Name: The Arctic Chessboard: Why Greenland and Canada Are Critical to US Security Against the CCP | Alex Gray
Uploaded: 2026-02-17T23:05:09.000Z
Description: “People have misunderstood that [Greenland] is somehow a President Donald Trump issue, and it’s not,” says Alex Gray, who previously served as National Security Council chief of staff and deputy assistant to the president.

Jan Jekielek is a senior editor with The Epoch Times, host of the show “American Thought Leaders” and co-host of “FALLOUT” with Dr. Robert Malone and “Kash’s Corner” with Kash Patel. Jan’s career has spanned academia, international human rights work, and now for almost two decades, media. He has interviewed nearly a thousand thought leaders on camera, and specializes in long-form discussions challenging the grand narratives of our time. He’s also an award-winning documentary filmmaker, producing “The Unseen Crisis: Vaccine Stories You Were Never Told,” “DeSantis: Florida vs. Lockdowns,” and “Finding Manny.”

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[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “People have misunderstood that [Greenland] is somehow a President Donald Trump issue, and it’s not,” says Alex Gray, who previously served as National Security Council chief of staff and deputy assistant to the president.

So why does Greenland matter? And why has it become such a massive issue?

In fact, Gray explained to me, multiple American presidents have tried to purchase or acquire Greenland over the last 160 years. Andrew Johnson was the first in 1867. Woodrow Wilson tried during the First World War. And Harry Truman tried right after World War II, Gray says.

In my deep-dive interview with Gray, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and co-founder of American Global Strategies, he lays out Greenland’s geostrategic importance to America’s national security and what it would mean if Greenland became dependent on China.

Beyond Greenland, we also dive into security threats related to America’s northern neighbor and the implications of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s overtures in Beijing.

For many years, China has shown great interest in establishing dominance over the Arctic region and is regularly moving its submarines up to the North Pole. As this geopolitical theater becomes more important, Canada and Greenland will both become vital players.

Back in 1952, the United States signed a treaty with Denmark, still in effect today, that provides America with extensive military access to Greenland. Gray’s overarching concern is what will happen when Greenland is likely to become independent in five or 10 years.

Gray is convinced that after independence, Greenland is likely to fall prey to the Chinese Communist Party’s “well-worn playbook” to gain influence and eventually control the island. He calls it the “Solomon Islands scenario.”

“They start offering Belt and Road projects. They start buying dual-use facilities. They buy ports. They’re taking over airfields. Next thing you know, we’re hearing conversations about potentially having [China’s People’s Liberation Army] naval access to ports in the Solomons. … This is a well-worn Chinese playbook,” Gray says.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of  NTD.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:

Alex Gray, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

We’re going to talk about all things Greenland and the U.S. relationship, the Danish relationship, and what should happen from a national security perspective. Before we go there, I want to talk about something that Undersecretary of State Sarah Rogers said in a recent post. She said partisan hacks spent years peddling the phony Russia collusion hoax while turning a blind eye to the sprawling web of far-left activist organizations pushing the agendas of the Chinese Communist Party [CCP]. So here you are sitting in the seat. You’ve made the Chinese Communist Party a study for a while. What’s your reaction to Sarah Rogers’ comments?

It’s about time. It’s about time someone at that level in our government says what I think people have known, both people like you who study this on the outside and people who served in government, know that it’s the United Front Work Department. The United Front Work Department of the Chinese Communist Party makes it its business, whether it’s the United States or Australia or other Western allies, to infiltrate civil society, infiltrate key institutions with the goal of sowing discord.

That’s what they support: far extreme elements of both sides of the political spectrum, but particularly the Left. And they do everything they can to sow chaos with the goal of undermining societies and undermining governing structures so they can accomplish their political ends. And I think Mrs. Rogers made it very valid. And I just wish it had been said earlier.

Organizations like Code Pink and People’s Forum were, so she made kind of a point of mentioning them. And these are organizations that are involved, I think, unambiguously with fomenting some chaos or protests. Tell me more about how this works.

