The Bunker: Greenland Land Grab
This week in The Bunker: Dissembler-in-Chief Donald Trump delivers whoppers in his push to justify his apparently insatiable appetite for the world’s biggest island; and more.
This week in The Bunker: Dissembler-in-Chief Donald Trump delivers whoppers in his push to justify his apparently insatiable appetite for the world’s biggest island; and more.
THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
Three little green(land) lies
The Bunker has long preferred pondering military procurement and strategy because they represent “hard power” when it comes to global order (and disorder). Diplomacy and statesmanship are softer, fuzzier realms, where yardsticks shrink and grow depending on today’s alliances and tomorrow’s foes. But President Trump is making The Bunker reconsider: he is fudging the facts so brazenly when it comes to his ardor for Greenland that he warrants a comeuppance. Plus, conveniently, his polar preoccupation overlaps with key U.S. military issues.
Incredibly, Trump has threatened to take Greenland, by military force if necessary, from Denmark. Both are NATO members. “One way or the other,” he said January 11, “we’re going to have Greenland.” Military action is something opposed by 86% of Americans, including more than two-thirds of Trump’s own Republican Party. A near-identical 85% of Greenlanders do not want to become part of the U.S. (These days, who can blame them?)
Bizarrely, Trump threatened January 17 to slap 10% tariffs on eight supposed allies beginning February 1 for coming to Greenland’s defense. That’s slated to rise to 25% on June 1. It boils down to a megalomaniacal Donald Corleone’s demand for protection money. The next day, he insanely said his failure to win the Nobel Peace Prize is playing a role in his Greenland fetish. Likea school bully eyeing a classmate’s puffy North Face jacket or new iPhone,, the Trump administration recently posted a churlish and childish photo of the president covetously viewing a map of mineral-rich Greenland through a White House window. Conqueror-in-Chief Trump capped off his rapacious week with a January 20 post showing him planting a U.S. flag on Greenland.
We’ve never seen a president so diplomatically disturbed, or one throttling the truth so violently. Even more distressingly, an alarmingly large share of Americans, including the Republican congressional majority, continues marching to his war-threatening drums.
Here is Trump’s Greenland triple fudge:
GOLDEN DOME
The island isn’t needed for Trump’s aerial shield
On January 14, Trump fired off a social-media post claiming that U.S. possession of Greenland “is vital for the Golden Dome that we are building.” Golden Dome will likely consist of networks of space- and ground-based weapons knit together by overlapping layers of sensors designed to detect and destroy any kind of aerial threat bearing down on the U.S. (something experts deem physics-ly and fiscally impossible). His claim that the U.S. has to own Greenland to build this very-high-pie-in-the-sky is as wrong-headed as the ill-defined system that could end up costing trillions.
Greenland isn’t necessary for such a system. Alaska and New York could do the job. And if somehow it did prove critical, Denmark and Greenland have made it clear the U.S. could build whatever ground-based interceptors or other facilities it needs on Greenland through negotiation, not annexation. The U.S. has had a pact with Denmark allowing U.S. military sites on the island since 1951. There’s a base already there for space surveillance, missile defense, and satellite command and control. Finally, the fantasists pushing Golden Dome believe only a space-centric system — not one rooted on the ground — could do what Trump says he wants done. That renders Greenland even more marginal, regardless of ownership.
YOU DON’T HAVE TO OWN IT TO PROTECT IT
Greenland is already protected by NATO’s umbrella
Alliances are like insurance. It’s too expensive for one country to do everything, so nations share the risk and pledge to come to one another’s aid if one is attacked. That’s the logic behind the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the post-World War II band of nations (originally 12, now 32) that has managed to pretty much keep the peace in Europe for a remarkable 80 years. Article 5 of the NATO Treaty makes it explicit: an attack against one member is an attack against all, and the member states not being attacked shall respond “forthwith” — immediately — as if they were being attacked.
For whatever reason, Trump has chosen to ignore this “collective defense” that is at NATO’s core. That’s surprising, given that the only time NATO invoked Article 5 was to come to the aid of the U.S. following the 9/11 attacks. Instead, Trump sees a threatened Greenland that only he can protect: “IF WE DON’T, RUSSIA OR CHINA WILL, AND THAT IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN!”
There are only two things wrong with this argument: the Chinese and Russians aren’t coming. (“We haven’t had a Chinese warship in Greenland for a decade or so,” Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen said January 14, and Moscow has its hands full in Ukraine.) And, even if they did invade, the 31 non-Denmark NATO members are obligated to join the Danes in repulsing any such attack. Bottom line: regardless of whom holds the deed to Greenland, neither China nor Russia is likely to attack a NATO state.
Even more critically, Trump’s actions threaten to shred the web of bilateral and multilateral accords that have bolstered global security for decades (the U.S. has troops at 128 foreign bases in 51 countries, generally without owning the soil underneath). And that may be Trump’s subplot here. He has never been a NATO fan. In a matter of weeks, the U.S. president has turned it into a house of cards that could collapse, leaving Europe rightly reeling. “Musing about taking Greenland only weakens Alliance solidarity, undermines American credibility as a trusted ally, and diminishes deterrence,” a bipartisan band of 14 senior U.S. foreign-policy officials said in a January 9 statement.
“TWO DOG SLEDS”
Trump denigrates Danish defenses
Trump deriding Greenland’s defense as “two dog sleds” is like criticizing the U.S. military because some of the first American troops who invaded Afghanistan in 2001 rode in on horseback. They’re irrelevant asides, and Trump’s appears to be deliberately misleading.
His “dog sled” crack is an apparent reference to Denmark’s Sirius Dog Sled Patrol, optimized for enforcing Danish sovereignty over the inhospitable Arctic island territory. “You can’t basically get in a car or a Bradley vehicle or tank or anything and go up there,” Arctic security expert Steven Lamy told the Associated Press. “So they have dog sleds.” Beyond that, Trump’s petulant remark is an unworthy slur flung at a long-time ally by a purported superpower. He’s “undermining us as a people,” Mari Laursen, one of Greenland’s roughly 57,000 residents, said.
Denmark, which includes Greenland, is no superpower. But its 20,000 troops suffered more casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq, on a per-capita basis, than the U.S. “Strategically, Denmark punches above its weight,” The National Interest reports, “but militarily, they rely heavily on alliances.”
Trump says his only motive is to keep Greenland out of Russian or Chinese hands. But any U.S. move to take the Danish protectorate would also serve as a green light for Moscow’s continuing push to conquer Ukraine, and Beijing’s looming effort to subjugate Taiwan.
Thousands of miles from Greenland, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are smiling.
This Arctic kleptomania is manifestly madness.
WHAT WE’RE READING
Here’s what has caught The Bunker’s eye recently
The Pentagon says it will retool Stars and Stripes, the storied independent newspaper continuously published for U.S. troops since World War II, to rid it of “woke distractions,” the Washington Post’s Liam Scott and Scott Nover reported January 16.
Trump’s plan to build his “Golden Fleet” of U.S. Navy warships will require 250,000 additional workers over the coming decade according to Navy Secretary John Phelan, USNI News reported January 14.
Trump’s proposal to change the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War could cost up to $125 million, the Congressional Budget Office said in a January 14 report.
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Pulitzer Prize-winner Mark Thompson, a national security analyst for the Center for Defense Information at POGO, has been covering the Pentagon for more than 45 years.
