Greenland: Donald Trump versus Nato

After the Danish and Greenland foreign ministers came out of a meeting in Washington on Jan 14 convinced that Donald Trump really intended to seize Greenland, things moved very fast.

- Gwynne Dyer

Except in Canada.“We didn’t manage to change the American position,’ said Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen. “It’s clear the president has this wish of conquering Greenland. And we made it very, very clear that this is not in the interests of the [Danish] kingdom?”

Within a day, European members of the Nato alliance were promising troops for a Danish-led military force to strengthen the giant island’s weak defences against the alleged threat of invasion by other, more distant conquerors: Russia and China.

Oddly, not even the keenest strategist looking for plausible reasons to buy more submarines or whatever had hit upon this particular excuse before. But that was Donald ‘Trump's pretext for taking Greenland: “The US needs Greenland for the purpose of national security is vital for the Golden Dome that we are building”

Hardly anybody actually believes this. The “Golden Dome’ is a proposed space-based antimissile defence system that, like former president Ronald Reagan’s fanciful and ultimately abandoned “Star Wars” project, would protect the United States from attack by nuclear missiles.