Trump’s preoccupation with Greenland reflects how his presidency is reshaping the world order

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Back in the summer of 2015, when 17 candidates were vying for the Republican presidential nomination, William Hill, one of the world’s leading bookmakers, put the odds of a Donald Trump presidency at 14 to 1.

That’s nothing.

The following items were too remote to even set odds: serious talk about American possession of Greenland. Members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, created by the United States to prevent aggression in North America and Europe, sending troops to the remote, icy island to forestall American foreign-power adventurism. The world, weary with, but accustomed to, big-power confrontations, directing rapt attention to relations between the United States and Denmark, so steady a U.S. ally that it recognized the newly independent nation in 1792, only nine years after the formal end of the American Revolution and before Austria and Russia extended their recognition.

All that by a President who threatened Canadian sovereignty; prompted Ottawa to rethink trade and security relations intact for nearly a century; sent troops into Venezuela in direct defiance of his vow not to embark on a new nation-building enterprise; and threatened military intervention in support of anti-government demonstrations in Iran while cracking down on dissent at home.

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With the approach of Tuesday’s anniversary of Mr. Trump’s second inauguration, his world view and the mind-stretching incongruities of his approach to foreign policy provide a clear window into the dramatic transformations the United States has embarked on under its most unpredictable president.

Just as historians now are debating when Stalinism ended in Russia, future scholars may wrestle with specifying the symbolic end of the post-Second World War period, largely an era of peace and prosperity forged by international institutions and alliances created by, and maintained by, Mr. Trump’s predecessors. Now a preliminary answer can be proffered: This, more than the one declared by George H.W. Bush a third of a century ago, is truly a new world order.

Or, perhaps, a disorienting disorder.

This era puzzles and troubles American allies, adds fresh uncertainties into relations with China and Russia, and – with hostility toward Canada, the removal of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, and the advent of the “Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine” – renders irrelevant generations-old assumptions of Western Hemisphere relations.

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If that didn’t come into sharp focus with Mr. Trump’s baiting of former prime minister Justin Trudeau and the President’s threats to Canada – first regarded as the artless taunts of a restless bully, then as a deeply hurtful insult with grave geopolitical and economic implications – then the Greenland preoccupation, and Mr. Trump’s 10-per-cent tariff threat against many of the closest NATO allies of the U.S. who rallied to Copenhagen’s side, sealed it, and count as another startling departure from settled assumptions.

The synchronicity offered by the confluence of the looming Trump one-year anniversary and the imbroglio with Denmark – so loyal an American ally that it supported the invasion of Iraq and sent personnel to Afghanistan – makes the Greenland threat a powerful symbol of the changes that have roiled the world since Mr. Trump took his second oath of office.

Indeed, the episode involves every characteristic of the initiatives he has undertaken: unforeseen. Seemingly capricious. In violation of decades, if not generations, of precedent. Disruptive of what was regarded as the established arrangement of nations. In some ways illogical and unnecessary. And in all ways underlining the power of the American presidency and of the United States itself.

It also presents an astonishing historical irony: a country celebrating its semiquincentennial as a rebel against colonialism seeking its own colony, only to be rebuffed by a series of European countries that practised centuries of colonialism themselves.

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This week, Mr. Trump, a billionaire tycoon styling himself a warrior against elitism, heads to the World Economic Forum in Davos, there to consort with global plutocrats and the European political gentry. The incongruity is palpable, especially since the President – whose 2018 visit was more like a trade mission, where he spoke in conventional rhetoric of reciprocal trade and proclaimed, “America is open for business” – almost certainly will deliver an address that unsettles the gathering and emphasizes settling scores with businesses and countries he believes have taken advantage of the U.S.

Recent weeks underline how an offhand, unscripted remark at an unlikely time – a rural health care event Friday, for example – has the potential of roiling the world economy. Top officials from the American heartland, more interested in drug prices and the economic threats facing remote hospitals, found their cares overshadowed “be­cause we need Green­land for na­tional se­cu­rity.”

The “need” for Greenland, a mix of national security and commercial concerns, is an illuminating example of how global expectations of strategic thinking from the White House – even if flawed, as it was when presidents from Harry Truman to Richard Nixon embraced the “domino theory” in the Cold War struggle against communist expansion – have been upended.

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Enhanced minerals extraction from Greenland would be extremely difficult and expensive. “There are few roads, no electrical grid and a small skilled work force,” said Paul Bierman, a University of Vermont geologist and author of When the Ice is Gone: What a Greenland Ice Core Reveals About Earth’s Tumultuous History and Perilous Future. “Big mining isn’t happening in a place where it’s minus-30 degrees, it’s dark most of the year, and the fjords freeze over.”

At twice the area of Saskatchewan, Greenland – which seems even larger because the space it occupies is exaggerated by the Mercator projection used in classrooms and popular maps – was vital during the Second World War because its upstream position made it an effective predictor of Europe’s weather. Germany placed four weather stations there. The U.S. and Canada used its strategic geographical position as an airplane and troop transport station to avoid Nazi U-boat attacks on maritime convoys.

National-security worries prompted Truman to set his eyes 80 years ago on purchasing Greenland for US$100-million in gold plus oil rights in Alaska, then 13 years from statehood. Those secret 1946 negotiations occurred before surveillance satellites, intercontinental ballistic missiles and NATO itself were born.

The principal rationale for the Greenland preoccupation is the prospect of Russia and China moving through the Arctic to attack the Western Hemisphere – possible largely because of global warming. Mr. Trump has pronounced the latter a “hoax.”

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to specify that Truman’s offer to purchase Greenland included US$100-million in gold. The incorrect estimated current value of the purchase offer has been removed.