The Arctic Great Game

With a week still to go before his inauguration on January 20, US President-elect Donald Trump has, among other things, instigated the Greenlandic Inuit to push for full independence and panicked the Danish king to add Greenland and the Faroe Islands to his royal coat of arms. Trump has also, probably, had an indirect hand in Justin Trudeau’s decision to resign as Canada’s prime minister, or as “governor” of the “51^st State of the Union”.

If it’s facetious to call Trump a clown, it’s equally so to say the clown act masks cold calculation. With Trump, one doesn’t ever know. But one could make informed guesses. Greenland hasn’t really done badly as an overseas autonomous territory of Denmark, if not as a former Danish colony. But it could have done better. And who can deny a people their aspiration for freedom? Unlike the king, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen dismissed Trump with a politically correct “Greenland is for Greenlanders.” In Nuuk, however, Frederiksen’s rather unequal counterpart Múte Egede reiterated the need to move on from the “colonial era” and remove “obstacles to cooperation”. Cooperation with America, of course.

Trump couldn’t have chosen a better moment to wade into Greenland’s debate on its own future, which is peaking after the territory won its right to claim independence in 2009. The fact is that Greenlanders are split down the middle on whether to be closer to the US or Denmark. Donald Trump Jr’s trip and distribution of Make Greenland Great Again hats were just Trump Sr’s way of doing things—rubbing it in and making a song and dance about it too.

It’s often forgotten that Denmark has historically been Atlanticist and not Continental. As a NATO member, it has been closer to the US and the UK, not least because of its territories, than to Germany or France. The post-war agreement between the US and Denmark in any case makes America responsible for Greenland’s defence and the US maintains a base there. Strategically, Greenland’s salience has never been questioned given its position on the map vis-à-vis the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans. Add its resources to the mix—meaning mostly its rare earths—and the commercial, industrial and geopolitical logic of integrating the icy landscape with America is clear. Trump says it as it is. And that’s where he is different from his predecessors and perhaps also his successors.

Canada, on the other hand, is about history. It’s about politics and American ego. It was supposed to have been handed to the US by the British in a full and final settlement after the American War of Independence. Its existence, first as colony and then as a Commonwealth country across the most open and friendliest border in the world, irks a forgotten strand of American thought. Trump, as Chris Cutrone, a Chicago-based academic, recently wrote in Compact magazine, has kicked the embers of this history. “The US-Canada border,” says Cutrone, “is the frontier of the American Revolution… [Canada] remains the frontier of the counterrevolution after both American revolutionary wars. It remains the most European part of the Western Hemisphere. This has not been a good thing.”

But it is Greenland where, unbelievably, the action is. To understand that, all we have to do is, one, look at the map again, and two, look at what Russia and China are doing. Greenland is America’s gateway to the Northern Sea Route. There are oil and gas reserves here, still untapped, but the Northern Sea Route can make both the Panama and Suez Canals redundant as far as trade and transit between North America/Europe and Asia is concerned by using the Bering Strait. And this is where Russia and China come into the picture, especially as the ice caps melt.

“Trump surely knows that Russia, with its extensive Arctic coastline, is uniquely positioned to capitalise on the region’s potential. Indeed, the Northern Sea Route is the lynchpin of Moscow’s new energy strategy; it has constructed ports, terminals and icebreaker fleets aimed at leveraging the new shipping routes to export oil, LNG and other resources from the Arctic regions to global markets, particularly Asia,” writes Thomas Fazi in UnHerd. He adds: “China, meanwhile, is also heavily present: having designated itself as a ‘near-Arctic state’ in 2018, it has since been investing in the region through its Polar Silk Road initiative, aiming to integrate Arctic shipping into its broader Belt and Road framework.”

With too much talk everywhere of American decline, realistic and fantastic, Trump appears to have his finger on the geopolitical pulse, first grasping where the challenge of tomorrow lies, and then appearing to make a joke of it all. That’s the dangerous part—Trump not being taken seriously. He is unlikely to use military force to annex territory from a NATO ally. He is unlikely to use largescale force anywhere at all. That hadn’t been his way in this first term and, ceteris paribus, won’t be in his second either. But time and history wouldn’t move if ceteris paribus were ever guaranteed in practice. So, we don’t really know. (Xi Jinping could paw Taiwan tomorrow for all know.)

The danger is that this Arctic Great Game is very real. It’s already on. Whatever he thinks and does with NATO, Trump has indicated that he is not going to be isolationist; he is not going to pull America back. Well, not altogether. Rather, he will focus on what he considers America’s most pressing geopolitical priorities, and those seem to be closer home than his predecessor and the DC establishment think or would like to admit.

That’s the easy part. Through his noise, Trump has communicated a message. How will he walk the talk now? Because he will have to walk one way or the other.

Arctic coastlineCanadaDonald TrumpgeopoliticsGreenlandNATOWeb Exclusive