Early into his second term as US President, Donald Trump threatened to seize control of the Panama Canal, Greenland, and Canada, possibly through military force. To justify seizing the Canal, Trump lamely asserted that the US has been subjected to “unfair” transit fees since control reverted to Panama, in 1999, under terms of the 1977 Torrijos-Carter Treaty. Similarly unpersuasive, Trump argued that the US “needs” the natural resources (like oil, gas, uranium, copper, cobalt, nickel, and rare earth metals) of Canada, as well as those under Greenland’s melting ice sheet.
A common denominator in these three cases is how they all fall under the category of “Sea Control,” due to their important locations along “Sea Lines of Communication” (SLOCs) and “maritime chokepoints.” Sea Control is one major facet of “Full Spectrum Dominance,” the paradigm of global military primacy operationalized by the George W Bush administration, during the so-called Global War on Terrorism (GWOT).
The paradigm originally derived from the notion of the “Unipolar Moment,” when the Soviet Union collapsed, in 1991, and left the US as the “world’s sole superpower” – presumably forever after. One of the ancillary principles of Full Spectrum Dominance was articulated as the “Wolfowitz Doctrine,” which argued for preventing the emergence of “peer” or “near-peer” rivals – also forever. Another key ancillary was the policy of “strategic denial,” sometimes called “anti-access/ area denial” (A2/AD).
Nothing is very new about the general idea of controlling sea lanes and chokepoints. These have been relevant in naval strategies for centuries, all around the world. (A sampling of current literature titles would include: “Lawful Sea Control to Protect Sea Lines of Communication and Chokepoints” and “Southeast Asian Chokepoints: Keeping Sea Lines of Communication Open” and “Maritime Chokepoints: Key Sea Lines of Communication (SLOCs) and Strategy” and “Choke Points“). What’s new is how Full Spectrum Dominance applies to today’s evolving situation in the SLOCs and chokepoints of and around Panama, Greenland, Canada, and elsewhere.
Whoever controls a chokepoint has the obvious advantage of keeping it open to merchant transit, ideally under “freedom of navigation” rules and norms, such as are enumerated in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) – which the US has not ratified. On the other side of the coin, the very definition of chokepoints implies that they can be closed off and blockaded by force – presumably given some alleged military necessity, legal or otherwise.
Panama
This map illustrates global Sea Lines of Communication (SLOCs) and Maritime Chokepoints. The significance of the Panama Canal is clear to see, as it is the singular chokepoint of the Western Hemisphere, between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. This importance has remained the same since it opened, in 1914, but direct military US control of the Canal and the entire “Canal Zone” ended and was transferred to Panama, in 1999.
The importance of the chokepoint is somewhat complicated. In this next map, it is clear that the Canal is only the primary chokepoint among several others in the Caribbean. In order to transit the Canal, in either direction, a ship must also transit secondary passages, the most important of which is the Windward Passage, between Haiti and Cuba (near Guantanamo – GITMO). Other significant secondary chokepoints would be the Mona Passage (between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic), the Yucatan Channel (between Cuba and Mexico), the Florida Straits (between Cuba and Florida), and the passage between Grenada and Trinidad-Tobago, through which maritime traffic extends up and down the east coast of South America, to and from ports including Rio, Belem, and Buenos Aires.
Apart from all that GITMO has come to represent as a hell-hole, in the context of the GWOT, it is important to recognize it as a major naval base at a very strategic chokepoint. The base was originally leased from a newly-independent Cuban government, following the Spanish American War of 1898. That lease was declared “perpetual,” and it carried over into the era since the Cuban Revolution of 1959, when it became maintained by force against a hostile state host.
US military force has conditioned political affairs in Central and South America and the Caribbean since the days of the Monroe Doctrine, in 1823. Since the Panama Canal first opened, in 1914, armed force has always been at the intersection between regional events on the land and those on the water. The Canal indirectly explains Ronald Reagan’s illegal military intervention of Grenada, in 1983, when a Socialist politician was elected to govern a tiny island – which just happens to sit astride a major Caribbean SLOC and chokepoint. It also indirectly explains Bill Clinton’s policy of preventing Socialism in Haiti, on the other side of the Windward Passage from Socialist Cuba, during the 1990s. And of course, it explains George HW Bush’s intervention in Panama, in 1989, in so-called “Operation Just Cause” (mocked by critics as “Operation Just Because”).
The pretext of that intervention was to arrest Panamanian President Manuel Noriega, who had been an asset of the DEA and the CIA, and who cooperated in training soldiers for the Contra War against the Socialist Sandinistas in Nicaragua, during the 1980s. He stepped out of line and outlived his usefulness, when he agreed to join Panama to the “Contadora” group of Central American and European nations, who demanded a regional solution to the Contra War and the ongoing bloodbaths in Guatemala, El Salvador, and elsewhere. That demand implied sympathy for Socialism, and so Noriega had to go. He was arrested for drug trafficking, tried, convicted, and sentenced to 40 years in a US prison. Hundreds of Panamanians were murdered in the intervention.
