The Greenland affair brings geopolitics much too close to home for people like us, who live in a sparsely populated and barely defended — but strategic — place on the map.
Last Saturday, the US threatened new tariffs on European countries supporting Denmark and Greenland against US demands to acquire the island. The Europeans appear to have offended Washington by sending small military contingents to Greenland, a move interpreted as a sign of support versus the Americans.
By Wednesday, President Trump appeared to have de-escalated. At least for now.
Before we get to what all this means for Yukoners, let’s ski quickly past the highlights of Greenland-US history.
Back in 1868, after buying Alaska from the Russians, US Secretary of State William Seward tried to buy some Danish-owned Caribbean islands and Greenland. A bonus feature of this move, from Washington’s point of view, was to encircle the British colonies in North America and make it obvious their future lay with the United States and not in some newfangled confederation.
That didn’t happen. In 1910, the US tried again. They had just encouraged the separation of Panama from Colombia and built the Panama Canal. At the same time, rising German naval power was making Washington nervous, especially about the possibility of Germany pressuring Denmark to cede Caribbean naval bases on shipping routes to Panama.
A complex proposal involving swapping the Danish West Indies and Greenland for US-controlled islands in the Philippines went nowhere, but in 1917 the US did buy what are now known as the US Virgin Islands.
More offers followed for Greenland, prompting the Danish prime minister to come out in public in 1930 and say the island was not for sale.
During the Second World War, the Germans did conquer Denmark. With Copenhagen under enemy control, the US moved quickly on its own to establish bases in Greenland to protect Atlantic shipping and ferry warplanes to Europe.
There are historical echoes with the US establishing bases in the Yukon and building the Alaska highway, although that had the permission of the Canadian government.
I happen to have just watched my grandfather’s home movie footage of the ceremony where the US handed the Alaska Highway to Canada after the war. Our army was in Europe, but we still managed to get a kilted military pipe band to the celebrations. The mood between the US and Canadian officers and civilians present seems to have been jovial, as befits two allies who had just won a difficult conflict together.
In Greenland however, the US did not leave. The Cold War was ramping up and Soviet long-range bombers were on the mind. In 1947 the US made another offer, which was turned down. Instead, in 1951, the US and Denmark signed a defense treaty providing for extensive US bases in Greenland.
Your guess is as good as mine as to why the Trump administration now wants to acquire Greenland rather than just use its treaty rights for bases or have American mining companies invest in Greenland like they would anywhere else.
But it’s hard to disagree with Bernd Lange, the head of the European Parliament’s trade committee, when he said, “A new line has been crossed.”
The White House has pointedly not ruled out the use of military force to acquire Greenland, a US position that would have been unthinkable under previous presidents. While President Trump spoke last year about using “economic force” to turn Canada into the 51st state, we would be fools to assume that the Pentagon doesn’t have contingency plans for Greenland-style adventures in Canada.
For Yukoners, the most immediate thought is the Arctic Winter Games. It might seem incredible, but Games organizers must now do contingency planning about events that might prevent Team Greenland from attending. Or even what happens if Team Greenland is here in Whitehorse with Team Alaska when a crisis happens.
More fundamentally, we must contemplate the previously unthinkable. What, for example, is Canada’s plan to dissuade the US from actively patrolling the Northwest Passage? Occupying Baffin Island as a two-for-one deal if they go for Greenland? Or even a more dramatic move on Canada itself?
It may sound ridiculous, but welcome to 2026.
I lived in Finland for a year before the Soviet Union collapsed. The Finns broke free of the Russian Empire in 1917, then lost a one-tenth of their territory, their second biggest city and their Arctic Coast to Stalin in 1945. They knew that living beside a superpower meant their national survival hung by a thread.
They managed to maintain their democracy and their independence with what is called the Finlandization strategy. This had three parts.
First, they avoided provoking the Soviets in foreign policy; for example, by not joining NATO during the Cold War.
Second, they traded with the Soviets and provided the Russians with access to their resources so Moscow wouldn’t feel as much need to own them outright. They tried to balance their trade so as to not be overly dependent on Moscow economically.
Third, they built a strong military. The Finns knew they could never defeat the Russians, but they aimed to be strong enough to make a Soviet invasion very costly.
Call it the porcupine defense. Any Yukon News reader could win a one-on-one fight with a porcupine, but why would you even want to try?
Canada is now adopting strategies from the Finnish playbook. We are trying hard not to provoke Washington, while working to build up our economy, alternative trade routes and defense capabilities.
However, we are at a moment of maximum danger. Decades of comfortable complacency have suddenly caught up with us, and it will take years to build economic and military resilience.
A fifth of Canada’s economy is exports to the US. We didn’t build the mines and pipelines we would love to have now. Our military is hollowed out.
The Biden administration’s Arctic Strategy document has a handy map of circumpolar military bases. They kindly show dots in Inuvik, Yellowknife, Alert and Iqaluit as well as the ones in Fairbanks and Anchorage. The Biden map makers were so polite they even included Whitehorse — presumably the Cadet Camp — as a northern military base.
But all dots are not the same. By my reckoning, the reorganized US airborne division in Alaska plus the air force squadrons in the state alone could outgun the entire Canadian military.
The Finns are famous for having a robust military as well as well-funded civil defense organizations.
In the Yukon, we have things like the Rangers, our emergency preparedness outfit and the search and rescue organizations. The Finns would find them too small and not well coordinated enough for a true civil defense plan.
As I have written before, we are not prepared for a whole-of-territory response to a major wildfire. If we had one like in Yellowknife, we would have to rely as they did on ad hoc volunteers phoning around construction companies to mobilize the city’s bobcats to build emergency firebreaks.
The Economist magazine reports that Ottawa is considering a 400,000-person civil defense organization. On a per capita basis, that would mean 400 volunteers and permanent staff in the Yukon who are trained and prepared to respond to unforeseen events.
So what should the Yukon do? If 2025 didn’t convince us, the Greenland affair should. We need to support the build out of Canadian Forces bases in the North, contribute to upgrading the Dempster corridor, support the acceleration of mining projects in the Yukon, and ramp up civil-defense organizing.
It’s heartening to see the people of Nuuk protesting in the streets. We should support them. But we should also recognize we need to do a lot more than that.
Keith Halliday is a Yukon economist and a winner of the Canadian Community Newspaper Award for Outstanding Columnist. The audiobook version of his most recent book Moonshadows, a Yukon-noir thriller, has just been released.