Three days in Greenland for a group of soldiers sent to demonstrate that they can deploy, connect and coordinate, then everyone goes home. This is the purpose of the “anti Trump” exercise promoted by European states. That’s why Italy and Poland won’t be there
The military exercise conducted by Denmark in Greenland this year is called Arctic Endurance, which is why other nations are also moving military personnel to the region. Trump’s demands, from the proposed purchase to past declarations of repeated threats to the sovereignty of that territory, have also pushed Canada to deploy military planning personnel in various locations, starting with Nuuk. Washington would not only want Greenland to pass under the sovereignty of a NATO ally, but rather to have full ownership of it, thus a tension between allies has been fueled which in many newspapers ends up causing us to lose sight of the fundamental point of the issue: the growing presence of Russians and Chinese in a region too close to the West for this to happen without control or limitations. However, Arctic Endurance is about to begin and that is why France, Germany and Sweden sent military personnel to Greenland on January 15th. To do what is easily said: to demonstrate the necessary military readiness against any threat of unilateral annexation of the island, regardless of who is considered the “invader”. No one can prevent a group of nations from organizing such an event, however our Defense Minister Guido Crosetto also reiterated the need for this exercise to be carried out with coordination by NATO. For now, the affair involves a few dozen soldiers, namely 13 Germans, 15 French and 3 Swedes. So the only message to Trump is that some allied nations have decided to carry out an exercise without the US. Other soldiers will arrive, obviously, from the United Kingdom, Norway, Finland and the Netherlands, but everything will last from today to Saturday. Then everyone goes home. Doing deployment tests means installing command and control centers, connection networks, simulating attacks and reactions, then dismantling everything and returning to your bases. The decision was taken after the meeting between the Greenlandic, Danish and US authorities in Washington on the future management of the island, a meeting with far from positive results, so much so that the Danish Foreign Minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, declared that no concrete agreement had been reached. And these war games certainly won’t be able to change the Trump administration’s mind. Motivating the presence, however symbolic, of his country’s troops, French President Emmanuel Macron said that France must “stand alongside a sovereign state to protect its territory”, namely Denmark, and announced that in the coming days he would send other land, sea and air forces, but without specifying how many. Instead, the first diplomats to arrive from Paris in Nuuk were the first French consulate in Greenland to open on February 6, an office that will manage the presence of approximately twenty French citizens who live there permanently. Just to give an idea of the population that lives in the region, there are just over 58,000 people, a tenth of the citizens of the Province of Monza and Brianza. Italy refused the invitation to participate and Minister Crosetto himself said: “What do one hundred, two hundred or three hundred soldiers of any nationality do? It seems like the beginning of a joke. It is not a competition to see who sends soldiers around the world, ours is a rational attitude”. Like Italy, there is also Poland, whose Prime Minister Donald Tusk has warned that a US military intervention in Greenland would be “a disaster. A conflict or an attempt to take control of the territory of a NATO member country by another member state would be the end of the world as we know it”.
