Greenland

Many Filipinos admittedly can’t relate with the international headline-grabbing Greenland crisis. Except perhaps for the families of some 1,110 Filipinos sustaining Greenland’s fisheries export industry.

Significantly, however, those migrant Filipinos in the icy vastness of the Danish-administered autonomous territory account for over 40 percent of the non-Greenlandic and non-Danish residents of Greenland’s roughly 57,000 population.

Facts which presently raises the question: What happens to them amid US President Donald Trump’s alarming obsession to annex Greenland?

As I write this, the Marcos administration has yet to specifically address the question, probably because of the need for caution on a hot-button issue which has since roiled European leaders and governments.

Bristling European and non-European leaders are now resisting Trump’s doctrine of domination and are concluding the US has become an unreliable ally.

European leaders, however, also faced accusations that European countries largely benefited from their “asymmetric security alliance” with the US.

Trump’s bullying doctrine, dubbed as the “Donroe Doctrine,” in fact, prompted Canada Prime Minister Mark Carney’s now famous epitaph of the international liberal order at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Carney basically spoke about “a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality, where geopolitics -where the large, main power, geopolitics — is submitted to no limits, no constraints,” as The Guardian newspaper puts it.

Trump, meanwhile, has since re-holstered his most explicit threats over Greenland like cocking tariff guns to the heads of European leaders and ruling out military action. Tempestuous Trump seems to have backed down.

But as Carnegie scholar Sophia Besch puts it, Trump’s “retreat should not be mistaken for closure. The president has not abandoned his determination to acquire Greenland. He has merely adjusted his tactics.”

At any rate, there are several reasons for Trump’s obsession over Greenland.

Trump and his advisers frame their neo-imperialist ambitions of putting the world’s largest island under their control as strategic realism rather than imperial whimsy.

For them, the strategic perspective here means Greenland is the perch wherein Americans must first assert might in the Arctic Circle, ahead of Russia and China.

Greenland, however, happens to have vast economic attractions. It not only has oil and iron ore but is also “rich in critical minerals, including rare earths essential for clean energy, defense production, and advanced manufacturing.”

While those are compelling reasons for the greedy, analysts nonetheless can’t discount their suspicions that egotistic Trump wants Greenland “not because it solves a defined security problem, but because it satisfies a personal impulse: territory as legacy, sovereignty as real estate.”

An even more sinister reason on why Trump is emboldened on colonizing Greenland is that there’s tacit support from American tech billionaires and executives, the magazine Rolling Stone reports.

“For decades, libertarian-minded tech executive has dreamed of creating a sovereign territory free of regulatory oversight and tax structures, envisioning a free-market, stateless utopia where they can pursue their wildest ambitions and accrue even greater wealth. A MAGA-takeover of Greenland could be exactly what they’re after, since it offers a vast, mostly untouched environment for all kinds of harebrained experiments they can’t carry out on US soil,” says Rolling Stone.

Anyway, whatever physically happens to Greenland also presents an existential threat to us, affecting our overall welfare.

Filipino scholar Tieza Santos argues that if Greenland’s ice sheets somehow melt due to exploitation and climate change, those changes eventually raises sea levels here and that means even more devastating floods for us.