So look at what the Soviets did in the United States. And the Chinese have inherited those lessons and, in many ways, they’ve refined them and made them more sophisticated and more effective. And the goal is to use organizations that are partisan, that are extreme, that sow disunity and disharmony within American society to create wedges that make us vulnerable to the CCP’s division.

And the more divided we are, the harder it is for us to resist the CCP’s ultimate political objective, which is global hegemony. And the American people are the last bulwark against CCP hegemony. If they can divide us, confuse us, and keep us at each other’s throats, they will have an easier path towards their ultimate goal.

Well, so actually this is a perfect foray into talking about Greenland in a way. So why is this such a big issue right now? And maybe actually let me backtrack a little bit. Why is it a big issue at all?

Sure. So to start with, why does it matter? Why is it a big issue? I think what people have misunderstood is that this is somehow a President Donald Trump issue, and it’s not. President Trump has just been extremely focused on it for reasons we can talk about that make good sound strategic sense. But presidents since 1867— the Andrew Johnson administration was the first administration to try to acquire Greenland. Woodrow Wilson tried to acquire it during the First World War. Franklin Roosevelt sent troops to occupy it during the Second World War. Harry Truman tried to buy it. Dwight Eisenhower considered buying it. This is a long-standing important piece of American strategic thought.

And what I always tell people is, if you start in 1867 and work to today, the strategic logic of why Greenland matters to us has not changed because geography doesn’t change. The only thing that’s changed is the American president and the adversary that we’re trying to counter. So in the beginning of this history, it was Great Britain. We were worried about Britain gaining control of Greenland and then threatening us in the post-Civil War period.

Then in World War I, obviously, we were worried about German U-boat bases being built in Greenland. In World War II, Denmark was occupied. The colonial master in Greenland was occupied. We were very concerned. Greenland was occupied; we were very concerned. And they actually did land— German raider parties landed in Greenland, set up radar stations, and they were actively planning to build U-boat bases to menace U.S. shipping that was doing Lend-Lease convoys to the Soviet Union. Again, then, of course, the Soviets in the Cold War led to the famous 1951 treaty that we signed with Denmark, which is still in effect today, which gives us bases and pretty extensive military access to Greenland.

The bottom line, when you think about why we have done this, why this all matters, and why this spans competitions across adversaries, is that Greenland is about a thousand miles or so, as the crow flies, from Maine. If you fly from Greenland to Maine, it’s very close. More importantly than that, it’s the strategic sea lanes, the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap. This is where the Soviet submarines would come down from northern Russia during the Cold War, stay off the eastern coast of the United States, and threaten us from a nuclear perspective.

Now, the Wall Street Journal reported just a couple of weeks ago that the Chinese are moving submarines regularly up to the North Pole. And as the Arctic ice melts, that passage between Greenland and the Arctic in northern Canada is going to be an incredibly important strategic location. All this to say, whoever controls Greenland or exerts coercive influence over Greenland is going to have a pivotal role in the security of the Arctic, in the North Atlantic, and in the passage between all of these critical geographies. And that’s why it’s so important, as it was in 1867; that’s why it’s so important today to make sure that no outside power has the ability to keep Greenland pointed, a dagger pointed at the United States. We have to keep an outside power from having that influence.

Outside power means an adversarial power or any power.

I would say an adversary power. I’ve always said I don’t worry that much as long as the Kingdom of Denmark includes Greenland. As long as it’s part of Denmark, you know, I’ll give you a real-world example. In 2018, the Chinese tried to buy an airfield in Greenland. And we worked very closely with Denmark, and under the existing rules and laws, Denmark was able to exercise veto power and actually stop the Chinese from purchasing that airfield. So as long as it’s part of the Kingdom of Denmark, I think American security concerns can relatively be contained. I think that Denmark has been woefully inadequate in many ways in securing the Arctic and fulfilling its obligations for Arctic security. They’re working on rectifying that. I hope they continue to do so.

For me, the longer-term concern is what happens when Greenland inevitably becomes independent. And that’s where we get to what I call the Solomon Islands scenario. And this is where I think we have to be extremely vigilant because we will wake up and we will have, just like in the Solomons, we will have People’s Armed Police [PAP] or Chinese militia running rampant in Greenland, and that is a lot bigger threat to us than anything that’s happening in the Pacific Islands.

Interesting.  So I’m very familiar, actually, with the Solomon Islands situation. Cleo Paskal is a regular guest on this show, and she’s kind of my go-to expert on the region, along with Grant Newsham, who actually is also right.  Now, maybe just explain to me what happened with the Solomons. I think this is very illustrative.

So the Solomon Islands archipelago in Southeast Asia is very strategically important. Thousands of American Marines died there in 1942-43 at the Battle of Guadalcanal. Hugely important sea lane connecting Southeast Asia and Australia. It recognized Taiwan for decades. And when I was at the National Security Council [NSC] in President Trump’s first term, I had responsibility at one point for all the islands of Oceania.

So I had a front-row seat to watching the Chinese United Front operation that was dedicated to winning an election and then making sure that the winners of that election were dedicated to switching diplomatic recognition from China to the PRC [People’s Republic of China]. And as soon as that recognition was switched, the first thing that happened was the Chinese rolled in, and they started offering projects with the Belt and Road Initiative. They start buying dual-use facilities, they buy ports, and they’re taking over airfields.

Next thing you know, we’re hearing conversations about potentially having Chinese naval access to ports in the Solomons, airfields on outlying islands that potentially the PLA [People’s Liberation Army] is going to be operating out of. This is a well-worn Chinese playbook. Fast forward a little bit in this saga, and the authoritarian leader Manasseh Sogavare, the authoritarian leader of the Solomon Islands,realizes that he needs help keeping his own people under control. Who’s better at keeping their own people under control than the Chinese Communist Party?

So he asked the CCP to literally violate his own country’s sovereignty and send the People’s Armed Police [PAP] to come into Honiara, the capital of the Solomon Islands, and start enforcing Solomon Islands law against the people of his own country. And you now have PAP officers locking up Solomon Islands citizens who criticize the Chinese Communist Party. This is an extraordinary threat to our Australian friends who, by the way, up until this happened, would insist they had it all under control, nothing to see here, this is going to be totally fine, keep your Yankee nose out of it.

And next thing you know, you have the PAP running around in Honiara, a critical strategic choke point in the region. That’s what I call the Solomon Islands scenario. And that’s exactly what I think will happen to a Greenland that becomes independent without a larger American security role to ensure that we don’t have this type of what I would call colonization.

And this Greenland independence scenario is not some new idea. Right. But before we go there, so you were at the NSC when all this was happening. Why didn’t you guys do anything?

We did as much as I think we should have done more. At the NSC, under the leadership of Matt Pottinger, we fought very hard to try and get our own government, frankly, the State Department particularly, to care about this. And the State Department felt that we were wasting our time trying to stand up for Taiwan’s remaining diplomatic allies. And so it was essentially the Trump NSC vs. the State Department, and the State Department won.

I’ll never forget. Matt Pottinger and I actually flew to the Solomon Islands. And we went and we laid wreaths with the Taiwanese deputy foreign minister at the Guadalcanal Memorial in a last-ditch attempt to try and keep the Solomons from flipping. So the White House did everything we could. But unfortunately, our State Department friends did not want to fight.

Wow. It’s amazing how quickly this can sort of flip. And there were also these heroes like Daniel Suidani, the premier of Malaita province, who now actually recently passed away, but after, again, all of this flip, suffered extreme persecution, which eventually connected with his death, I think. Very illustrative. Now, the idea for independence for Greenland is not a new idea. And again, just given the news cycle right now and everything, people might think it is. Explain that to me.

So I’m from the state of Oklahoma and grew up in a place where Native American indigenous history is very real. And so this is something that anyone from where I’m from in the United States, we understand the history of the mistreatment of First Nations or indigenous people. The Greenland-Denmark relationship is very much like that and, in some ways, even worse. Greenland has been a colony of Denmark for almost 300 years. And there are, if you look at the history of that colonization, it was brutal. It was extremely, it was extremely oppressive, particularly to women.

There are some horrible instances that have become very politically fraught issues in Denmark and Greenland with the forced sterilization of native Greenlandic women. So there’s a very complicated and a very painful history here that a lot of American indigenous people would understand and relate to. This led, in the late 1970s, to the first real push for Greenland to start getting greater autonomy from Denmark. And in 1979, they began the path toward home rule. And so they were able to start having elections and having local self-government on most domestic matters.

Fast forward to 2009, and there is another piece of legislation passed that sets up a procedure for even greater self-government. And it establishes a formal mechanism where Greenland can seek independence through a referendum and then through legislation in the Danish parliament that would also have to be ratified. But this sets up a formal constitutional mechanism for complete separation. In the meantime, foreign policy and defense remain the purview of Denmark, with increasing authority for foreign policy delegated to Greenland.

So there is certain collaboration, certain things that Greenland has to consult Copenhagen on, but they have their own foreign minister; they can have their own representation in certain instances. So increasingly, over the last 45 years, there has been this gradual path toward independence. In 2024, Greenland put out its first-ever national security strategy. And in that strategy, they said, by the 2030s, we aim to be on the path toward full independence from Denmark. This is not speculative. This is not just me saying it. This is, in the own words of the Greenlandic government, they are headed in the next decade towards independence.

The current kerfuffle that started when President Trump raised this longstanding U.S. strategic concern has altered Greenlandic politics significantly, and people have tried to reposition themselves because of the kind of antibodies in the system that have arisen because of the way this debate has been perceived and played out. But the reality is the underlying currents, the dislike of Danish colonialism, and the longstanding desire to get increasing self-government; this evolutionary process with legal mechanisms and constitutional mechanisms, none of that is going away.

And so what I think is going to happen is that in five years or ten years, you will see a referendum initiated, legislation initiated, and this gradual path to complete independence will happen. And what we cannot allow to happen is, like in Solomon’s, where these major political changes happen, and we’re just sitting there on our hands not preparing for the day after. We don’t want to be like the Australians who say everything’s fine, there’s nothing to see here, and we wake up to find there’s a Chinese People’s Armed Police presence in Nuuk, which is the capital of Greenland.

Okay, recently I talked with a former, I think it was, chief editor of one of the major Danish daily newspapers, okay, and the guy was very agitated talking to me. I was kind of trying to explain to him why I think the Americans, being Canadian, are interested in playing a role in Greenland and having kind of the strategic relationship and everything. And he said, yes, they’re forcing us through, like with a gun to our heads. This is what he’s telling me. If you could kind of disambiguate this a little bit.

Sure. I have no desire to coerce Greenland. What I want to have is a relationship with Greenland that is based on a respect for their sovereignty, but which takes into account our security interests. And I think the best example—it’s not like I don’t have to make up a real-world example; three of them exist: the Marshall Islands, Palau, and the Federated States of Micronesia. They are sovereign states, UN members, with long complicated colonial histories, and they are now fully independent, with their own foreign policies. Oftentimes they do things we don’t like, but we have what are called compacts of free association with them.

These give us several important things: unrestricted military access, so we can use their land, air, and sea without any restrictions. And then the most important thing is what’s called the right of denial. If a Chinese ship or Chinese aircraft wants to come into one of those three states, the U.S. government can say, under the terms of the compact, no. It’s 100 percent no, that ship cannot dock. And under that treaty, the states of Palau, the Marshall Islands, and Micronesia have to turn the Chinese away. That’s the type of influence we need to have. To guarantee our security in Greenland, that’s the type of relationship that has to be set up to wait on the other end of an independent Greenland.

And also in this context, I’ll just add a little bit of color, but the U.S. provides some financial support. It provides the postal service. People from these places can serve in the U.S. military; apparently, they disproportionately serve in the U.S. military because they understand the value. So there is very much a reciprocal relationship here. It’s by choice.

