The acting U.S. Ambassador to Denmark was recently summoned to the Danish Foreign Ministry’s woodshed over the kerfuffle over the Trump administration’s new directive to step up surveillance or information-gathering as intelligence agencies prefer to call it on Greenland.
Reactionary journalists and some politicians here are portraying the directive as a slap in their collective face, something akin to a declaration of a soft war.
It is, nonetheless, a sign that the administration is taking the whole Greenland saga seriously; that it is willing to find supporters within the island that would be friendly and helpful in the U.S.’s efforts to become partners with Greenland as the U.S. navigates the choppy waters of diplomacy.
There are several goals, it seems: one is to improve the U.S.’s understanding of how Greenlanders truly feel about the U.S.
The other is to build back a bridge of understanding with Denmark on the issue, and the third is to open a door to a dialogue, directly, with the Greenlandic people.
None of those three are at all nefarious. The truth is that all countries surveil each other, routinely. They do it from both inside and outside of each others’ borders, these days with sophisticated technology that make 20th century surveillance seem amateurish by comparison.
But now the U.S. and especially the Trump administration are being viewed as the principal villains in the “spy game” as if America and Americans have now magically been transformed into the new Stasi and are out to build a massive archive of data on every single Greenlander that charts their political leanings, their buying habits and everything in between with a view to buying them off with a big check for their allegiance to America and their rejection of Denmark.
That is what some here in this otherwise bucolic land prefer to believe, and there is nothing stopping them other than the reality of generations of prevailing practice.
Countries have been surveilling (or spying) on each other for hundreds of years and the practice has been accepted by every serious military strategist/analyst, political watcher and government leader who understands how critical, up-to-date, reliable information is to a country’s military readiness and interactions with its neighbors. The interactions can be on international policy issues, treaty negotiations, business dealings or how the political parties in a given country are developing. Years ago, the Economist magazine wrote that nations spying on one another has the oddly beneficial impact of lowering paranoia levels.
The world was teeming with spies during the Cold War and later. Information-gatherers were embedded in the fabric of target countries as NOCs (non-official cover) operatives that had respectable “day jobs” in their communities but were also tasked to expand networks of other assets that could burrow deeper into that fabric and thereby get more high-value information and be part of an “early warning system” which could be used to prevent conflicts.
It was and is customary for countries with bilateral political agreements and which have a shared belief in who their real enemies are to allow intelligence agents to operate in each others’ embassies. Some are declared personnel and some aren’t. The declared ones work closely with the host country’s intelligence services and routinely share information. Others don’t, but do send their reports directly back to headquarters, wherever headquarters may be, and then let others evaluate them for their validity and usefulness.
That brings up many questions to the current directive that was leaked to the Wall Street Journal and later became a news story. So what about Greenland? Should U.S. diplomats or ordinary Americans who might be on a contract with the U.S. government be prohibited to contact Greenlanders? Should the Danish government or the Greenlandic government prevent its own citizens from talking to Americans? And what about legitimate public polling organizations? Should they be prevented from conducting public polling in Greenland or in Denmark? Then there are the academics or business professionals. Should they refrain from asking any Greenlander a question about their feelings towards the U.S.? Would journalists be exempt, and if so, how confident would we be that their information was not biased or tainted?
Extend that to the rest of the world. How many authoritarian regimes would love to ban reporters or whistleblower organizations from their ranks? How many of those regimes would like to regulate every bit of news that made its way to the studio or the printing presses? I’ll bet there are many. Some of the countries that come to mind are China and Russia where news broadcasts are tightly regulated. Then there are the Middle Eastern countries like Iran and Yemen. Even in the Far East, sophisticated countries like Singapore had strict regulations on who might erect a satellite dish when I lived there and the government controlled access to the Internet and carefully screened and managed what they did allow.
The truth is that our world today feeds on information. Some of it is true and some of it is fake, but in order for us to retain the freedom to make conscious, fact-based decisions we must protect its prudent gathering. Otherwise, we might as well turn the clock back to the Cold War days and accept the fact that dictatorial regimes with absolute power will govern absolutely knowing that they and they alone have access to the right information.
The Greenland saga is all about where we who live in this modern age of communication, decide to draw the information line. In the case of the Danes and Greenland they should consider asking themselves: “Are they more afraid of what they will find out when the information-gathering is complete than fear the exercise itself?” That is the real question and not one of territorial overreach that some are claiming.
Stephen Helgesen is a retired career U.S. diplomat specializing in international trade who lived and worked in 30 countries for 25 years during the Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, Clinton, and G.W. Bush Administrations. He is the author of fourteen books, seven on American politics, and has written over 1,500 articles on politics, economics and social trends. He now lives in Denmark and is a frequent political commentator on Danish media. He can be reached at: stephenhelgesen@gmail.com.
Image: Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 2.0 Deed
This article was originally published at www.americanthinker.com
