The life of one Danish soldier

In 1910, Henry Wilson, the British army officer charged with planning for a possible war with Germany, visited Ferdinand Foch, the French officer doing the same job in Paris. The Anglo-French alliance was still a tentative, semi-secret thing, so Wilson asked Foch “What is the smallest British military force that would be of any practical assistance to you?”

Foch replied: “Send a single British soldier — and we will see to it that he is killed.”

He wasn’t being cruel. He just knew that if the German army killed even one British soldier, the whole British empire would be at war with Germany — which was what the French needed to see, given how skittish the British were being about their commitment to the alliance.

The story is only hearsay, because nobody writes this sort of thing down. However, if the United States were to invade Greenland, the unwritten instructions of Maj.-Gen. Søren Andersen, the commander of the 160 Danish soldiers who flew into Greenland on Monday and Tuesday, will be very similar: to get at least one of his Danish soldiers killed by American troops.

Ideally, the Americans would do this unprompted, and then the rest of Andersen’s troops could surrender: no need for a massacre. But if necessary the Danes would fire on the American invaders first. As the victims, they would be well within their rights, and the whole political point of the exercise would be to get one of their own killed by return fire.

If that happened, then the rest of the NATO countries (except the U.S., of course) would be obliged to help both legally and in terms of public opinion when Denmark invoked Article 5 of the NATO founding treaty and asked them for military support. The others could still worm out of it if they chose, but only at the expense of publicly betraying their word.

Article 5 (“one for all, and all for one”) has only been used once before, when the United States was attacked by foreign terrorists in September 2001. Most NATO nations sent troops to Afghanistan to help U.S. forces, and over 1,200 died there. It is trickier when the U.S. itself is the aggressor, of course, but Denmark aims to call on Article 5 and see what happens.

That is not to say that any number of Danish or indeed European Union troops could repel a full-scale American invasion of Greenland. U.S. President Donald Trump said at the Davos meeting on Wednesday that he will not use force to take Greenland, so all these preparations to resist an invasion may be completely unnecessary.

However, Trump changes his mind more often than he changes his socks, and the number of times he has said he will use force on Greenland is far greater than the times he has said he won’t. He also favours surprise attacks, and he often lures his targets into a false sense of safety just before attacking them.

If Trump’s advisers are brave enough to do their jobs, they will also have told him that force will be necessary because a huge majority of Greenlanders don’t want to be Americans. Without force, they would not obey.

So let us assume that a violent American invasion of Greenland remains a strong probability. What is the use of a few people dying to resist it, and then lots of other people suffering hardships because Trump imposes 200 per cent or whatever tariffs on EU countries to punish them for backing Denmark’s resistance, when it’s all inevitable anyway?

It isn’t inevitable. It wouldn’t even be irreversible after it happened. Americans themselves might turn against Trump’s imperial adventures either before or after a conquest of Greenland. And losing Danish and Greenlander soldiers’ lives, activating Article 5, even waging a guerrilla war are ways to keep your right to your homeland on the table.

Canadians might escape the same fate if the conquest of Greenland proves too expensive or just too embarrassing, whereas otherwise they are the next item on Trump’s menu. (Neither Greenlanders nor Canadians in the occupied territories could expect American citizenship, since giving them the vote would swing American political outcomes far to the left).

At the very least, a joint front against Trump on this issue would strengthen the European Union’s internal solidarity against American pressure. It will have to evolve very rapidly to build a credible common identity and both Trump and Putin will try to prevent that, but the Greenland crisis may even help on this count.

A successful resort to NATO’s Article 5 including a fairly peaceful parting with a post-Trump United States (he’s an old 79 and his stream-of-consciousness style is more and more repetitive) could be a start down that road. It’s going to be a rough ride, but the game is not over.

Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers.