Transcript: Swamp Notes — Greenland, USA

This is an audio transcript of the FT News Briefing podcast episode: ‘Swamp Notes — Greenland, USA’

Kasia Broussalian
In Donald Trump’s second administration, the America First ideology might be a lot more imperialist. And not only does the president-elect want to expand US territory, he wants that new land from friends.

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This is Swamp Notes, the weekly podcast from the FT News Briefing where we talk about all things happening in US politics. I’m Kasia Broussalian, and this week we’re asking: why is Donald Trump threatening to annexe territory from allies? Here with me to discuss is Richard Milne. He’s the FT’s Nordic and Baltic bureau chief. Hey, Richard.

Richard Milne
Yeah, hey there.

Kasia Broussalian
And we’ve also got Ed Luce, the FT’s US national editor and columnist. He also co-authors our Swamp Notes newsletter. Hey, Ed.

Edward Luce
Happy New Year.

Kasia Broussalian
Thank you. So, Richard, I want to first start with Greenland. It seems to be the most significant or, you know, at least the most advanced of Trump’s annexation aspirations. Why does Trump want it?

Richard Milne
Yeah, well, it’s a bit déjà vu all over again, and he tried once before in 2019. It’s really one of the most geopolitically geostrategically important places in the Arctic, the most rapidly warming region of the world. It’s at the mouth — at the start of two future trade routes through the Arctic. You got the Northwest Passage, which would go over the top of Canada. You got the North East Passage known as the Northern Sea Route that goes over the top of Russia. You got China being sort of increasingly active, and you got Russia as a huge military player. Throw in a whole load of minerals and some oil, and you’ve got something that Trump eyes as a great deal to be done.

Kasia Broussalian
So we have a confluence of events, it sounds like, that are happening here. You got some trade, climate change, geopolitics playing around. Can you explain some of the power dynamics on the island right now? Like who’s in control there?

Richard Milne
Greenland is an autonomous territory belonging to the kingdom of Denmark. So the government in Copenhagen takes care of foreign and security policy and pretty much everything else. Greenland has home rule. What Greenland really wants is to become independent. And so there’s some suggestion that maybe the US is picking up on this and wondering, you know, what’s gonna happen if this, you know, huge land mass has the world’s largest noncontinental island. If that sort of leaves the grasp of Denmark in the coming years, there’s an argument that Greenland needs a security guarantor. And so maybe the US can step in. I mean, of course, I think the thing with what Trump does a lot of the time is, you know, while he might put his finger on a decent idea — in some ways the way he goes about talking about it — you can ask whether that helps or hinders what he’s actually trying to do.

Kasia Broussalian
But Ed, it’s not just Greenland, right? Trump has set his imperial sights on Canada, on Panama. Why do you think the president-elect is doubling down and expanding his territorial ambitions?

Edward Luce
Well, that’s the question everybody’s asking. There’s no single answer to it. I mean, you could look at, you know, how Trump has always operated. And then, he looks at real estate and he tries to buy cheap and sell there. And he sees Greenland as essentially an uninhabited place that is there, he thinks, for the taking. With Panama, the Americans more than a century ago, built the canal. And he believes, as Ronald Reagan said at the time when Jimmy Carter handed it back to Panamanian sovereignty, that we built it, we own it. I think the sort of common factor here and, you know, I haven’t mentioned Canada. Canada, I think, he’s more trolling. I don’t think there’s really a serious bid to make it the 51st state, but he does seem to enjoy this trolling. But I think if you look at the Panama Canal and you look at Greenland, what do they have in common? The arterial, serious trade routes in which China is playing a bigger role. So, I think if you were going to give a sort of geopolitical logic to this, it’s an anti-China move. More . . . sort of basically, I would say that Trump’s foreign policy philosophy is that the world is a jungle and that there are big predators. America’s the biggest. China is a rival predator, and big predators tend to pick off weak small ones. And Greenland is weak and Panama is weak.

Kasia Broussalian
But one thing that I’m kind of curious here, though, and we haven’t really brought up yet, is Trump has actually said that he’s not gonna rule out using force to kinda take what he wants here. Why go to the military aspect rather than just look at some transactional deals that could be made between the two?

Edward Luce
Well, this might well just be the opening negotiating bit to put the sort of fear of God into the Panamanians and to the Danish in order to soften up some kind of offer from them. I mean, I think it’s quite hard to imagine Trump in practice landing paratroopers along the canal or in Greenland. But don’t forget that George HW Bush, Bush senior, did invade Panama in 1989 to depose that highly criminal dictator, Manuel Noriega, and put him in an American jail. So it’s not without precedent. The Greenland one is a bit more puzzling, I have to say, because Denmark is a Nato ally, and Article 5 of the Nato treaty says an attack on one is an attack on all. This would pose a real philosophical conundrum. If all had to come to the defence of Denmark, including America, should America invade part of Denmark sovereign territory?

Kasia Broussalian
Yeah. Wouldn’t that be an incredible split screen? Now, speaking of that, Richard, how do these threats impact America’s alliances?

Richard Milne
Well, I think this is a big open question. I mean, I think in Europe, everybody’s wondering is, are we gonna have four years like this? You know, for all the preparation you go to, there’s still that element of Trump that throws everybody off balance. And I think Denmark, you know, hasn’t really known how to react. I think they realised that last time he made the offer to buy Greenland in 2019, they probably reacted the wrong way. They rather ridiculed his proposal and him sort of calling it an April Fool’s joke, saying it was absurd. And he immediately cancelled a state visit to Denmark. This time around, they’ve been a much more emollient. They’ve been very much saying that they understand that the US has increasing interests in the Arctic and they wanna help them with that. But at the same time, insisting that Greenland isn’t for sale.

