WASHINGTON, January 10. /TASS/. If the US decides to take Greenland over by military force under US President-elect Donald Trump, it would be the shortest war ever fought, analysts interviewed by Politico predict.
The experts cited the fact that US troops have been stationed in Greenland since the 1940s as a big reason for this. Their deployment to the island was formalized under the 1951 agreement signed between the United States and Denmark. As a result, the Arctic’s largest air base was established in Thule where the US military stationed 10,000 troops and strategic bombers capable of carrying nuclear weapons. In 2023, the air base was renamed Pituffik Space Base. It is home to missile warning and space sensors.
Under the 1951 pact, the US accepted the legal obligation to protect Greenland from any attack, "given the inability of the Danish armed forces to fight off a potential aggressor without help," according to the newspaper.
"Denmark has been very aware it cannot defend Greenland against anybody on its own. <…> The question is: Who would [the Americans] be fighting? Their own military? They’re already there," Politico quotes Kristian Soby Kristensen, a senior researcher at the University of Copenhagen’s Center for Military Studies.
During his first term in 2019, Trump said that the United States could buy Greenland, an autonomous Danish territory. Marc Jacobsen, an associate professor at the Royal Danish Defense College, told the newspaper that Trump’s proposal was part of a US strategy "to get Denmark to spend more of [its] military budget on surveillance of Greenland."
On January 7, Trump suggested again that Greenland should become part of the United States, citing national security concerns and protection from Chinese and Russian threats. Both now and back in 2019, the island and the kingdom dismissed the idea as absurd.