid to gain control of Greenland. Better the devil you know etc. Russia may not want to conquer Europe but China has given strong signs that it would like to replace the USA as global hegemon. Do we really want to invite it to set up camp in our back yard?
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