GREENLAND IS A NORTH AMERICAN STRATEGIC ISSUE
Greenland isn’t under NATO protection in practice though. NATO is meaningless without the USA. The whole of europe can’t field anything substantial in war. It’s totally hollowed out to pay for their social programs. Even worse, france is approaching an unrecoverable debt crisis because of it. Germany italy and poland are running out of people.
Canada is absolutely useless with only 52k total ready forces only a tiny fraction of which about 1000-2000 are immediately deployable. And if we look at naval passages, the north pole and greenland are a russian and chinese naval lake. The UK is down to 75k regulars. Tehy can only deploy 3000-5000 immediately with France equal in that number. Current German capacity is only 1000-5000 and then only if they have US, UK, of french transport and supply. The USA can field 200K anywhere in the world in ten days, and frequentl deploys 90k in exercises. And this is before we talk about air, sea, land, space, and missile power. The USA’s problem is simply that it doesn’t stock enough ammunition and depends upon ramping up production unrealistically. So the net is that NATO is roughly symbolic other than the USA, which is what Trump is trying to change – and what the europeans are resisting. Surveys show that the people won’t even fight for their countries.
Ask a search engine for a polar map of the world. It’s the shortest distance between chinese, russian, north american and european geographies in the northern hemisphere. Its also the single optimum location for planetary surveillance and monitoring of satellites.
So greenland is profoundly strategic. And there are only 50k residents there and denmark’s population is only 6M and it’s GDP under $500B. It’s barely equivalent to a large american city. They can’t police it and even less defend it. It would take all of Europe to even try. But Europe has an eastern front with russia, and a southeastern from with islam. And Turkey is a questionable ally. So in the current era, the north polar region is as important as the atlantic was in the past and the pacific has become of late.