Last week, I reposted part of CDR Salamander’s view of President Trump’s desire to take Greenland from Danish control. I still don’t really understand his motivation, so Kiran Pfitzner‘s take that Trump’s “perverse interest in Greenland” can only be explained as rising from a belief “that conquest, that being a conqueror, is a pleasant fantasy to indulge in”:
“InfantryDort” is not worth responding to, but the tweet is a useful frame for our discussion.
Aside from morality and legality, invading Greenland is, strategically speaking, utterly pointless. Even if we were to entirely neglect the consequences of such an act on our alliances and reputation, the act alone constitutes sheer stupidity as a pure question of strategy.
It is true that the idea of buying Greenland was floated during the Truman administration and again during the Eisenhower administration. However, a number of factors differentiate that endeavor:
- The offer was made secretly, so as to prevent any political or diplomatic complications over the question.
- The significance of Greenland was peculiar to the time — a nuclear attack on the US would have had to have come over the Arctic by Soviet bombers — technology has since starkly reduced its importance.
- Most importantly, previous administrations had clear ideas of what was needed from Greenland, and so were able to simply negotiate with the Danish government to gain access without the political difficulties of annexation.
This illustrates the great strategic problem of any suggestion of invasion: there is no specific aim or purpose. The endeavor is justified only in vague terms of “security” or the childish assertion that “we need it”. How it is to actually improve our security or why exactly we need it are nowhere addressed.
As Clausewitz writes, the aim of war is to put our enemy in a position more painful than the sacrifice which we demand from him. What exactly is it we want from Greenland? What have they denied us that we should seek to gain by force?
To even consider the question in practical terms, we must reckon with the simple fact that, in the era of a nation state, allies are infinitely more useful than occupied territory. Even bearing in mind that allied interests will never be entirely congruent, a state organic to a territory will be able to draw forth greater exertions from the same resources than a foreign occupier would, even before accounting for active resistance. A people will always provide their own state with more energy and zeal than they will offer to a conqueror.1 There is less “friction”.
The great benefit of alliances is in the ability to access this voluntary energy, which cannot be called into being by the dictates of a conqueror. Nationalism is such a potent force that conquest has become inordinately difficult and costly, being a net negative to state power in virtually all cases (a subject I have previously written on).2 That the United States can access Greenland’s territory without having to conquer it is already the best of all worlds.
- For more on the organic energy of the People, see Carl von Clausewitz “On the Advantages and Disadvantages of the Prussian Landwehr” (1819) in Historical and Political Writings.
- See also: Posen, Barry R. “Nationalism, the Mass Army, and Military Power”. International Security 18, no. 2 (1993): 80–124.
