Dr. Shale Horowitz: ‘Democracies Ignore Something for as Long as Possible’

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Dr. Shale Horowitz said in the race to the Arctic between superpowers, the United States, China, and Russia, the U.S. is playing “catch-up,” while China and Russia have had a presence in the Arctic in the past.

“Russia, for a long time, has made this a major priority, plowed a lot of resources into it,” Horowitz said. “China, I think, saw an opening more recently, like in the last 10 years. They started to pursue their own advantages there in cooperation with Russia. But they see opportunities there of a variety of types, both economic and military.”

Horowitz is a professor of Political Science and director of International Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Horowitz has research interests in international and ethnic conflicts, specifically East and South Asia. Additionally, he has an interest in Chinese foreign policy, Indo-Pacific security and political economy.

Horowitz has selected publications ranging from Chinese foreign policy and economy, ethno-territorial disputes and Israel.

While he said it’s usual for democracies to ignore something for as long as possible, President Trump saw a “prestige opportunity” to get on top of this strategic issue. Horowitz said Trump made a “big issue” after his outspoken interest in acquiring Greenland, but he thinks the issue would’ve garnered incremental attention from the U.S. due to both trade routes and military uses, something that rivals and adversaries could exploit.

The location of Greenland presents a challenge for the U.S. due to the proximity of the northeast part of the country, including major cities like New York City and Boston, and the capital, Washington, D.C. If an adversary like Russia and China were to have a base that close to the U.S., it could create an enhanced risk in a conflict. A comparison to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when Cuba housed Soviet missiles at the height of the Cold War.

“It’s more a question of they [U.S.] don’t want a creeping Chinese and/or Russian presence there in the way that has occurred in many of these Pacific islands, obviously in a stronger form in Cuba or Venezuela,” Horowitz said.

Greenland’s population is roughly 56,000, which wouldn’t take a lot to seize control of it, but it is harder to hold onto control of the territory, Horowitz said. Although he doesn’t think a global superpower believes they could “grab and permanently hold” the territory, he does believe a superpower thinks Greenland could be an asset in a larger fight, like in WWII and the Cold War, when in 1951 the Defense of Greenland Agreement was signed, allowing a U.S.-controlled military presence in Greenland.

“If you look on the map, this is huge,” Horowitz said. “It’s exaggerated because of the flat project of the globe, but it’s still a huge piece of real estate.”

In January, President Donald Trump announced a 10% import tax on eight European countries, and fellow members of NATO, due to their opposition of America taking control over Greenland, testing the strength of the alliance, according to the Associated Press.

Horowitz said the approach Trump took wouldn’t have been the approach of China and Russia.

“They [China and Russia] would have tried to spend a long time establishing more influence among people in Greenland,” Horowitz said.

“I think most people that accept the importance of Greenland for strategy would have just said, ‘you should have just take a hard line that there can’t be any Russian or Chinese presence allowed there, even if it’s supposedly non-military. Number one, we need commitments about that, and number two, we need some kind of a more robust presence there to defend it.”

Horowitz said that China is the primary threat to Greenland because “Russia alone is just not capable of fighting NATO and the United States.”

“It [Russia] has all those nuclear weapons, but those can be used in a full-scale nuclear war, which would destroy everyone,” Horowitz said. “You’re not going to get into such a war over Greenland, or even over Ukraine.”

Horowitz describes China as a “peer competitor,” meaning they have become stronger due to increases in military spending. China thinks in terms of an indirect approach in military strategy, intimidation, coercion, and convincing its enemy, or preventing them from fighting at war by creating a diversion, according to Horowitz.

However, he said that China’s economic side is tied with its military side, saying you “can’t disentangle those two things.”

“They use their economic power as part of their total state power,” Horowitz said. “Certainly they’re interested in the economic penetration, but when they invest in other places, like the whole Belt and Road Program, they’re trying to establish a political and, potentially in the future, and it’s starting to happen in some places, a military presence.”

During the height of WWII, the U.S. was granted permission to use Greenland in order to prevent and protect the Danish colony from Nazi invasion. In addition to air bases, ports were used in anti-submarine warfare to protect the convoys supplying England and later all allied armies, according to Horowitz.

“Military historians view that as the primary threat that England faced in losing the war, that it wasn’t actually an invasion,” Horowitz said. “It was being strangled by submarine warfare. Those air bases in particular, as technology improved, became the decisive factor in winning the war against the German submarines. During the Cold War, they practiced a similar thing for the Soviet Union.”

With a base in the territory for roughly 75 years, and Trump wanting more, it begs a question: Does the U.S. feel it has an entitlement to the territory?

“I think the entitlement factor is even more strongly that we’re defending Europe at a time when they’re far more capable of defending themselves than they were during the Cold War,” Horowitz said. “Russia now is a shadow of what it was in terms of its strength during the Soviet period.”

As the Europeans’ greatest ally, Horowitz believes the U.S. should provide them with forms of assistance, but they should also be doing more, including they “should not be denying us anything which is necessary for our own security.”

According to a March 2024 report from The Simons Foundation Canada, there are 69 Arctic military sites along the Arctic Ocean coastline, 32 of them Russian, compared to the 10 the U.S. has. Horowitz said those bases are one of the reasons the U.S. may potentially get involved in Greenland.

“I don’t think Russia alone turns into a threat, but Russia facilitating China or allowing China to use its bases in the event of a conflict, the joint threat, is what would be more dangerous, not Russia alone,” Horowitz said.

This story is part of a semester-long investigative reporting project into Greenland’s people, history, and culture. It was created by an advanced reporting class in the Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies program at UW-Milwaukee. Other stories from the project are available on Edge of the Arctic: Greenland, the Land of the People.

This work was made possible through the support of MPC Endowment Ltd., the philanthropic affiliate of the Milwaukee Press Club, and a private donor.