Much has been said about President Trump’s apparent insistence that the U.S. own Greenland, with speculation ranging from the desire for natural resources to growing the U.S. sphere of influence. But it must also be considered whether it’s part of the preparations for a nuclear war with Russia and China.
Trump’s recent post on Truth Social pointed in this direction, making an explicit point about Greenland’s location being necessary for the placement of missiles as part of the supposed “Golden Dome” system. On Jan. 17, Trump wrote: “Hundreds of Billions of Dollars are currently being spent on Security Programs having to do with ‘The [Golden] Dome’… and this very brilliant, but highly complex system can only work at its maximum potential and efficiency, because of angles, metes, and bounds, if this Land Greenland) is included in it.” Trump specified that the deployment would be for “both Offensive and Defensive” systems.
Alexander Stepanov, a military expert at the Institute of Law and National Security at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, [recently told TASS that, “The Golden Dome project is aimed at monitoring airspace and near-Earth space for the timely detection of launches and interception of various types of offensive weapons—not only in the Western Hemisphere, but also in the northern waters and Arctic zone of the Russian Federation. This is primarily about developing a countermeasure capability against Russian hypersonic weapons.” Stepanov said he expects that the Pentagon is planning to deploy additional ground tracking stations and radar systems in Greenland, as well as support infrastructure for the U.S.’ nuclear submarine fleet in the Arctic. “The military-strategic importance of the island is difficult to overestimate in terms of implementing the Pentagon’s comprehensive program to build up military infrastructure in the Arctic,” Stepanov concluded.
Former Russian space agency chief and current senator for the Zaporozhye Region, Dmitry Rogozin, also had very stark comments about the Greenland discussion. In a Jan. 14 post on Telegram, Rogozin said Trump’s workings are not those of an “impulsive” or “eccentric” person, but rather part of a “single, coherent plan.” “Donald Trump’s statement that the United States ‘vitally needs’ Greenland, for the sake of national security and the ‘Golden Dome’ project, is not an improvisation. Trump, emboldened by his success, decided to use his momentum to push through something the US has been planning for a long time—a strategy to neutralize Russia’s strategic nuclear potential.” Greenland’s location, Rogozin says, “fits perfectly into this architecture,” and the strategy will be to “turn it into a platform for deploying both nuclear attack and anti-missile interception systems against Russian ICBMs. This is a dismantling of the entire system of strategic stability in the world.”
An article in CSIS from last November reprises various Chinese and Russian responses to the Golden Dome policy so far. It quotes two scholars from the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, a research center under the Ministry of State Security, who argue that the Golden Dome represents a “fundamental break” from the focus on “rogue actors” under Obama and Biden. The Director of the Center for Arms Control Studies at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations makes a similar point, arguing that the system underscores the U.S.’ desire to develop “left-of-launch” capabilities, which undermines strategic stability. Golden Dome also explicitly targets Russia and China for the first time, indicating a new degree of hostility.
Last May, on the 80th Victory Day marking the end of World War II in Europe, Russia and China issued a “Joint Statement between the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation on Global Strategic Stability, which directly responded to the announcement of Trump’s Golden Dome proposal. The statement claims that the proposal “can be employed for the purposes of delivering... a first strike, in calculation to repel a radically weakened retaliatory strike with air and missile defense assets.” The statement criticizes Golden Dome as a “complete and ultimate rejection” of the relationship between offensive and defensive strategic systems, and argues that Golden Dome’s left-of-launch missile defeat concept is intended to undermine adversaries’ nuclear deterrents and indicates that the United States seeks to achieve ‘strategic invulnerability.’”