And just as a fun fact, a few years back when this compact was up for renewal, the treaty, for some reason, had been dropped out of the national security bill, the NDAA [National Defense Authorization Act].  And, you know, I had multiple guests on the show saying, hey, guys, we need to spend, you know, a hundred million here to avoid having to spend a hundred billion later. That kind of discussion. So my point is just simply that we can drop the ball so easily around some very basic and incredibly important strategic relationships.

Look, democracies have a horrible track record of doing hard things when they’re relatively easy. It’s a lot easier for democracies to do hard things when it’s harder. And Australia and the Solomons is, I think, just the perfect example where Australian troops alongside American Marines died in huge numbers. It was actually an Australian colony for many, many years. It’s so strategically important. The Australians have sent troops in as recently as 20 years ago.

Well, they were also supposed to be the ones providing the security, weren’t they?

And they said they were. And they dropped the ball. I love our Australian friends, but they dropped the ball. And that’s because it’s so hard as a democracy to get out there and convince the public, convince your bureaucracy that you should do these difficult things that don’t look like they’re urgent because, you know, nothing’s happening at the moment, and then there’s a crisis, and then you’re on your heels and you’re responding from a position of weakness.

My position in this whole Greenland debate has been we have 150 years of strategic thought behind why Greenland matters. We have examples like the Solomons and elsewhere of what happens when we don’t get ahead of these things. And we have templates, like in the Freely Associated States, of how we can solve this issue in a respectful, mutually beneficial way.

Let’s not wait. We have all the pieces here. Let’s put it all together. And when the Greenlanders decide they want to be independent, it’s a really binary choice. They’re going to have a great power waiting for them on the other side of independence. Do you want it to be Washington or do you want it to be Beijing? It’s a very simple binary choice, and we have all the tools to prevent this from being Honiara.

If we can never, I mean, the idea of it being Beijing, you know, you’ve already explained a bit of what that might look like, right? But I think it actually goes a lot further in my mind, right? Like, I mean, it’s a route that’s a lot closer to China, frankly, than across the Pacific, right?

Yes. It’s also, I mean, you follow this every day. The Chinese, if they make a decision that something is strategically valuable, whether it’s a naval base on the coast of West Africa, whether it’s building icebreakers to go to Antarctica, whether it’s hydrographic survey vessels off the coast of Chile, or a surveillance station in Cuba, I mean, you go down and down the list. They don’t have to get funding from Congress. They don’t have to convince a bunch of senators that this is worthy of an appropriation. They just do it.

I’m not arguing that we shouldn’t have that system by any means, but I’m just saying, you know, they will seize the opportunity because they have the ability and the resources and the command system that allows them to nimbly, for the most part, respond to strategic opportunity. It’s much harder for us institutionally to see a vulnerability and to fill the gap than it is for the Chinese to step in. And that’s why I think what I’m trying to do is get people to think about this now before there’s a crisis.

And I think this is what President Trump is trying to do. He wants us to think about this before it’s a crisis so we never have to be like the Australians and the Solomons and panic and worry that a couple of hours from Brisbane there’s going to be a Chinese PLA Air Force base because we didn’t handle it in time.

You know, so I’m Canadian, as many of our viewers know. And, you know, actually, I’m very concerned about Canada for all sorts of reasons, but especially these recent kinds of forays into, you know, a strategic relationship. And it’s very confusing in some ways because, you know, I kind of understand, for example, this 51st state idea, which is an anathema, by the way, for Canadians. Like, we hate the idea of the U.S. exerting some sort of, you know, coercive power against Canada.

But the economies are so closely tied. They’re so closely tied that they’re tied as many economies of states relative to the federal government or states with each other are in America. So it’s, you know, that there’s some kind of analogy there, right, to be had. And geography is a similar part of the world as Greenland. What would be the concerns for the U.S. of this deepening relationship of Canada with the Chinese Communist Party?

Well, look, Canada is increasingly becoming a major strategic weak spot for the United States for a number of reasons. Number one, they spend about one percent. I’ve heard people argue that in reality, it’s less than one percent of GDP [Gross Domestic Product] on defense. And they have shown under multiple prime ministers no interest in doing anything about it. I would almost say to some extent, that’s just baked into the cake at this point.

