Trump’s Greenland threats echo dark moments of cold war alliances | Donald Trump
Donald Trump’s repetition of talking points from Russia’s war against Ukraine has long caused alarm and dismay in the west.
Now, the US president’s determination to seize Greenland, that is, to launch attacks on military allies, recalls an even more disturbing Kremlin precedent from the Cold War.
As the Soviet Union entered a long ideological and military standoff with the capitalist west, it twice invaded its allied communist partners and openly asserted its right to intervene in the affairs of other allies if they deviated from Moscow-dictated policies.
Trump’s repeated assertion that the United States “needs” Greenland for national security purposes and his dismissal of the possibility of acquiring Greenland through military force have put Washington on a collision course with Denmark, a NATO ally with sovereignty over the autonomous and self-governing region. Trump said “it could be a choice” between taking control of Greenland and keeping NATO intact.
If Trump proceeded, perhaps unconsciously, he would be following a path similar to that taken by the Soviet Union, which invaded communist-run European allies in the Warsaw Pact, the Cold War NATO equivalent of the Moscow-dominated eastern bloc.
Soviet troops invaded Hungary in 1956 to suppress a popular uprising that threatened to overthrow Budapest’s communist regime, and close to 3,000 people were killed in bloody street battles.
In 1968, Moscow staged an invasion of Czechoslovakia—this time including forces from other Warsaw Pact countries—to suppress the liberalizing Prague Spring led by the country’s communist leader Alexander Dubček, who pioneered new freedoms aimed at creating “socialism with a human face.”
Unlike Trump’s controversial Greenland attack, the Soviet actions were taken to save the Warsaw Pact, not out of concern for their impact on it. Hungarian leader Imre Nagy, who was later executed for his role in the 1956 rebellion, attempted to withdraw the country from the alliance during the uprising.
“The Soviet Union’s use of force … was a different case because it was not involved in territorial conquests, but was trying to preserve the integrity of the alliance by preventing the rise of regimes that might defect,” said Charles Kupchan, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and former White House director of European affairs under Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.
“In the case of NATO, we are faced with an alliance that has been united and remarkably solidarity since the beginning of the Cold War. So the idea that the United States could find itself at war with a NATO ally really defies the imagination.”
To prevent this from becoming a reality, Denmark could invoke NATO’s Article 4, requesting consultation within the alliance, citing an imminent threat. If the United States then attacks and Denmark tries to invoke Article 5, which requires other members of the alliance to come to their collective defense, this could put Washington on a military collision course with the rest of the alliance.
Kupchan downplayed the possibility of such an “extraterrestrial” scenario and also highlighted previous intra-NATO disagreements, such as US threats against Britain and France. 1956 Suez crisisand fierce Franco-German opposition to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 did not lead to military conflict.
“This is a White House that sees itself on reality TV,” he said. “We are not yet in a world where the United States is preparing to attack an ally.”
But even if current tensions end, the long-term impact of the Soviets’ attitude towards the Warsaw Pact, which disintegrated in 1989 as one Eastern European communist regime after another fell from power, could teach NATO a lesson.
“This was actually the beginning of the decline of the Soviet Union because they put themselves in a position where they couldn’t trust their own allies, and that was caused to a significant extent by their own behavior,” said John Lewis Gaddis, a professor of history at Yale University. Biographer of George KennanUS diplomat who spearheaded the West’s anti-Communist containment strategy.
“There are some lessons here about what the purpose of an alliance is. It’s not just to deter enemies, but it also reflects the interests of other members, sometimes smaller members of the alliance. The alliance is much stronger if it wants to be in it rather than if it’s forced into it by the greatest power within it.”
The lessons learned are easily applicable to the United States’ interests in Greenland, where it has had military bases since its founding in 1941 under the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was preparing to enter the second world war on the side of Britain against Hitler.
“You could certainly make the argument that Greenland is strategically located and could possibly be vulnerable to China or a resurgent Russia years from now,” Gaddis said.
“But the Americans already have bases in Greenland. And it seems to me that it would be much easier to maintain them and, if necessary, expand them, not with such unilateral provocations, but with the cooperation of the Danish government. Trump is just creating unnecessary friction for himself.”
