President Donald Trump got a major pushback from the United States’ North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies when he threatened Greenland with annexation. In a biting editorial, the conservative National Review argues that Trump’s Greenland push was a “diplomatic” debacle — from hurting the United States’ “reputation” to undermining key U.S. alliances.
The Review, in its editorial, emphasizes that while Greenland is important to the U.S., Trump handled things badly at a considerable “cost.”
“To be clear,” the conservative Review says, “Trump was right about one big thing: that Greenland merited much more attention than it had been getting. The Arctic may not have warmed up by as much and as quickly as Al Gore and others claimed it would, but it has done so by enough to render it much more accessible than before. As a result, it is becoming a zone of geopolitical competition for its resources and, more simply, because of location, location, location. For obvious geographical reasons, that increases the already-considerable importance of Greenland to this country.”
The Review editorial continues, “The island is a potential back door through U.S. defenses and a key North Atlantic vantage point. Moreover, in an era of supply-chain anxiety, it has potentially valuable mineral resources, including rare earths.”
But Trump, the Review laments, made things “painful” in ways they didn’t have to be.
“Asking politely to upgrade the existing agreement might well have delivered just that — and done so without creating all the geopolitical self-harm,” the Review explains. “Unfortunately, Trump went about defending the U.S. strategic interest in a different way, and that was the wrong way. The core of the problem has been that, despite his own nationalist instincts, the president is oblivious when it comes to the national sensitivities of others. Originally, he had imagined that Greenland could simply be bought: essentially, it would be ‘a large real estate deal.’ This was not, unsurprisingly, how the Danes and Greenlanders saw it. The president’s adding the threat of stick (tariffs and hints of worse) to the promise of carrot caused a major rift within NATO and did damage to our reputation as a reliable ally.”
According to the Review, “stressing the fact that Danish and Greenlandic sovereignty will be left intact” is in the United States’ best interests.
“If and when an agreement is concluded,” the Review writers argue, “the best way to maximize its benefits to the U.S. will be to repair the diplomatic damage that this episode has caused by rebuilding a deeper relationship with Denmark and Greenland.”