Donald Trump has probably not read Machiavelli, even the short one, The Prince. Machiavelli’s most famous advice was that it’s better for a prince to be feared than loved. But above all, he said, a ruler should strive not to be hated. Nobody likes a bully. The US President, however, clearly doesn’t care about any of this in his attempt to intimidate Denmark into handing over Greenland.
Why does Trump want Greenland? A clue lay in his meeting at the White House last week with the Florida Panthers ice hockey team. The team lined up for a photo: red ties and muscle-bound torsos bursting out of suit jackets, Trump in front of them at a lectern. ‘Good-looking people, young, beautiful people, I hate them. You hate standing here with all this power behind you.’ He went on: ‘But I got power too, it’s called the United States military. I don’t care.’
Trump saw one of the team hovering with gifts, a hockey shirt – with ‘Trump 47’ on the back – and a gold hockey stick: ‘Ooh, that looks nice. I hope it’s a stick and not just a shirt. That stick looks beautiful… Maybe I get both. Who the hell knows. I’m President, I’ll just take them.’ Whatever rationalisations Trump’s officials come up with, there’s a similar reason he wants to take Greenland: because he can.
Thomas Dans, the US Arctic commissioner, told USA Today that some kind of American action could happen within ‘weeks or months’. Dans said he hoped a deal could be done, so it may be just a coincidence that the 11th Airborne Division, based in Alaska, has been put on a few hours’ notice to move. The public story is that they may be needed to help immigration agents in Minneapolis, but they are trained in Arctic warfare and are the closest American unit to Greenland. Sending them to the US base there would ratchet up the pressure on Denmark.
Rasmus Jarlov, chairman of the Danish parliament’s defence committee, believes an American invasion can’t be ruled out. ‘We wake up every morning to new threats and new false accusations from the US administration,’ he says. ‘Very little would surprise me at this point.’ Danish politicians give off an air of befuddlement. They are hurt to be treated this way after years as one of America’s most loyal allies, shoulder to shoulder in Iraq and Afghanistan, and think American officials have taken leave of their senses.
Jarlov tells me: ‘We’re struggling to understand. We keep asking the Americans why they want Greenland and we’re not getting logical answers. If they would tell us what it is that they would gain from annexation, then we could talk about how we could achieve that in other ways. But they’re not. They’re not really coming up with a reason. We’re willing to give them access to what they think they need, but we can’t do that if they don’t tell us what it is.’
Perhaps the end of Nato wouldn’t bother Trump. He has never much liked the alliance
According to Mike Waltz, Trump’s former national security adviser, what they want are rare earth minerals. Greenland certainly has a lot of them, but getting them out of the frozen ground is difficult and expensive. American companies can already buy mining rights, but there’s been no rush to do this because it’s far from certain they would make any money: there’s a reason rare minerals are not yet being mined in Greenland. Even if they were to be extracted, they would have to be sent to China to be processed.
Trump’s declared rationale is national security. He has said: ‘Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place.’ It is possible, however, that he is muddling up different parts of the Arctic.
Professor Elana Wilson Rowe, of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, tells me the real worry for the US ought to be the Bering Strait, just off Alaska, 8,000 miles from Greenland. Russia and China have carried out joint naval exercises there on America’s northern doorstep. ‘For sure, the Arctic is a strategic location,’ she says, but Trump and his officials were ‘transposing’ the threat from their own bit of the Arctic to Greenland. ‘The idea of an immediate threat [there] is significantly exaggerated.’
If there is a new Arctic ‘Great Game’, it is around, not on, Greenland. As polar ice melts, new shipping lanes are opening. Chinese vessels have started to make voyages between China and Europe, and China and Russia, using this northern sea route. They may want to do much more of this in years to come, a polar Belt and Road strategy. But despite claiming to be an Arctic power, China is 1,000 miles distant. It has no permanent military presence in the Arctic.
It’s a different story with the Russians – and here the real danger lies. They have even planted a Russian flag, made from titanium, on the seabed at the geographic North Pole. The Danish government has repeatedly pointed out that Nato would break if the US invaded Greenland. But there is another way Trump might destroy the alliance. Moscow has been militarising its Arctic coast. As the ‘rules-based international order’ melts like the polar ice, Vladimir Putin might decide to seize the Norwegian territory of Svalbard.
Svalbard is an archipelago of islands about 500 miles off Norway. Russia has long coveted it. The islands would be part of Russia’s ‘Bastion Defence’, giving Moscow the kind of ‘strategic depth’ used as the justification to invade Ukraine. Svalbard controls the Bear Gap, the chokepoint that Russian submarines must cross to reach the Atlantic. It is the gateway to Russia’s submarine bases on the Kola Peninsula, and in a war could be critical for protecting its nuclear deterrent.
