Wall Street Journal Flags A Dark Downside To Donald Trump’s Greenland Push

The Wall Street Journal on Sunday warned how Donald Trump’s bid for the United States to take control of Greenland could backfire and ultimately benefit Russia and China, the dual threat of whom the president has used as one of his main reasons for potentially seizing the semi-autonomous Danish territory.

The newspaper’s conservative editorial board — which has slammed many of Trump’s trade policies in recent months — acknowledged there are “good reasons for Washington to care about Greenland, including the island’s strategic position and untapped reserves of rare-earth minerals.”

But bullying supposed allied nations, including by imposing new tariffs on the European countries that have sent troops to the island as a deterrent to possible U.S. aggression, isn’t the way to go about it, it argued.

Russia’s decades-long dream of breaking the North Atlantic Treaty Organization alliance “is now a possibility as President Trump presses his campaign to capture Greenland no matter what the locals or its Denmark owner thinks,” it cautioned.

“The sad irony is that China and Russia may be the biggest winners,” it later lamented, noting how traditional allies such as Canada and the United Kingdom are now striking closer relationships with Beijing and signing free-trade deals among each other, independent of the U.S.