- Controversy: Donald Trump is interested in buying Greenland from Denmark
- U.S. Buy Greenland and other eccentricities of Donald Trump
Two Spaniards began this story 480 years ago, one month and ten days ago. One was from Medellín, in Badajoz, and his name was Hernán Cortés. We don't know the date or place of birth of the other. Only his name: Francisco de Ulloa . It was July 8, 1539. That day, De Ulloa, commanding three ships, departed from Acapulco, on the Mexican Pacific coast, on an expedition financed by Cortes from his own pocket. His only order was to head north until he found the Northwest Passage , the route that supposedly connected the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic.
Ulloa did not find El Paso. He only explored what Spanish speakers today call the Gulf of California and the Anglo-Saxon Mar de Cortés. That is just one more of the confusions of this five-century story. Another, more influential, was the one committed by Ulloa, who decided that the Gulf was the southern end of the Anian Strait , that is, of the Northwest passage.
The Northwest Passage, thus, went from mythology to geopolitics, and the North Pacific - including Alaska itself - was filled with names of Spanish sailors who crossed it first, looking for the passage, and then showing the flag and establishing armed forces, in a Cold War with the Russian and British Empires to decide which power controlled those waters.
Since that July 8, 1539, History jumps to last Thursday, when the financial newspaper 'The Wall Street Journal' published the headline 'President Trump poses a new real estate purchase: Greenland' . A few hours later, the 'Washington Post' repeated the same information. Indeed, the head of the State and the Government of the United States has proposed to his advisors to make an offer to Denmark for Greenland, the largest island in the world - four times the size of Spain, but with a third of the population of the Chamberí district , in Madrid- covered by an ice cap that reaches more than three kilometers thick.
But Greenland's ice is melting at a speed impossible to imagine. On July 31, the island poured 10,000 million tons of solid and liquid water into the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans . The next day, he threw another 12,500 million tons. That is enough to cover Spain with 10 meters of water. Last month, worldwide ocean level rose one millimeter just because of melted ice in Greenland.
Effects of climate change
It is not just Greenland. Last month, a weather station located north of the Polar Circle marked 34.8 degrees Celsius. On Friday, you had to sail 250 kilometers north of Alaska to find ice. As the US Navy secretary Richard Spencer said in April in the United States Senate, "the whole damned thing has melted." The "damn thing" is the Arctic.
That is the reason for Trump's interest. Climate change has made the myth of the Anian Strait a reality. The warming of the Earth caused by the use of fossil fuels and the expansion of livestock has opened a new continent to human activity: the Arctic. The result is a struggle between great powers for the control of a new world as it was not seen since, between 1880 and World War I, European countries divided Africa.
So, faced with a nineteenth-century reality, Trump has launched a nineteenth-century initiative: the purchase of a territory from another nation. After all, this is how the US set foot in the Arctic, when in 1867, just out of the Civil War, it acquired Alaska from Russia for 100 million dollars of the time .
The world has changed a lot since then, and no one - including some Trump collaborators, according to the 'Wall Street Journal' - seems to have taken the president's idea seriously. But buying Greenland is just a symptom. The US, Russia, Canada, Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Iceland are unleashing a Cold War in an Arctic , paradoxically, every day less cold.
Blockade to China
They are not just the countries of the region. There is also China, which is officially an observer country in the Arctic Council, the body formed by the riverside countries of that ocean. Last year, the United States managed to block the construction by China of three airports in Greenland , where the Pentagon has, 1,250 kilometers north of the Polar Circle, Thule's huge radar base. In May, the US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo , had to cancel a visit to that island because of the crisis between that country and Iran, in which he was going to discuss, among other things, "the activities of China."
Beijing's strategy is the same as the one it has applied in other countries: massive investments, especially in infrastructure . Aware that it cannot influence Russia, the US and Canada, the Chinese Government has focused on the European countries in the region. Thus, it has unsuccessfully proposed to Iceland the construction of a large port and massive investments in tourism, but it has managed to enter the geothermal energy sector in that country. The project of the Government of Xi Jinping - which has been formally presented to Finland - is the creation of a 'Silk and Road' - that is, its immense plan to link roads, ports, and railways Asia with Europe - by the Arctic Russian, in a tracing of what he is already doing through the Indian and the Mediterranean.
But nobody has the Arctic as developed as Russia. It is logical, given that 20% of its GDP comes from territories north of the Polar Circle, according to estimates by Magnus Nordenmann, director of the Transatlantic Security Initiative of the Washington Atlantic Council think tank. In April, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that 10% of the country's civil investment goes to the Arctic.
Transportation and resources
And, aside, there is the military issue. Since 2003, Russia has spent billions of euros in building and expanding seven bases in the Arctic Ocean , especially in the Barents Sea, the only Russian Arctic region that does not freeze in winter. The Barents Sea is in western Russia, on the border with Norway, a NATO country in which US soldiers are trained to fight in the extreme conditions of the region.
For now, all this activity is summarized in two words: maritime transport . Which brings us, again, to the Anian Sea. Or, in its modern version, to the Northeast Pass. The Siberian Arctic freezes less than that of Alaska and Canada. And it is much more practical to connect Europe and Asia. If it is done through Siberia, the route between Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, and Yokohama, in Japan, is 37% shorter than the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal, the Indian Ocean and, finally, the Pacific. If the ship goes to Busan, in South Korea, the time savings is 29%. If your destination is Shanghai, in China, 24%.
More in the long term, there is another key element in the Arctic: natural resources . The region has around 13% of the world's oil, concentrated in Alaska, Canada, and Greenland, according to the US Geological Survey and one billion euros in mineral reserves.
Militarization of the North Pole
At the moment, the exploitation of these resources is not profitable. For example, if the price of the barrel is not solidly at the level of 100 dollars - which is practically double that of today - the oil companies will not have incentives to assume the immense investments involved in drilling in the Arctic. And that adds to the technical difficulties of operating in extreme weather. In 2012, the attempt of the world's largest oil company, the Dutch Shell, to exploit crude oil in northern Alaska was about to end in an environmental disaster when the Kulluk oil rig crashed into an islet near the island of Kodiak, in the one that lives the biggest brown bears in the world.
These problems also affect maritime traffic. Merchants who cross the Northeast route in summer need to be prepared for ice, cold and storms, and often have to be escorted by one of the 40 icebreakers capable of sailing through the Arctic that Russia has. The US has only one.
That imbalance leads to another new element: the militarization of the North Pole . Barack Obama began to see the Arctic as a strategic region in which Moscow was beginning to take too much advantage, and already in 2016 ordered the construction of six icebreakers, which will begin to enter service in 2023, and which, as he declared in 2017 the Retired admiral Paul Zukunft , who until a year earlier had been commander-in-chief of the US Coast Guard, could be armed with cruise missiles. Zukunft, however, saw those measures clearly insufficient, and estimated that it would take the US "one generation" to reach Russia's military capabilities in that region. "In this chessboard that is the Arctic, the Russians have given us checkmate as soon as the game begins , " the admiral concluded. The Arctic Cold War and the fight for control of its communication routes are still as valid today as in the time of Cortés and De Ulloa.
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