Forcible annexing of Greenland would trigger an international crisis
Rothwell says, “Trump has spoken about using economic or military means to acquire Greenland. The most obvious military means is the United States annexes Greenland in the same way that Russia has served to annex parts of eastern Ukraine. The President issues one of his executive orders, suggesting that he’s going to annex Greenland, and then orders the US military to effectively take over Greenland.”
There’s already a US military base on Greenland, Pituffik Space Base, specifically for space surveillance, missile detection and missile defence.
Rothwell says, “It’s not a regular US Air Force or other military base, but I’m sure that it could be used as a staging point for any US military takeover. We know that Greenland is virtually undefended, and that this President seems to be quite open to using what he sees to be his presidential powers. So the cost of that is just inconceivable in terms of how that would be received and seen by the international community. That would absolutely break the Western alliances if the United States was to go down that track. The ramifications for Australia, from the perspectives of international relations, foreign policy, and even defence, are just unimaginable.”
An invasion would theoretically trigger NATO’s Article 5, which states that an attack against one member state is an attack against them all.Rothwell says it would also breach the North Atlantic Treaty, and that, “in itself, could trigger other NATO partners coming to the military aid of Denmark.”
This, he adds, is “just completely inconceivable.”
“The most likely situation is that Trump “seeks to entice the Greenlanders to come over to the United States’ way of thinking, either through a unilateral declaration of independence, or gradually working towards independence in collaboration with Denmark, and then an independent Greenland saying ‘we’d now like to very much join up and have some sort of security, defence and economic relationship with the United States’.”
