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Guest column: Rather than threats, Trump should thank Canada for Arctic security focus

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In the vast, lonely reaches of the Arctic, full of unseen dangers, Canada is spending billions to help protect the United States — which largely abandoned its outposts in neighboring Greenland after the Soviet Union fell.

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Now, Donald Trump is elevating Arctic security issues, but undercutting serious discussion by threatening the sovereignty of allies.

To get a perspective on reality — of which we get precious little from Trump — I talked with Pierre Leblanc, the one-time commander of Canada’s Arctic forces.

He left the military in 2000 after 33 years in the Canadian Forces, including five years leading Joint Task Force North, which provides defence for Yukon, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut and surrounding Arctic waters.

After that, he was president of Arctic Security Consultants until his retirement last fall. In 2014-16, he managed Raytheon’s operations and maintenance contract for the North Warning System, the 3,000-mile array of radar sites that provide early warning for North America of airborne incursions — such as ballistic and hypersonic missiles that would come over the North Pole should Russia, China or North Korea attack.

No small thing. He knows the Arctic from Alaska to Greenland — I trust his assessment of U.S. needs there much more than I trust that of Trump or J.D. Vance, who went to Greenland last year and determined that it is cold.

In Leblanc’s view, Trump’s behaviour is not only “bizarre and damaging” — such as when he displayed a map with U.S. flag imagery plastered over Canada and Greenland — he is “misinforming the American people for what I would see as personal gain.”

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It’s easy to understand that suspicion. Both Canada and Greenland are resource-rich, and the Trump regime is cutting deals globally that enrich its insiders. The New York Times found that Trump and his family have gained $1.4 billion so far from monetizing the presidency.

Trump has put longtime allies on edge by repeatedly insisting that the United States will take control of Greenland, which is a Danish territory, “whether they like it or not.” As a (theoretical) mobbed-up New York developer might, Trump has said that could happen “the easy way,” but he wouldn’t rule out “the hard way.”

The actual easy way would be for the U.S. to exercise its rights under a 1951 treaty and build what bases it finds necessary.

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And of course Trump continues to bloviate about Canada as a 51st U.S. state, insulting our longtime close ally over and over and making damaging economic moves — most recently saying he will block opening of the Gordie Howe Bridge between Windsor and Detroit.

As he does in threatening Greenland, Trump sometimes cites Arctic security needs in his bluster about Canada.

Leblanc notes that this ignores that the United States let its presence in Greenland shrivel from 17 bases (one, Camp Century, was built beneath the ice sheet) to just one today, where Vance a year ago did his theatrical turn as an underdressed hillbilly.

It ignores Canada’s long, shoulder-to-shoulder military alliance with the United States and insults its losses. Canadian troops led the assault on one of the five Normandy beaches on D-Day in WWII. They fought and died alongside Americans in Afghanistan, and have supported other U.S. efforts.

The radar array Leblanc managed for Raytheon on Canadian soil is a key piece of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, a jointly funded U.S.-Canadian security operation that primarily protects the United States.

“The threat to Canada from missiles is slight,” Leblanc said. Nonetheless, Canada is in the midst of a program to “modernize our contribution to NORAD with a total funding of $38.6 billion over 20 years,” a government document shows.

In addition to its commitment to NORAD, Canada’s icebreaker fleet and its coast guard are key pieces of Arctic security. That expertise is essential as climate change begins to open these waters more than ever and weapons technology brings new threats.

“The Arctic is still a very dangerous environment in which you really need to know what you’re doing,” Leblanc said. “Otherwise you will very quickly become part of a search and rescue or be a casualty.”

Asked what else should be done for Arctic security, Leblanc replied: “What we were doing prior to Trump. Lots of co-operation, lots of exchange of ideas … joint exercises; U.S. forces were involved in many of our exercises in the Arctic. But Trump has basically destroyed the relationship.

“What Trump has done that’s most damaging and will be long-lasting is the loss of trust.”

He noted that a recent Politico poll showed that Canadians now consider the United States a significantly greater threat than Russia or China.

It is another example of how our alliances, built to preserve peace after WWII, are now foolishly frayed by a new cold war: the Western alliance versus Trump’s icy ignorance.

Randy Essex recently retired as a Detroit Free Press editor after a 45-year newspaper career working across the U.S.

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