But it’s even worse than that. Because that limited percent of GDP they’re spending on defense, the Canadians are not allocating in a way that’s actually helpful to the Western Alliance, to NATO, and to the United States. So the Canadians are still trying to maintain a rapid reaction brigade that can deploy to Europe. Why on earth are the Canadians, who are spending so little of their limited resources on defense, still trying to do a Cold War-style armored deployment to Europe?

They, at the same time, have an icebreaker fleet that is minuscule. Stephen Harper in the mid-2000s tried to build an icebreaker fleet, and it did not come to fruition the way it should have. You look at the militia, essentially the mostly First Nations militia that is guarding the northernmost flank of Canada. These are local guides armed with Lee-Enfield rifles. The early warning sensors and airborne defense that should be up in an area that’s going to be increasingly part of strategic competition; in many places, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of miles of the Canadian wilderness that’s just totally open and unguarded.

So what I’m saying is Canada, particularly under the Trudeau government, but Carney I think is trying to do a little bit better, but he has his own problems, as you said, with his kind of strategic focus on China. The lack of preparedness that the Trudeau government engaged in for a decade has truly harmed U.S. core security interests. We expect the Canadians to contribute to at least keeping our shared continent safe, and they have done the opposite. They have made it more vulnerable, and they have put more of the burden because of their lack of preparedness; they put more of the burden of securing the hemisphere on us when we should be allocating our resources in many cases to the Indo-Pacific, the main theater of potential competition.

So I think Canada’s lack of preparedness is a real threat to our shared security. And you add on top of that the way Mark Carney has sought to have some sort of deepened relationship with Canada and China. The problem with that is you could conceivably, if he does this, if he does his fantastical middle power, his Davos speech thing, if he does that, you now have a potential Chinese vassal state that is bordering and shares the longest border with the United States.

Why is the middle power a potential Chinese vassal state? Break that down for me.

Because the Chinese don’t acknowledge anything but vassal states. The Chinese conception of interstate relations is enemy and vassal state. There is no middle ground. And so if Mark Carney’s vision of these middle powers gathering together in some sort of, you know, harmony, non-aligned movement, you know, where they’re just going to not pick sides and get along with everybody and sing kumbaya. Well, the reality of what that means from a Chinese strategic perspective is they’re offering themselves up on a platter to be devoured by the CCP for their strategic ends.

That’s what’s going to happen. And the United States cannot afford or allow the country with whom we share our longest border to be a Chinese vassal state. So between his lack of preparedness militarily, particularly in the hemisphere, and then this absurd Chinese overture, Carney is creating a strategically unsustainable situation for the United States.

The U.S. kind of has no choice but to provide the security. I’ve always thought about this as a kind of curiosity because that is a, let’s say, an unfortunate incentive structure, if you will, okay. So, well, maybe if you understand, you seem to understand exactly what I’m thinking, maybe you can explain it better than I will.

It’s the ultimate free rider problem. Because we can’t say that this massive land mass bordering us, we don’t like Trudeau, we don’t like Carney. So we’ll just let them leave them to their own devices and let them become a Chinese vassal state. That’s not feasible. And for the same reason that whether we liked Justin Trudeau’s father in the Cold War or not, we had to play ball with him to a certain degree because the Soviets posed, just like China, an existential threat, and we couldn’t allow our northern neighbor to become a Soviet vassal.

So we have always had this geostrategic need to keep Canada integrated with us economically, militarily, and politically. The challenge that, as we see in so many parts of the world, the challenge we’re facing with our relationship with Canada is that Canada is increasingly going to be called on to do more in the Arctic and elsewhere, because that’s the direction of geopolitics.

But the United States is increasingly, from a voter perspective, a domestic political perspective, we’re just expecting more of our allies. So Canada is being asked to do more geopolitically. They’re expected to do more domestically in the United States. They’re showing no inclination to do it. And they’re bandwagoning essentially with the Chinese for various reasons. That is creating a, I would say, going back at least to the 19th century, the biggest potential rupture in U.S.-Canadian relations. All of these forces are coming together at a really ill-opportune time.

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