US President-elect Donald Trump has said that he would not rule out the use of military or economic coercion to force Panama to give up control of the Panama Canal and to force Denmark to sell Greenland to the US.
As The New York Times reports, his identification of both as necessary for US national security is an indirect acknowledgement of climate change – although Trump has said that climate change is a hoax.
He also said that his administration will rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, and he has criticised President Biden for banning oil drilling in some waters.
The Panama Canal was given back to Panama by treaty in the late 1990s.
An estimated 11,000 square miles of Greenland’s ice sheets and glaciers have melted over the past three decades, an area roughly equivalent to the size of Massachusetts, as the newspaper reports.
US space agency NASA has said that if Greenland’s ice melts completely, sea levels could rise by as much as 23 feet.
However, retreating ice could open up areas of Greenland for oil and gas and critical mineral exploitation, and expand trade routes.
The Arctic Council says that ship traffic in the Arctic has increased by 37 percent over the past decade as sea ice melts.
The newspaper quotes Arctic climate change expert Amanda Lynch, who says new trade routes could increase the risk of environmental disasters as ships from some countries are not designed to withstand Arctic conditions.
The New York Times said that the Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment, but records that his former national security adviser, Robert C O’Brien, suggested on Sunday that climate change was one factor in Trump’s interest in acquiring Greenland.
“Greenland is a highway from the Arctic all the way to North America, to the United States,” O’Brien told Fox News.
“It’s strategically very important to the Arctic, which is going to be the critical battleground of the future because as the climate gets warmer, the Arctic is going to be a pathway that maybe cuts down on the usage of the Panama Canal.”
The president-elect has threatened to use “economic force” to join Canada and would “tariff Denmark at a very high level” if it does not give Greenland to the US.
The New York Times report is here (paywalled)
