Garvan Walshe is a former national and international security policy adviser to the Conservative Party
With Venezuelan president Maduro captured, Trump’s covetous gaze has moved back north, towards Greenland. The Maduro raid seems to have emboldened him to ignore his advisers that consider it folly in favour of Stephen Miller. Threaten people with the US military, and they will comply goes the theory. Force is “among the options,” Administration officials have been instructed to tell TV interviewers are on the table.
The Venezuelan operation is not as Trump has described it: the US does not actually run Venezuela; its Chavista regime is still in place, albeit with a different figurehead; nor will it be particularly viable to revive Venezuela’s oil industry, which has suffered from decades of mismanagement and neglect; Maduro’s trial might not go according to plan; Panama’s Manuel Noriega, seized in 1989 and convicted of drug offences is not an exact precedent. Yet those are not decisive obstacles for this Administration. Greenland and its mother country, Denmark, could not be expected to put up a direct military challenge to the United States.
But the diplomatic and legal situation is considerably more challenging. Venezuela is a pariah state under sanctions and Maduro not recognised as leader by many European countries. Denmark is a member of NATO and the EU and a supplier of key components for the F35.
The objective has to be to make it more challenging still, so that the rational elements of the Trump administration overcome those who prefer to inflate the presidents ego and encourage him into an error of disastrous proportions.
The first rule of Trump is that he cares about the optics, not the substance, on any issue. It may not be quite a simple as him wanting the island to be described as “the United States” on a map, but any argument about resources is wide of the mark. He could mine those resources anyway, more cheaply and without causing the transatlantic alliance to collapse, by simply buying the.
It is rather that Miller, who hates the transatlantic alliance sees in seizing Greenland a way to break it irretrievably, and attempt to reconfigure the world into three poles: US, China and Russia, each commanding their sphere of influence. (Ignore for the moment that Russia cannot dominate Europe and is more likely to be dominated by China; this is the theory).
Here we need the coolest of heads. Neither the seizure of Maduro, nor threats toward Greenland, are the totality of US foreign policy. This is now divided between the Administration, and Congress, where Congress, through the National Defense Authorization Act, has forced the Administration to maintain troops in Europe. A unified American government would indeed be almost impossible to resist: fortunately, this is not what we face.
Secondly, the administration is getting weaker. Its means of keeping Republican parliamentarians in line: threatening them with a Trump backed primary contender, is running out of time (the primaries will take place in the next few months), but also power. Trump is now getting too unpopular to pose the same threat he used to. Indiana Republicans resisted his pressure to reject gerrymandering. Congress passed a specific law to release the Epstein files. The consequences of their further release will weaken him more. Increasingly likely defeat at the mid terms in November will enmesh the administration in oversight and impeachment hearings.
In these circumstances provoking an all-out confrontation with the United States, as certain European “continentalists” propose is unnecessary.
Better to ally ourselves with the transatlantic majority in Congress, to make any attempt to seize Greenland harder.
In the military domain, the UK and if possible also France should sign a specific mutual defence treaty with Denmark promising to protect all Danish territory from attack and extend their nuclear umbrellas over Greenland. This treaty would officially be described as protecting Denmark from Russian aggression, therefore undercutting the Administration’s excuse for threatening a takeover of Greenland. Unofficially it would be observed that air and sea launched nuclear weapons can be retargeted.
In Congress, a Transatlantic Alliance Reinforcement Act should be introduced prohibiting the use of US troops against a NATO ally without the consent of two thirds of both houses of congress (a similar provision prevents the President withdrawing from NATO). The Act should also explicitly state that orders to attack a NATO ally are illegal and officers who carry such orders out would be subject to court-martial. Despite the President being the commander in chief of the US armed forces, it is Congress that has the power to declare war and regulate military justice.
Though Trump would like to see the transatlantic alliance dead, it is too strong for any one leader to destroy. Rather than building up strength in Europe to oppose the United States, the strength built up should be used to support the transatlanticist American majority restore the most successful alliance the free world has known.