Commentary: The Greenland alarm is sounding. Europe needs to hear it

AMERICAN ACTION ON GREENLAND

For a possible timeline to American action on Greenland, assume it may come before November’s midterm elections to Congress. As for method, I doubt even Trump knows that yet, just as sending special forces to extract Nicolas Maduro wasn’t his first choice for getting what he wanted there (he first tried a negotiated exit for the Venezuelan dictator).

But what seems more likely for Greenland is some version of the hybrid use of force, money, political pressure and disinformation Putin used to seize Crimea with barely a shot fired.

The White House could pay as much as US$1 million to each of the island’s inhabitants to first vote for independence and then join the US, which would cost about the same as the State Department’s annual budget. But it’s very unlikely to need to go to that expense.

Denmark lacks the means to compete either militarily or economically with the US – which Frederiksen knows. Copenhagen is also, like the rest of Europe, exposed to US retaliation on trade, support for Ukraine and its own security more broadly, making a showdown with Washington unaffordable.

What’s emerging ever more clearly is that Europe is vulnerable because it remains dependent on the old US-led world order in ways that much of the rest of the world does not; lopsided trade deals, manipulations over Ukraine and now Trump’s threats to take Greenland are simply test cases that prove the point.

At the same time, we don’t yet have a replacement world “order”, just the grizzly death throes of the last one. It seems clear that we’re heading back to some form of 19th century great power competition, but without – as yet – any mechanism like the post-Napoleonic Concert of Europe to limit the rivalry and propensity to war that this will entail.

There will be countless questions for such an arrangement to resolve. How much of Europe, for example, should be in Russia’s sphere of control? Where in the Pacific or Himalayas should China’s sphere end and America’s and India’s begin? What of Taiwan and its vital chip industry?

And what will be the fallout in the Western Balkans, where in the 1990s the US and Europe prevented Serbia, the dominant regional power, from changing borders with its neighbours by force of arms and ethnic cleansing? Will the European Union – the rule-based international order par excellence – be able to rearm and remain sufficiently unified to survive in a recognisable form? 

None of these questions are fully answerable for the time being, because the Ukraine war is ongoing and Trump’s attempt to impose a new “Donroe Doctrine” in America’s backyard does not yet amount to a new international order. All of those issues and more, however, are now very much in play.