Don’t crack your teeth

‘The US needs Greenland for the purpose of national security,’ Donald Trump has said. ‘Anything less’ than ‘Greenland in the hands of the United States’ is ‘unacceptable’.

The US desire to annex Greenland is traceable to at least 1867 and the ambitions of the secretary of state William H. Seward, who negotiated the Alaska purchase that same year.

Though Denmark was occupied by Germany during the Second World War, Greenland remained under the control of a free Danish delegation based in Washington. In April 1941, the US secretary of state Cordell Hull and the Danish ambassador to the US signed a defence treaty for Greenland which led to the first US military bases there. After the war, the US offered to buy Greenland for $100 million in gold bullion but settled for a more capacious security agreement, signed by the US and Denmark in April 1951.

In the 1960s, US Strategic Air Command kept long-range bombers with nuclear weapons continuously circling over Greenland, ready to be diverted towards the Soviet Union. In 1968, a B-52 carrying four nuclear bombs crashed in Thule harbour. Three of the bombs were recovered but one was lost.

The New START Treaty between Russia and the US, which limits the number of deployed nuclear warheads, missiles and strategic bombers, is set to expire next month. Both countries have replaced much of their Cold War nuclear arsenal with more modern equipment. But Russia’s strategic nuclear doctrine has not changed very much. It has stuck to its long-standing policy of keeping parity with the combined nuclear arsenals of the US, UK and France.

Russia’s nuclear-armed submarine fleet is based at Gadzhiyevo naval base on the Kola Peninsula in Arctic north-west Russia. The Olenya strategic air bases are nearby. The submarines and strategic bombers, however, are mobile. Russia has more than three hundred ICBMs, of which around two hundred can be transported by road. The remaining hundred or so are mostly in silos in southern Russia, in Saratov Oblast, Irkutsk, Orenburg Oblast, Krasnoyarsk Krai and out of the way places a couple of hundred kilometres from Moscow.

An ICBM launched from somewhere near Moscow towards the East Coast of the US would fly over Scandinavia and skim the southern tip of Greenland. That is why one of the five US Ballistic Missile Early Warning System radars is located at Pituffik Space Base (formerly Thule Air Base). The others are at Fylingdales on the North York Moors, Cape Cod, Beale Air Force Base in Northern California and Clear Space Force Station, Alaska.

In 1979, Commander Finn B. Sørensen of the Royal Danish Navy wrote in the Naval War College Review that ‘Greenland and the surrounding waters are of great strategic importance to the United States’: ‘Military strategy in the North Atlantic stresses the importance of eastern Greenland.’

To reach the Atlantic, Russia’s Northern Fleet must pass through the GIUK gap between Greenland, Iceland and the UK (there is a back route between Greenland and Canada’s Ellesmere Island but it is very narrow). During the Cold War, the US Navy operated around Greenland to be ready to keep the Soviet fleet bottled up in the Barents Sea. In 1988, it issued a handbook on operating in Arctic conditions that included advice for seamen on how to take hot drinks without cracking their teeth.

US ocean surveillance ships towing sonar systems still operate in those waters, searching for Russian submarines. Greenland may become more important to both the US and Russian navies as global heating increases the viability of Arctic shipping routes.

What about the island’s mineral wealth? Large iron ore deposits have been confirmed. At Kvanefjeld, Kringlerne, Motzfeldt and a handful of other sites there are confirmed rare earth elements. But at Kvanefjeld, where they are intruded by radioactive thorium and uranium, the Greenland government has prohibited their extraction. The ban has been challenged by an Australian mining company.

The last major study, conducted by the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland in 2023, reported good potential for niobium, tantalum, molybdenum, titanium and gallium, which is of interest to the Pentagon.

Much of Greenland’s sub-ice terrain remains poorly explored. Mining at any scale would require considerable capital investment. Road transport is often very difficult or impossible. Even stable electricity generation on the scale necessary for large mines is not easy.

Whatever the motivation – fancy cannot be dismissed – Trump has a vision of Greenland as a second Alaska. There are options besides annexation. The head of the US Arctic Research Commission, Thomas Dans, has suggested that a Compact of Free Association, such as the US already has with Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau in the Pacific, could be the ‘first station on a train journey’. Under the 1951 treaty (which was updated in 2004), Trump could greatly increase the number of troops deployed to the Pituffik base.

Germany, France and the UK are frantically trying to head this off, and planning to push for a joint Nato mission in the Arctic modelled on Operation Baltic Sentry (it is said to include a British military contribution). The European Commission is talking of doubling its funding to Greenland in the next EU budget.

Europe does not often have to face the fact of US imperialism without some consoling dishonesty about alliances and partnerships. Now its leaders are scrambling. The Financial Times columnist Edward Luce has argued that in annexing Greenland, the US ‘would kill Nato in one swoop’. But would it? Trump appears to think Europe’s leaders are cowed enough to accept even this.