Talk of U.S. acquiring Greenland raises geopolitical tensions

Canada’s closest neighbours are in an escalating dispute that risks breaking the military alliance that has protected the nations of the North Atlantic for decades.

U.S. President Donald Trump has recently been talking about America acquiring Greenland, the Danish territory where Canada is about to open a diplomatic mission. Meanwhile, Canada is mulling whether or not to send troops to Greenland in a show of solidarity as Trump ramps up talk about taking over the self-governing territory.

Read more: 

• Carney says beefing up Arctic security key to solving Greenland crisis
• Churchill port is ‘our only hope’ if Greenland dispute rises, Manitoba premier says
• Security experts sound alarm for Canada as Trump threatens to take Greenland

On Tuesday, Trump shared an altered map on social media showing Canada, Greenland and Venezuela as part of the United States, a move that has drawn attention amid his continued push to acquire Greenland. Europe has responded to his rhetoric by deploying troops there for NATO‑linked military exercises, while Canada is weighing participation in training activities there.

To discuss the rising geopolitical tensions, Dr. Christian Leuprecht, a professor at Royal Military College and Queen’s University and senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, joined the Evan Bray Show on Wednesday morning.

Listen to the full interview, or read the transcript below:

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

EVAN BRAY: President Trump showed on Truth Social the other night a map that has the American flag over Canada, Greenland, and Venezuela as part of the States. How serious should we be taking some of this rhetoric?

LEUPRECHT: That’s a good question, because on the one hand, President Trump is an unusual politician that he actually does what he says. But we also know that Trump is known for making maximalist demands and then climbing down from those demands, and it seems that’s what we’re getting from his speech today, that a military invasion is not in the offing. It’s also not clear to me, is this really about Greenland? Is it about some of the fiscal challenges in the U.S., about a sort of failed bond auction by the Treasury, and distracting from that?

I think we need to figure out what the actual interests are that the U.S. has at stake, and then negotiate with the U.S. It’s always difficult to work with the U.S., but we’ve negotiated even with the Trump administration quite successfully. For instance, at least limited support for security guarantees for Ukraine in the event of a ceasefire, and so forth. It’s a NATO crisis, but it’s not necessarily an existential crisis.

Dr. Leuprecht, just this morning President Trump said it’s not about the critical minerals that Greenland has. He says that it literally is about the importance it plays from a militarily strategic geographic location. Can you talk about the accuracy of that? How significant is Greenland?

LEUPRECHT: The European Union and Denmark have already put in place a number of constraints to impede China from going after the critical minerals in Greenland, and from a purely market perspective, most of those are not profitable to mine without very significant critical infrastructure investments by the state. There’s probably some truth to the remarks that Trump is making, and yes, the security guarantees, the security concerns, are real. We’ve seen significant Russian and Chinese collusion in the Arctic, perhaps not as much as Trump makes it out to be, but the Commander (of) U.S. NORTHCOM, NORAD, confirmed that.

Look, 95 per cent for instance, of our communications underwater critical infrastructure runs through the Greenland-Iceland-U.K. gap. Whenever you send an email to Europe, that goes through an undersea cable there. The concern is if China and Russia were able to compromise those cables, or were able to compromise control over the gap, that would ultimately call into question the ability to defend the transatlantic space in Europe and North America, and the U.S. president is saying that’s a risk he’s not willing to take.

The problem is that after the Cold War, allies, Canada and just about all European allies, let their anti-submarine warfare capability atrophy. And so the only country that currently has significant capabilities of the sort is the United States. But the United States is all busy with those capabilities in the Indo-Pacific. I think this is very much about Trump knowing that if he menaces NATO members, they’re going to spend more. That’s what he learned last summer. This is about the key Arctic countries doing more to provide robust capabilities to actually defend the Arctic.

This is an ever-evolving discussion, because just this morning we heard President Trump say “Look, I’m not planning on coming in with military force to Greenland,” although we’ve seen him go back on his word before. One of the big questions has been, should Canada be sending some military troops to Greenland to take part in this NATO training exercise that they’ve got going on? Do you have thoughts on that?

LEUPRECHT: I think it sends an important signal for us to send troops. We need to understand to what end. We can send one soldier and fly them there and fly them back. We can send a contingent. We can send a battle group. And I think what we’re trying to signal is the unity in alignment with the European allies. We got that from the prime minister’s speech yesterday. At the same time, the prime minister is likely reticent about angering President Trump, and probably reticent about Trump’s sort of knee-jerk reaction of imposing tariffs on Canada as a result, the way he’s threatened against European Union members, and it’s a fine needle to thread. It’s also about where these troops would come from, whether it’s a short-term or longer-term mission, because there’s no spare capacity. The Canadian Forces are understaffed, undercapitalized and underfunded, and so there are very difficult trade-offs any time the prime minister decides, especially on short notice, that we’re going to take on a new mission.

I’m wondering if you could talk about what you see, given everything that’s going on, as to the future of NATO. Is it going to remain as is, or do you see some significant changes on the horizon?

LEUPRECHT: I think the existential crisis we have, we’ve walked back a little bit with Trump’s comments that he’s not looking to invade Greenland. And look, NATO’s had lots of existential crises. France withdrawing from the integrated command structure in the 1960s, the Turkish invasion of Cyprus 1974, the German stationing of nuclear weapons in Germany in the late 1970s out of U.S. concerns about German conventional weakness with their armed forces, the invasion of Iraq, the brain-dead comment from Emmanuel Macron, and of course the continuing, long-term burden-sharing crisis, if you want, until NATO members finally stepped up. Working with the Americans is always going to be difficult, but NATO is a very efficient decision-making mechanism. Nowhere else in the world do the Americans have 31 other countries around the table that they can co-ordinate with, and I always argue that for the relatively little that the U.S. spends on defense in Europe, nowhere else in the world do they get a better return on investment.

Last question: what do you make of this ‘Board of Peace’ that Donald Trump is assembling?

LEUPRECHT: Well, I think this looks like he might be trying to stand up an institution that’s going to compete with the United Nations, and that essentially will be led by, ostensibly the United States but effectively himself. And it’s sort of the usual Trump sort of pay-to-play kind of thing. We’ve seen, for instance, the European Union and all European Union members not so far taking up the invitation that the United Kingdom has also so far expressed reservations. Whether this is in the collective interest is not immediately evident to our closest allies.

–with files from The Canadian Press