President Donald Trump argues that U.S. security demands the annexation of Greenland from Denmark.
There’s no question that Greenland has outsize strategic importance to the United States. The island sits astride the entrance to the Northwest Passage, an increasingly important waterway as melting ice makes the route navigable for both Russia and China. The U.S. has maintained military bases there since World War II. The U.S. established Thule Air Base, since renamed Pituffik Space Base, in 1951 as a lynchpin in its primary early warning radar base to detect potential Soviet missile launches. The 1951 Defense of Greenland Agreement between the U.S. and Denmark was a model for Cold War cooperation among NATO’s European and North American members.
As Trump’s antics highlight, Greenland is also among the world’s top repositories of rare earths that together will drive the late 21st-century economy the way petroleum fueled the late 20th-century economy. What Saudi Arabia and Iran were decades ago, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Greenland are potentially today. Whether or not Trump was serious about purchasing, invading, or annexing Greenland, or if he simply wanted to spark a crisis to force Europe to take Greenland’s defense seriously, remains unclear.
If the latter, Washington and NATO more broadly are leaving a major loophole: the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. Located nearly 800 miles north of the Arctic Circle, Longyearbyen is the world’s northernmost functional town. The territory boasts more polar bears than people.
The problem is not just Svalbard’s geography, but rather the outdated treaty that governs Norwegian sovereignty. Long uninhabited and only discovered by the Dutch in the 16th century, the largest island, Spitsbergen, became a base for British and Danish whale hunts a century later. Whaling ended in the early 19th century, and Russian and Norwegian hunters moved in, attracted by polar bear and fox pelts and walrus tusks. In the late 19th century, Spitsbergen became the launch point for Arctic exploration. In the first decade of the 20th century, British, American, and Norwegian coal mining took off. Only in 1920 was Svalbard’s status confirmed by treaty. Norway became the sovereign power, but all signatory countries could fish, hunt, and exploit mineral resources on the islands.
The treaty also mandated that Svalbard be demilitarized. Norway’s sovereignty is symbolic only, with Oslo having little power to police malevolent actors on the islands. The Norwegian Coast Guard even struggles to keep Spanish fishermen, let alone Russians, out of the islands’ territorial waters.
Perhaps the biggest loophole is scientific. The Svalbard Treaty allows any nation to conduct non-military research on the archipelago. China has established a research station that seems far more concerned with surveillance than with knowledge, and that seems to repeat the scientific cover for military purposes it mastered along the reefs and rocks of the South China Sea. Russia likewise maintains a strong presence. North Korea could, in theory, establish a base on Spitsbergen should it desire. Shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a Russian trawler apparently cut communication cables between Svalbard and Norway.
European diplomats may say the 1920 treaty ties their hands, but China and Russia’s persistent grey-zone violations are the type of problem that alarms Trump and guides his national security policy to cast aside European niceties in favor of realistic security. Trump is vocal that the U.S. seeks control over Greenland to deny its territory to any future Chinese or Russian presence. That nightmare is already playing out in Svalbard, while China is already making inroads in Iceland.
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European officials can continue to hand-wring over U.S. rhetoric and threats over Greenland, but if they wish to show Washington that they take continental and Arctic security seriously, they need to act on Svalbard now.
Lest Trump otherwise begin to question Norway’s already dubious sovereignty over the strategic territory.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is the director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.