IN ALL the noise and politics machinations so well described in TCW by Bruce Newsome, the strong strategic reasons for Donald Trump’s desire to annex Greenland have not been sufficiently explained.
First it is a good idea to look at a decent map, as Ivor Williams stressed here, looking down on the world from above the North Pole like this one published by the Epoch Times. The normal Mercator map of the world does not gain the perspective you need.
The Arctic is surrounded by very few countries. The main coastline is Russia. The United States (Alaska), Canada, Greenland and Norway provide the rest of adjacent countries. China is rumbling that it has ‘adjacent status’, but it has no Arctic coastline.
The legendary North West Passage, which many brave mariners tried to establish, has been a 200-year-old dream. It is a sea route around the north of Canada linking down into the Bering Strait between Alaska and Russia. The entrance to this route is between Greenland and Canada.
Only now is technology sufficiently advanced for Arctic sea routes to be viable, and in the lead is Russia, not least because opening a sea route along its northern coast would be very advantageous.
To that end Russia has built nuclear-powered ice-breakers, and has between six and eight of them running (depending on various reports) in its fleet of 60 ice-breakers. To put that in perspective, the US has two ice-breakers. These are specialised ships and must be large enough and powerful enough to smash their way through the thick ice, to travel a long way from any port and stay reliable in hostile conditions. Nuclear power is a clever solution.
Last year a normal freighter followed Russian ice-breakers from the Bering Strait through to Norway, finally docking in Rotterdam. The journey for the freighter took around three weeks less than its normal route through the Suez Canal.
Russia and China jointly have also been developing Arctic oil and gas exploration. For the Chinese, a pipeline through Russia to China would give it a much greater reliability of supply than shipping oil and gas from various places in the rest of the world with choke points such as the Malacca Strait between Singapore and Sumatra which could be closed to shipping very easily. The Suez Canal is another choke point.
Canada, with its globalist-orientated regime under Mark Carney, has angered the US for many years because of its ties with China, initiated under Pierre Trudeau, Justin Trudeau’s father. China has been developing its interests in Canada, so much so that Trump has ramped up tariffs on Canada significantly to slow down China’s influence and make sure Chinese goods imported through Canada destined for the US pay a hefty tariff.
Canada has another problem too, which is secession of its states. Alberta is in the front line of this. Fed up with policies dictated by Ottawa, Albertans are flocking to a poll to see how much support is really there for secession from Canada. Alberta is on the American border, and is a major source of oil. Other states in Canada are showing interest in what Alberta is doing. They include Manitoba, British Columbia and surprisingly Quebec, the maverick France-orientated state. Yukon, the enormous Canadian state to the north west, and Saskatchewan, might be swayed by the results in Alberta. Trump has said an independent Alberta would be welcomed by America and might even be invited to join the US.
China is making its presence well known the world over. It is particularly interested in oil and gas as it remains heavily dependent on imports to meet massive demand. Shipping routes of oil and gas to China all go through ‘choke points’ which can easily force shipping to stop. This would starve China of oil, and might damage its fighting capacity in a potential war with the US over Taiwan. Events in Iran and Venezuela have further damaged China’s supplies. That leaves it very dependent on Russian oil and gas, hence its interest in Arctic exploration and potentially Canada. China has acquired a lot of land around US military bases, which is a source of great irritation to the Trump administration.
Which brings us back to Greenland and the North West Passage. This is clearly an area which could be developed to the advantage of the US. No wonder Trump is so interested in acquiring Greenland, which would be key to his strategy of securing a good legacy for his country. Defensively too, the US is interested in a defence system capable of detecting incoming missiles further away from the US. Greenland would provide this.
The people of Greenland are likely to benefit greatly too, as it is mooted that each citizen will be on the receiving end of a substantial lump sum if they vote to join the United States.
On some anti-Trump social sites a picture has been circulating showing the President ‘holding hands’ with a penguin walking in Greenland. This is done to mock Trump for wanting Greenland as part of the US, a depiction that is as erroneous as Trump’s critics are ignorant. Penguins, as TCW readers know, live in the Antarctic.