Russia already has two settlements on Svalbard, under a 100-year-old treaty. In normal times, if Putin flooded the islands with ‘little green men’, Norway would invoke Article 5 of Nato’s founding treaty and call for US help. It’s hard to see Trump sending that help now, as Europe confronts him over his threats to Denmark. Putin – always a gambler – might take a chance on this.
Cracking open the Nato alliance has been a Russian goal since Soviet days. But Putin could never have imagined this happening because of something so outlandish as American threats to seize Greenland. Perhaps the end of Nato wouldn’t bother Trump. He has never much liked the alliance. He could certainly get everything he wants in Greenland by asking the Danes nicely.
One of the wilder theories is that Trump has been persuaded of Greenland’s potential as the base for a massive bitcoin mining operation (which doesn’t involve any actual mining). Trump was initially sceptical of cryptocurrency, calling it a scam, but he’s since been converted, making as much as $1 billion from his own meme coin. He got big campaign contributions from new tech money, some of which is also behind a scheme to set up a libertarian ‘network’ state somewhere in the world, possibly Greenland.
In November Dryden Brown, a twentysomething crypto bro, went to Greenland to try to buy it. He posted photos on X of himself swimming in the near-frozen waters there. This might be the place, he said, where the West could achieve its destiny, ‘reaching ever higher towards spiritual heights and physical mastery’. It would be ‘a society of portly merchants, muscular warriors, and very thin priests… a heroic society reminiscent of Rome, Athens, and Sparta, but with spacefaring ambitions’. He went on: ‘If humanity is going to build Terminus on Mars, we should practise in Greenland.‘
It would be easy not to take this seriously. But Brown claims to have $525 million in initial funding from, among others, Peter Thiel, one of Trump’s leading Silicon Valley backers. Brown believes that Greenlanders haven’t achieved independence – despite ‘97 per cent’ of them wanting it – because Denmark pays half a billion dollars a year in salaries for government officials. He would replace that money with Thiel’s and build Eden in the Arctic.
Trump has never given any hint of buying into this. Seizing Greenland isn’t about the 22nd century but the 19th. He has his version of the Monroe Doctrine, the Donroe Doctrine, which claims a sphere of influence in America’s backyard. Professor Klaus Dodds says Trump wants the whole western hemisphere, including Canada and possibly Iceland too. Dodds has written a book, Unfrozen: The Fight for the Future of the Arctic, but thinks psychology, not strategy, explains much of what the US government is doing.
‘This isn’t geopolitics – it’s ego politics,’ he says. ‘He wants to be the president who has expanded the United States.’
A huge factor is Trump’s volcanic resentment over not winning the Nobel Peace Prize. On Sunday, he sent Norway’s Prime Minister surely one of the strangest messages ever written from one nation’s leader to another: ‘Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be pre-dominant.’ He concluded: ‘The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT.’
‘This isn’t geopolitics – it’s ego politics. He wants to be the president who has expanded the United States’
But a takeover of Greenland isn’t a new idea for Trump. In his first term, he pointed at it on a map and said to his staff: ‘Look at the size of this. It’s massive. That should be part of the United States.’ As he told two US writers, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, this was his background in New York real estate. ‘I love maps. I’m a real estate developer. I look at a corner, I say, “I’ve got to get that store for the building that I’m building”… It [Greenland] is not that different.’
At 836,000 square miles, Greenland is about a quarter of the size of the continental United States. It would be an impressive addition to anyone’s real estate portfolio. In that first term, Trump suggested taking federal money from Puerto Rico and using it to buy Greenland. He also suggested trading Puerto Rico for Greenland. It’s not clear if Puerto Rico is still on the table.
One repercussion for Keir Starmer’s government is that Trump has withdrawn his support for the expensive and bad deal to give Mauritius the Chagos archipelago, which includes the US military base at Diego Garcia. He posted on Truth Social this week that the UK was doing this ‘FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER… There is no doubt that China and Russia have noticed this act of total weakness. These are International Powers who only recognise STRENGTH’.
He added: ‘The UK giving away extremely important land is an act of GREAT STUPIDITY, and is another in a very long line of National Security reasons why Greenland has to be acquired.’
On Tuesday, asked how far he was willing to go to get Greenland, Trump said: ‘You’ll find out.’ Thomas Dans told the FT: ‘It may sound like American chauvinism… and it is. We’re done apologising about that.’
Trump revealed the thinking that underpins this new age of American imperialism at his photo-op with the hockey team: a foreign policy based on ‘STRENGTH’ – naked power shorn of hypocritical moralising. British readers might understand the current moment using a different sport, football. You could call it the Millwall approach to foreign policy: ‘Nobody likes us – we don’t care.’
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