A US military invasion of Greenland would be self-defeating, but both sides have a great deal to gain from harmonious financial and industrial relations, writes James Gray

There has been some fairly hysterical coverage of Trump’s remarks about Greenland. Will it mean the end of NATO? Will it lead to war with Denmark? But despite Trump’s notorious unpredictability, there seems to me vanishingly little likelihood of any kind of military aggression by the United States against Greenland. Why so?

His off-hand remarks cite Greenland’s strategic and commercial importance to America. And of that there can be no doubt. As the Greenland ice shelf melts – at a rate of 270bn tonnes per year – several strategic sea routes open up. Greenland controls the top end of the Greenland-Iceland-UK Gap, crucial to NATO submarine surveillance and vital in resupplying Europe.

The increasingly ice-free Northwest Passage skirts Greenland’s shores. There’s even talk of a deep-sea port to serve the emerging Northern Sea Route or Northeast passage, either in Iceland or – just possibly – in East Greenland. Mike Pompeo once called Arctic sea lanes the “21st-century Suez and Panama Canals”. So Greenland’s strategic importance to the US is abundantly clear.

Yet there are three powerful reasons why a military invasion of any sort would be foolish and self-defeating.

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Why the US military won’t invade Greenland

First, Greenland already hosts a huge American military base, and congress have recently approved a $4bn programme of upgrading for it. Indeed America is already the only effective military presence in the entire island. The Pituffik Space Base is an essential part of US air defence and missile early warning systems which would detect any nuclear missile........

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