At that point, in 1989, the US military was vacating some 45 bases in the Canal Zone. These were largely relocated into the near distance. There are no US naval or air bases at present in Panama, but there are nine in Honduras, seven in Guatemala, five in El Salvador, four in Costa Rica, seven in Colombia, and seven in Nicaragua, and elsewhere in the Caribbean (see the map).
In 1989, the Socialist world was falling apart, with the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the collapse of Yugoslavia and the Warsaw Pact countries, rebellion and repression in China, electoral defeat of the Sandinistas, and then, the Soviet Union up and died. In Panama, up to that point, the presumption was that any threat to the Canal was coming from the Soviet adversary.
Then, a steady stream of hysterical alarm that “Communist China” would take control of the Canal, or already had control, took over. This hysteria had been constant, ever since the Torrijos-Carter Treaty of 1977 was signed, but around 1990, it went ballistic. They’ve been crying wolf for 36 years now.
Trump’s current obsession over China and the Canal is based partly on account of the port facilities a Hong Kong-based corporation, CK Hutchison, now owns on both ends of the passage, and other Chinese infrastructure projects. The alarm is also based partly on the deep economic relations China has developed with Panama and other Central and South American countries. American economic primacy has a peer or near-peer rival, and that’s a problem, as per the Wolfowitz Doctrine, even though it’s not military – at this point. China’s Belt-and-Road Initiative and the BRICS organization are colliding head-on with Full Spectrum Dominance, and one major flash point is in Panama.
Both Trump and his new Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, have alleged without evidence that China might block the Panama chokepoint. This is pure imperialist propaganda, hyperbole, and total hypocrisy. The truth is that only the US presently has the capabilities to do such a thing, despite the physical relocation of its military bases from the Canal Zone since 1999.
China has no significant power projection capabilities anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. Any Chinese attempt to block or blockade the Panama chokepoint would require military force, and the presumption would have to be that all the pre-positioned US firepower, including the 4th Fleet of the Navy, would sit still and concede control of all the chokepoints of the Caribbean, as well as allow enemy forces anywhere near the Canal.
The bottom line is not that China is a serious threat to American “national security” in Panama. Instead, Trump’s policy is to reassert direct US military control, with its implicit threat to blockade the Canal against anybody, with or without a credible pretext. Gunboat diplomacy has defined US policy in Panama since the beginning. “Hard power” is what Trump believes makes America “great.” Bring the hammer.
Greenland, Denmark, and Canada
Few of the current maps of SLOCs and chokepoints demonstrate how Sea Control applies to Greenland and Canada, which have become subjects of the current crisis being created by Donald Trump, in his stated intent to seize control of both countries.
Climate change and global warming have brought the situation into the spotlight, as melting Arctic ice has resulted in opening the Northwest Passage, along the Canadian and Alaskan Arctic coastlines. There is little in the way of military presence throughout that SLOC and down the west coast of Greenland, except for the US Pituffik Space Base, which is located strategically on the Nares Strait chokepoint, at the northern end of Baffin Bay. Pituffik SB was formerly known as the Thule Air Base, a US Cold War installation where ICBMs were deployed under the glaciers.
On the Russian side of the Arctic coastline, along the also-melting Northern Sea Route, there has been some intensive exploration for petroleum and mineral resources. Russia has claimed ownership of much of the Arctic Ocean basin, including the North Pole. Meanwhile, China is increasingly interested in opening the Transpolar Sea Route, for more economical transportation in its burgeoning Belt-and-Road Initiative trading system. The Arctic route between China and Europe is far shorter than the alternative through the Suez and Panama Canals.
During the Cold War, Greenland’s importance in NATO’s defense architecture was determined by its strategic location, as the western coastline of the so-called GIUK Gap (between Greenland, Iceland, and the UK), shown in the map here. Soviet submarines and surface warships of the Northern Fleet had to transit to and from their bases around Murmansk and the Kola Peninsula through the chokepoint, in order to sail into and out of the Atlantic Ocean.
The GIUK Gap strategy is probably still operational, but Greenland’s location along the Northwest Passage amplifies its importance, as Russian and Chinese vessels already pass along its coastlines, where new chokepoints have yet to be established, especially on the western and southern shores. Both China and Russia are looking for opportunity to build harbors, ports, and naval bases all around Greenland’s littoral. The US wants to build bases, too. Perhaps, so does Denmark.