Kasia Broussalian
Now, Ed, you mentioned something interesting about how maybe we’ve heard Trump allies say that this is all sort of a pressure campaign designed to extract concessions, that, you know, Trump doesn’t actually want to annexe Greenland. He’s just looking for a better deal for all those resources and then using threats as leverage. So, is there any merit to that kind of approach?

Edward Luce
Sure, and I think as Richard’s just sort of implied, there is a softening by the Danish. The Panama government has been quite defiant. But look, 5 per cent of the world’s shipping goes through the Panama Canal, and potentially a far larger share of the world’s shipping will go through the Arctic as the ice caps recede, cutting the journey between Europe and Asia by 40 per cent. That is mega business, and Trump really wants a piece of it. So I think if you got, you know, the Panamanians saying something that they actually treaty-bound not to say, but if you’ve got them saying that, OK, we’ll give US shipping preferential rates through the canal, and if we got a newly independent Greenland or a highly compromising Danish government saying, look, we will give preferential drilling and prospecting rights to American companies for critical minerals, then that would be the kind of response that Trump would say, look, I’m the guy who wrote The Art of the Deal. I got the deal.

Richard Milne
Yeah. I mean, I think from the Danish or Greenlandic point of view, it would be a feeling of what more does he want than is on offer in the sense that, you know, Denmark is essentially accommodated the US as much as possible. I mean, the US already has a military base on Greenland. I mean, it doesn’t have to invade. And I thought it was interesting — there was an interview with John Bolton, who was national security adviser to Trump in the first administration where he basically, you know, sort of said that maybe there could’ve been a deal even last time, but Trump killed that off. And, you know, there were all sorts of possibilities short of actually buying Greenland. You know, I think that Greenland, after an independence that looks very likely to come, would be open to having some kind of deeper relationship with America, just not having it as a colonial ruler.

Kasia Broussalian
Well, that’s interesting. What do you guys think are the risks to Donald Trump’s approach here? I mean, if John Bolton, the former national security adviser, is saying, hey just sit back, relax, we could get something out of this, what are the risks to Donald Trump really, you know, pushing forward?

Edward Luce
I mean, there’s huge risks here. I mean, if Panama refuses to budge and calls Trump’s bluff, then he’s got a choice. Either he looks weak or he launches an invasion of a friendly country, which has been nothing but co-operative with the United States on many levels, including trying to keep illegal immigrants from moving from South America to North America. So it would be extraordinary if his bluff was called and he did then invade Panama. The impact on America’s reputation, I think, would be very damaging — not to mention the knock-on effect on trade, I mean, if he invades a country that has a US-secured treaty. When any country do a deal with the United States, when President Trump is in office, there would be no security of any contract, of any pledge, of any undertaking or of any law. So if he took this to the max, the consequences would be profound and they would reverberate.

Richard Milne
And I think in Europe, there’s a related, maybe deeper worry that this legitimises, you know, the actions of some of the people we’re trying to dispel — our enemies, basically Putin and Russia and Xi in China. And that jungle logic, you know, just leads to the power of the big beast, and these rather small or medium powers, that Europe’s full of, gets swatted aside.

Kasia Broussalian
Well then Ed, I guess more broadly, what do Trump’s threats say about the state of the global order and, you know, also America’s place in it?

Edward Luce
The global order as we know it, I think, ended before Trump was re-elected. And some would argue it ended before Trump was elected the first time in 2016. It’s something to which, you know, the west pays lip service, but which the rest of the world, the global south and so on, see as being a system of double standards, rules for America’s enemies, not its friends. So Trump, of course, you know, has delivered the coup de grâce, as they say in France. He’s ended it formally and he’s been elected on the explicit basis of saying he does not believe in the liberal international order. He believes that it’s basically a posh word for free riding on America’s security umbrella, and so that’s over. I think the sort of bigger question, and this is really potentially the thin end of the wedge, is: what is the future of Nato, another organisation for which Trump has great disdain. And this could be the sort of test case. How did Denmark’s neighbours in Europe respond to this kind of intimidation? Do they leave them alone to deal with this or do they react with solidarity? These big questions, you know, coming to the fore 10 days before Trump is sworn in. So we’re seeing them crystallise pretty quickly.

Richard Milne
And that’s the issue. You know, I mean, I cover the eight Nordic and Baltic countries. The US is, you know, I wanna say all they’ve got really. They rely so heavily on both Nato and that bilateral security guarantee with the US. So this is kind of almost existential and in a way for them there’s just no alternative. You have to hope that Trump comes through. You have to hope that you can play on his kind of transactional mindset, that you can say, you know, we’re increasing the defence spending to three, four, maybe getting close to 5 per cent, and we’re spending most of it with US companies. So we’re giving, you know, jobs in swing states for you. But yeah, I mean, I think threatening a potential military attack on the Nato ally before he becomes president is . . . wasn’t a great start for people who are hoping for a good outcome.

Kasia Broussalian
All right. I wanna thank our guests. Richard Milne is the FT’s Nordic and Baltic bureau chief. Thanks, Richard.

Richard Milne
Thank you.

Kasia Broussalian
And Ed Luce, he’s our US national editor and columnist. Thanks, Ed.

Edward Luce
Always a pleasure.

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Kasia Broussalian
This was Swamp Notes, the US politics show from the FT News Briefing. If you wanna sign up for the Swamp Notes newsletter, we’ve got a link to that in our show notes. Our show is mixed by Sam Giovinco and produced by Ethan Plotkin. It’s also produced by Sonja Hutson. Special thanks to Pierre Nicholson. I’m your host, Kasia Broussalian. Our executive producer is Topher Forhecz, and Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. Original music by Hannis Brown. Check back next week for more US political analysis from the Financial Times.