1News US Correspondent Logan Church ponders Trump’s quest for Greenland, the new age of empire, and what New Zealand can do about it.
Last year, when Donald Trump threatened to slap tariffs on his European allies, many came crawling to the White House, cap in hand, desperate to make a deal.
It seemed like the president was expecting a similar response to his Greenland desires, following his forceful (and somewhat chaotic) speech in Davos.
Instead, he united Europe against him, his imperialistic ambitions and historical revisionism shook European leaders from their slumber into a wide-eyed realisation the time was nigh to grow a backbone and stand up to him.
Trump is now back in the United States, with claims a deal was reached, which would give him access to the island “forever”.
“I'm not going to have to pay anything,” he told Fox News in a sit-down interview. “We're going to have total access to Greenland. We're going to have all the military access that we want. We're going to be able to put what we need on Greenland because we want it. We're talking about national security and international security."
What this deal actually involves, no one really knows. Some experts are suggesting it could be some sort of ‘free association’ arrangement, whereby the US is handed control of zones to build military bases, Trump’s “golden dome” missile defence project etc. And, at some point, the US gets to mine rare earth minerals.
But no details have been announced by the parties involved – other than Trump – and Greenland's leaders seemed to have poured cold water over the whole thing too.
“In terms of the deal there's been talk about, I don't know what's concrete in that deal either,” said Greenland’s Prime Minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen.
“But I know that we have now a high-level working group working on a solution for both parties. We have said from the beginning in Greenland, we have some red lines. We have to respect our territorial integrity. We have to respect international law, sovereignty. We are ready to cooperate more in economics, in other areas, but that's something we have to talk about in mutual respect.”
While these negotiations continue, Europe is pondering a much more philosophical problem – that the scaffolding of global order and rules the Western world is built within seems to be crashing around them.
A twisted irony
I see a somewhat twisted irony in this, even if the consequences for the rest of us could be severe.
Long before America became the superpower we know today, many of those same European nations dominated the world. By the time the 19th century rolled around, nations like Britain, France and Spain had long been empires, but the landscape was looking very different.
The production of goods was at an all-time high, outgrowing traditional markets. More resources were needed to create those goods. Thanks to technological advancements, weapons of war were far more lethal, cheap, and effective than ever before.
Infrastructure was built in epic proportions – from railways to the telegraph network. Competition between the great empires of the time (Britain, France, Belgium, Germany (after its unification in 1871), Italy, Russia and, to a lesser extent, the United States) was fierce.
And to fuel much of this – resources, new markets, territory, and pride – these nations bought, sold, fought over and confiscated lands all over the planet.
If that land happened to belong to another country, civilisation, or less developed society, well, sucks to be them.
Many historians call this period “high imperialism”.
Fast forward to today, that list of countries has been replaced with the United States, China, Russia and (to some extent) the EU+UK. The coal powered factories have been replaced with the internet and AI. New machine guns and artillery have been replaced with nuclear and drone warfare.
Russia is aggressively seizing territory in Ukraine. China has its eyes on Taiwan. Just this year the US has seized control of Venezuela's oil industry, now claiming to wield enormous influence on the government and country of 29 million people. Trump wants the world’s largest island, Greenland.
New times, but old concept.
“You are in a period of thinking which is 19th century, where it’s not the international architecture you defend, and the rules-based order, it’s the power and security of your own nation and the price of other around you,” said International Relations expert Al Gillespie, from Waikato University, in a recent interview with me.
“The way the system worked for a while was that there was a balance of power between the main countries, but that balance historically tips at some point when some major power oversteps the mark in a third country, and that is when you get major conflict.”
Resolve differences
So that begs the question, should modern states operate in the 21st century in the same way they did almost 200 years earlier?
Since the end of World War Two, the developed world – arguably led by United States - has gone to great lengths to avoid that.
The United Nations is one of these efforts – a body designed to provide a forum for nations to resolve differences with dialogue, rather than war, under an internationally agreed framework of rules. The International Criminal Court is another example.
European countries, which have been at war with each other in some way or another since pre-medieval times, created the European Union, to stop Europe’s countries from fighting each other and build prosperity across the continent.
New Zealand benefits immensely from this international rule of law and order – not just for our economic prosperity, but our very survival. No offence intended to the NZ Defence Force, but there is very little it could do if a major power decided it wanted our islands.
So, what does the world do when the most powerful countries in the world – economically, militarily, and politically - are completely ignoring the international order which has carried the world out of the war-scarred 20th century into the 21st?
It’s a question that European leaders are urgently pondering.
Wellington is too, behind the veneer of carefully curated diplomatic language designed to not annoy anyone.
“If America decided they needed the Cook Islands for national security, we would be in a conundrum if they decided to say ‘it is essential for us, we must have it, and we are going to put a tariff on you until you give up your sovereign territory’,” said Gillespie.
“You cannot behave like this in international law, it undermines all sense of international order.
“The difficulty for a country like New Zealand is at what point do we say ‘this is wrong’ directly to Mr Trump in front of a world audience. It makes sense for me as a professor to say it is wrong, but if [Foreign Minister Winston] Peters said it, it would have consequences for our exporters.”
That’s the dilemma our leaders and policy makers are now faced with on a daily basis in a world where the US president has his eye on foreign territory.
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