Adversarial competition explains some of Trump’s urgency to seize control – and to deny that control to Canada, Greenland, and Denmark, as well as to Russia and China. “Strategic denial” applies not only to military transit, but also to the many petroleum and mining companies competing for leases that might be negotiated with the present sovereign state of Denmark, or perhaps more importantly, with any new indigenous Greenlandic government, if it should become independent from Denmark.
In this map, Arctic military bases are located, illustrating the situation. Obviously, Full Spectrum Dominance of the Arctic is going to require a big upgrade, construction of numerous military bases, just to balance present Russian deployments. And such development would depend on the cooperation of Greenland, Denmark, and Canada, which might not be forthcoming. It would be easier for the US if it just owned all that territory, and cooperation with other parties would not be necessary.
None of this is to deny the importance of both Greenland and Canada as present and future resource colonies. There is some huge potential for oil and gas drilling, as well as mineral extraction, in both cases. Just whose corporations would be eligible for permitting and licensing that kind of development is an open question. Competition is already fierce, and it includes Russian and Chinese companies, as well as American, Canadian and Danish concerns. They all have stars in their eyes, and are salivating over the riches that they might colonize and monopolize – and deny to other parties.
The complications and consequences of colonial capitalist industrial development, while laying waste to Arctic environments and ecosystems with pollution and contamination, as the ice melts and sea levels rise, still don’t rise quite to the level of conflict over SLOCs and chokepoints. Can industrialization happen without a solid foundation of political control of the territory, backed up with military force? For the US, Full Spectrum Dominance is the whole story. As in the Wolfowitz Doctrine: No peer rivals! To allow easy access to Russia and/or China is simply out of the question, unless the US has a total, global lock on Sea Control. That’s the sub-text of Trump’s message.
The Indigenous Dimension
In the 1970s, the international movement for rights of indigenous peoples began to coalesce in the United Nations, and it led to the promulgation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), in 1993. Throughout that development, indigenous peoples of the Arctic were instrumental actors, and their activism generated organizations that today have two main levels. The top level can be identified as the Arctic Council, which includes the governments of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Canada, Russia, and the USA. It is a state-centric organization, founded in 1996, and it also includes 13 other states as Observers.
The Arctic Council was created in great part to contain the political pressures of indigenous peoples demanding recognition through the UNDRIP movement. The Council relegated them to a non-voting second level of “Indigenous Permanent Participants,” comprised of six regional indigenous organizations, one of which is the Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC), which represents Inuits of Greenland (and therefore Denmark, today), Canada, Alaska, and Russia. The other Permanent Participants are: the Aleut International Association, the Arctic Athabaskan Council, the Gwich’in Council International, the Saami Council, and the Russian Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North (RAIPON: representing Aleuts, Chukchis, Nenets, Yupiks, Evenks, Sahkas, and over a dozen other Arctic peoples).
In early indigenous organizing within the UN, Greenland Home Rule was considered a good example of positive relationships possible between states (in this case, Denmark) and indigenous peoples. But for many Greenlanders (80-90 percent of whom are Inuit), Home Rule never came close enough to decolonization, and they advocated for total independence. Their movement has now grown to a point where that goal might be realized – just as Donald Trump comes along and tries to buy the entire island. It’s not the least bit clear with whom Trump would make one of his infamous real-estate deals. Trump asked: “Who owns Greenland, anyway?” We may be about to find out.
An independent Greenland would face a host of problems, getting started. Probably the worst case scenario would to be bought out and owned by the United States, and rendered into an analog of an Indian reservation, or a captured nation, like Hawaii, Puerto Rico, or Guam – consigned to the Interior Department and subordinated to the Bureau of Land Management. Another big problem would be to organize a military capability to control and defend its own SLOCs and chokepoints.
In an alternative scenario, the Inuit people of Greenland might find the greatest support in their current alliances with other Arctic indigenous peoples. After all, it really has been a collective effort, within the UN and the Arctic Council, that brings Greenland’s aspirations for independence to the table.
This is especially true for the Inuits who inhabit the Nunavut Territory of Canada, just across the Nares Strait and Baffin Bay. In the vast area of Nunavut, as in Greenland, Inuits comprise some 80-90 percent of the population. Nunavut’s Arctic coastline is also Canada’s. The entire littoral defines the SLOC that is the Northwest Passage, along which there are numerous possible chokepoints, control of which Donald Trump defines as a question of “national security,” not just for the US, but for the entire “Free World.”
Whether the Nunavut Inuits generate a united political force-field to defend and protect themselves is yet to be seen. Likewise, the question is whether this population finds support and unity among other Arctic peoples, especially among Inuit relatives in Greenland, who are facing the same threat of being taken captive by the United States, in its quest for Full Spectrum Dominance.
Marc Sills, Ph.D. is an independent writer living in New Mexico.
