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China, Russia, and Iran had to be alarmed by the display of US power in the Venezuela incursion — but so did Denmark, a NATO ally of the United States.
In the aftermath of the snatch-and-grab of Nicholás Maduro, President Donald Trump spoke to The Atlantic about his other foreign-policy priorities: “We do need Greenland, absolutely.”
It might have been easy not too long ago to dismiss this as bluster.
Not anymore — not after the successful strikes on the Iran nuclear program and the Venezuela operation.
We’ve gone from “Trump always chickens out,” when he was backing off his Liberation Day tariffs, to “dismiss Trump’s threats at your own peril.”
Trump doesn’t do everything he says, but almost everything he does do, he talks about openly beforehand.
In this respect, enemies of the United States can never complain that they weren’t warned — and perhaps allies, too.
Denmark controls Greenland as a semi-autonomous territory. It colonized the sparsely populated island several hundred years ago.
Mostly within the Arctic Circle, Greenland is not desirable real estate by any typical metric, but it has outsized strategic significance.
As more waters become navigable in the Arctic Sea, the top of the world opens up for greater geopolitical contention.
Greenland occupies a crucial spot: It sits on a key naval corridor between the Atlantic and the Arctic, and it has prodigious reserves of critical minerals, and perhaps fossil fuels, too.
If it fell into our lap, it’d be an excellent addition to our territorial holdings.
There’s a reason that American statesmen down through the decades have coveted the island.
The problem is that it’s not currently available.
What are the other options? A lightly armed contingent of American crossing guards could probably take it over in a couple of days.
The challenge, though, is political and diplomatic, not military.
A NATO ally seizing the territory of another NATO ally would obviously be a grave threat to the integrity of the alliance.
Would Denmark invoke Article 5 against the United States?
It has the makings of a good spoof musical, but it’s not something anyone should want to experience in reality.
Although Trump has said in the past that he doesn’t take military force off the table — an amazing statement in and of itself — he’s also talked of buying Greenland.
The Danes, though, say it’s not for sale, and the Greenlanders don’t want to be bought.
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If Trump really pushes the issue, and forces Denmark and NATO into a corner with the 82nd Airborne ready to go on an airstrip somewhere, he could probably compel a sale — but it’d be courting a diplomatic crisis, damaging the reputation of the United States without enough upside.
The fact of the matter is, we can almost certainly get whatever we need from Greenland without violating a friendly country’s sovereignty, or straining a world-historical alliance to the breaking point.
We already have a missile-defense base there. The 1951 Greenland Defense Agreement between Denmark and the United States that allows for the Pituffik Space Base could presumably be updated and extended.
Given the national-security importance of critical minerals to both the United States and NATO, it should be possible to unlock Greenland’s resources.
Instead of clapping back at Trump, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen should be reaching out, asking to sit down for a steak dinner at Mar-a-lago and offering a deal.
While public pressure gets Trump’s back up, private persuasion — and a warm relationship — goes a long way: The Panamanians managed to get him to stop talking about taking back the Canal (for now) with prudent concessions.
For his part, Trump should realize that making everyone in a friendly nation hate him doesn’t help his cause.
His loose talk of annexing Canada last year helped Justin Trudeau’s party survive a national election that it should have lost.
His Greenland saber-rattling is presumably making it harder for leaders in Denmark to work with him on sensible economic and security cooperation.
If Nicholás Maduro got what he deserved, Demark is a different matter.
Even the unsentimental, results-oriented foreign policy of Donald Trump needs to distinguish between friend and foe.
X: @RichLowry