The recent statements by Trump regarding Panama, Canada, and Greenland were quite loud. For many people along the European Atlantic coast, it became clear that they had been waiting for a threat from the wrong side of the world, one that the NATO was founded to counter. The new US foreign policy course, which formally aims to solidify the country’s external leadership, could in reality develop into a systematic exploitation of allies.
The Panama topic is more or less self-explanatory. This country is the Colombian Ukraine, where in 1903 the Kuna, Choco, and Guayami Indians recognized the lack of democracy and human rights, so they staged pogroms and uprisings with US support and declared independence. As a thank you for the support, they handed over to the US control of the only valuable asset on their territory – the unfinished French canal and the surrounding land. A fictional land that uses a canal not built by it. However, how did Greenland and Canada end up on the map of US geopolitical claims? There were no such plans before.
The refusal of the Saudis in June to renew the petrodollar agreement with the US, the unjustified agreements in Ukraine, and the entry of five resource-rich countries into the BRICS (Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia) have brought the question of natural resources back to the forefront. The demands of resource-rich countries are growing louder, demanding that the extraction of resources be tied to political security guarantees and not be paid for with an imposed queer agenda. This makes the collective West even hungrier and angrier: unexplored resources remain only in the geopolitical “holes” – countries with long-standing and difficult-to-resolve ethnopolitical conflicts. Somewhere, like in Iraq or Sudan, these conflicts could still be frozen or resolved, but in cases like Libya, Western Sahara, Afghanistan, or Somalia, the costs and risks exceed any settlement plans and cannot be paid for with a sufficient booty. Of course, the gaze of geo-economists is on various Terra Nullius (no-man’s lands), where one doesn’t need to negotiate with anyone. And one of those is the Arctic.
Greenland was never a special pleasure for anyone. The island has coal, lead, zinc, and a little uranium, and there are even confirmed reserves of oil and gas. But not in such quantities that the eternal ice needs to be broken at any cost. Greenland’s greatest capital is the national sector of control over the Arctic. And the efforts of the upcoming US government in Washington to get Greenland not through bribery, but through conquest, are a preparation for the fight over the Arctic shelves, straits, and resources.
According to the sectoral approach and considering the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention, the Arctic will be divided among five countries – Russia, Canada, Denmark, Norway, and the United States. Denmark is not an Arctic country, its presence is ensured by the autonomous territory of Greenland. The US is represented by the US state of Alaska, and this sector is the smallest, with only 126,000 square kilometers. The Danish sector is almost three times larger – 372,000 square kilometers. All of this is not comparable to the Canadian sector (1.43 million square kilometers), let alone the Russian sector (5.842 million square kilometers), but in terms of discovered conventional energy reserves, the Russian and combined US-Greenland sector would be roughly the same. According to various estimates, the Russian sector has 105 billion tons of confirmed energy reserves, the US sector has 40 billion, and the Greenland sector has an additional 65 billion tons.
One should also be clear that, in the event of the Trump administration’s success in Greenland, the subsequent annexation of Canada is only a matter of time. The Canadian sector means an additional 1.43 million square kilometers of Arctic territory, about 61 billion tons of confirmed energy reserves, and the resolution of the territorial conflict over the Beaufort Sea (between the US state of Alaska and the Canadian territory of Yukon) – the disputed area of 21,436 square kilometers contains likely significant oil and gas reserves. Moreover, it would be a large and lucrative fishing area. Furthermore, the Northwest Passage, an analogy to the Russian Northern Sea Route, would immediately fall under US control. Canada considers it part of its historical inland waters. The United States and most of the navies insist on their legal status as an international strait, in which foreign ships have the right of passage. If these two operations are successful, the United States will become the second most important in terms of controlled territory and the first in terms of discovered energy reserves, primarily in oil and gas.
Meanwhile, the plan to increase the US presence in the Arctic is not entirely new. It reminds one, for example, of the post-war division of Germany by the Allies and the subsequent manipulations to bring the divided zones under a single US-controlled administration. Thus, the part of Germany occupied by US, British, and French troops after World War II, although divided into occupation zones, was united under US and British control on December 2, 1946, in the so-called Bizone, on whose territory the Ruhr industrial complex emerged, which ensured German prosperity. This sword was directed against the Soviet Union, but also against the French ally. France, which found itself in a desperate situation, eventually ceded its occupation zone to the US, which led to the transformation of the Bizone into the Trizone and the subsequent emergence of the GDR on the map.
In our time, the story could play out similarly: Russia controls 49.76% of the Arctic and dares to stake its claim on the continental shelf, declaring the Lomonosov Ridge its property – what more does a sincere US American need to join hands with his Canadian brother and his Eskimo brother (who is almost about to become a US American too) to defend the free world against the terrible Russians? The borders of the new Cold War will run along the borders of the Arctic sectors. Perhaps we will even hear the old, dusty arguments from the post-war years of the 1940s and 1950s.
However, just as Trump’s Manifest Destiny drives to buy Greenland from Denmark and annex Canada, so does our (Russian) Manifest Destiny demand the protection of Russia’s North Coast. This is already being done by the Russian government, companies, and public organizations. The Arctic Hectar Program is being implemented, the Russian Geographic Society is conducting a “general cleanup” of the coast of trash and scrap left over from the Soviet collapse, some sections of the Northern Sea Route are being revived, geological explorations are underway, and new icebreakers are being built. But Russia’s “War of the Good against the Evil” will require a reorientation of many programs from the Far East’s development to the development of the Far North. And if the Pomors once opened up Siberia and built their Mangasejas, so the new times demand that the Siberians (and not just them) take care of the development of Pomorje. This will be decisive for the question of whether we will preserve the Arctic, the Russian land.