Trump goes all colonial - with China as the excuse

Comments on Greenland and Panama suggest an old mindset

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It’s tempting to dismiss Donald Trump’s recent comments about wanting to take control of Greenland and the Panama Canal as a joke, but I think that would be a mistake. He talked a lot about acquiring Greenland in his first term, and even canceled a state trip to Denmark in 2019 after the country’s government said that the island wasn’t for sale. And while Trump hasn’t started talking about the Panama Canal until fairly recently, there’s a long history of conservative animosity to the idea that the canal ought to be under the control of the Panamanian government.

But what I find really interesting about both of these things is that Trump is invoking the threat of China to pursue what are effectively colonial goals.

Greenland and Panama: Why?

Traditionally, the U.S. interest in Greenland - which is a Danish territory - was all about the geography of defending Europe and the Atlantic. When Denmark fell to the Nazis in World War II, the U.S. took control of Greenland to prevent the Germans from establishing a presence there.

During the Cold War, it became a base for U.S. strategic bombers and submarines. In the late 1950s, Eisenhower asked Denmark if the U.S. could build a network of underground ICBM launchers on Greenland in order to be able to strike the Soviet Union more quickly in the event of a conflict. When the Danish government didn’t answer, the U.S. set out about doing it anyway.

This operation, dubbed Project Iceworm, was supposed to result in the creation of 4,000km of tunnels housing 600 nuclear weapons, powered by the world’s first portable nuclear reactor. A scientific base, Camp Century, was created as a cover story. The truth eventually came out, causing outrage in Denmark, but even worse from the U.S. perspective was the fact that the Greenland glaciers were moving faster than anticipated and would cause the whole complex to collapse in just a few years. The project was canceled. The U.S. never got its secret underground ice base, but the precedent of mucking about in Greenland’s affairs was set.

A shot of Camp Century’s construction by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

Nowadays, U.S. interest in Greenland isn’t really about Europe or the Atlantic, but about China and the Arctic. Greenland provides strategic access to the Arctic and has massive amounts of the raw materials - metals and rare earths - which are needed to power the green transition. That’s why it’s being courted by the European Union and China, although the efforts of the latter have so far been pretty notional. If China were to establish some kind of military presence there, that would be bad for the U.S. - but there’s also pretty much zero reason to believe that it will happen. The China panic looks more like a land grab for Greenland’s resources, which are valued in the trillions.

The Panama Canal is another piece of territory that has long been of interest to U.S. policymakers - and, like Greenland, it’s one that they used to control.