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(Melville House; background photo of Nuuk, Greenland by Evgeniy Maloletka/AP) |
My wife’s school district contains about three times the population of Greenland. At the moment, only one of them is being openly threatened by Donald Trump. How the fate of a remote community of 57,000 people could spark fears of NATO’s collapse is one of the strangest developments in this already awful year. World leaders were still sputtering over the recent U.S. errand in Venezuela when Stephen Miller, the White House adviser in charge of 1930s nostalgia, told CNN’s Jake Tapper, “Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.” “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” Or, as Orwell puts it in “1984,” “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” This week, a flock of op-eds has descended on Greenland like Arctic puffins reclaiming their cliffs. But Elizabeth Buchanan was there long before them. Last fall she published an engaging blend of history and modern-day political analysis with the cheeky title: “So You Want to Own Greenland?” “The change under way in the Arctic is going to be century-defining,” she writes. “Beyond the redrawing of global trade corridors, or the carving up of resources for humanity’s next millennium, the Arctic is hosting an extinction-level event in respect of the post-war global order.” The co-founder of a polar security program at West Point, Buchanan doesn’t sound like an academic. Determined to explain complex issues to lay readers — she notes that her parents didn’t go to college — she approaches the Greenland question with a hard line of Realpolitik and a surprising dash of humor. Her book offers a survey of the giant island’s geography and its native peoples: No, it’s not empty, nor is it the grotesquely distorted mass our Mercator maps show. Her concise history runs through attempts to own Greenland, starting with the Vikings, whose mysterious disappearance may be a modern-day warning. In a chapter slick with James Bond intrigue, she reminds us that during the Cold War, the U.S. built Camp Century, a nuclear-powered city beneath the ice with miles of tunnels, a hospital, a chapel and hot showers. Project Iceworm, meanwhile, involved an audacious scheme to hide hundreds of nuclear missiles without telling the Danes. We have, in a sense, acted as though we own Greenland for decades. And yet most people laughed off Trump’s suggestion in 2019 that the U.S. might buy the island. The Danish prime minister called his idea “absurd.” But Buchanan doesn’t allow Trump’s buffoonish behavior to cloud her view of America’s strategic interests. Like the Panama Canal, Greenland is key to crucial shipping lanes — lanes that could grow even more important as climate change alters polar trade routes. The island is also packed with valuable rare earth minerals, though she’s skeptical about the economics of extracting them from the frozen ground. And finally, Greenland, like Alaska, is a natural buffer in the Arctic against Russia. “There is simply no denying it,” she writes dispassionately. “Greenland is a strategic North American island.” In a world of legal boundaries and mutual respect, talk of grabbing territory from the Kingdom of Denmark would be unimaginable. But as Buchanan told me from her home in Australia, “You’re dealing with a president who has basically trashed what’s left of the rules-based order in a way that I don’t think the U.S. can actually come back from.” To explain the president’s bellicose approach toward Greenland, Buchanan looks at “The Art of the Deal,” the book Trump published almost 40 years ago. There, she finds a clear outline of the tactics that too many critics dismiss as mere incoherence: launch outrageous demands to re-anchor negotiations, create maximum uncertainty and exploit leverage. She points out that Trump’s goal isn’t to do what he says; it’s to get what he wants. Controlling Greenland doesn’t require military action (an option Buchanan dismisses as ridiculous), purchasing the island or formally making it part of the United States. Her favored scenario, among several more theatrical options laid out in the final chapter, is what she calls the “boring” one: The native residents will continue to shame their liberal colonizers in Copenhagen and press for independence. Using arrangements already in place — or perhaps a “free association agreement” like the Marshall Islands maintains — Washington will increase its military and commercial presence on the island and attain “de facto control.” Given the looming presence of Russia and China, it all makes a grim kind of sense. I’m tempted to be irritated with Buchanan’s cool rationality, her unwillingness to make moral judgments — a stance she describes as “hard realism,” not indifference and certainly not approval. “Watching what’s happening in the U.S. is terrifying,” she concedes. But expressing outrage in her book, she tells me, “would be unhelpful. I don’t think it gets us any closer to a conducive global environment. There are always going to be winners and losers.” When she thinks of her 9-year-old son, though, and puts herself in the place of the Inuit Greenlanders, her tone shifts from geopolitical strategy to daily parenting. What do they want for their children? What all parents want: education, security, opportunity. And like the savvy owners of any valuable property, they’ll use every tactic at their disposal to make their own artful deal.❖ | ||||||||||||||