Preparing for American Annexation of Canada's Arctic Islands

It is almost certain from U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on June 12, 2025, that the Pentagon has prepared plans for the invasion and conquest of Greenland. Seizing control of a sparsely populated Arctic land mass would involve reinforcing the single 821^st Security Forces Squadron at U.S. Spacebase at Pituffik, garrisoning the existing capital at Nuuk (pop. 21,000) on the central West coastal fjords with perhaps one acclimatized battalion of the 10^th Mountain Division, which is where 80 percent of the 57,000 Greenlanders live, and pre-infiltrating “little blue men,” or airmobile forces, to corral any armed constabulary, special forces patrols, and proposed “Greenland Guards” on the Eastern coast. The U.S. would also need to brush off any ships of the Royal Danish Naval flotilla, consisting of Thetis and Knud Rasmussen ships. A student of mine piloted the landing of a military transport at the old Thule airbase in winter, so there are no seasonal limits to U.S. deployment. While it is not true that Danish forces immediately capitulated to the 1940 German invasion of the Second World War, and so U.S. forces may be assured of some resisting exchange of fire, resistance would likely be ceremonial.

Most of Europe was alarmed by the 1867 U.S. purchase of Russian Alaska because it signalled that the Washington had territorial ambitions that would eventually reach beyond North America. Even Karl Marx remarked that it would eventually lead to the conquest of Canada. However the Russians sold it anticipating a British conquest, and the British saw American ownership as securing Canada’s Russian frontier. President Theodore Roosevelt sought similar aggrandizement in his 1898-1903 Alaskan panhandle negotiations with Canada. If “rounding out” is the underlying motive, then Canada faces a serious threat to the Queen Elizabeth Islands, which is the archipelago to the north of the Northwest Passage.

While of no strategic value at the moment, in part because global warming has clogged the three passages with ice floes, seizure of the islands would shrink Canada’s Arctic coast to the shores of the Yukon. Even in wartime, it is difficult to ascertain the strategic benefit to the Russians of a raid on Canada’s Arctic. The region’s principal strategic value is the Bering Strait, where the U.S. can easily block Russian oil and LNG tankers using land based anti-ship missiles, and for which the Canadian Navy would contribute little. China has no prospect of having a significant presence in the Arctic unless it somehow seizes the Russian Yakutia during another Russian territorial disintegration. In that case, it will have the resources to dredge the ports of Ambarchik and the Anzhu Islands and establish a major Arctic presence. If this does happen, Trump’s long-term geopolitical instincts will be proven correct. There are also the usual optimistic estimates of potential Arctic energy reserves, but extraction would be expensive.

Trump’s threats to invade Canada, should, however, be taken seriously given his success in compelling changes in the control of the Panama Canal. The risk of an enactment of a Greenland Invasion plan is that it would be almost effortless to append a seizure of The Queen Elizabeth Islands, in order to present the wold community a single fait accompli. These islands comprise 34 major and over 2,000 smaller islands, together 419,000 km², or a total area somewhere between Germany and France, of which only two have permanent inhabitants (Cornwall and Ellesmere Islands). Conquest of these territories will allow the U.S. to replace the North Warning System that is mostly located on Canada’s northern continental coast.

The problem for Ottawa is that Canada’s presence in the Queen Elizabeth Islands is largely rotational or through recent forced relocation. There are two permanent bases, Alert (maximum 110 personnel, mostly CSE staff, half military, half civilian, including U.S. personnel, est. 1950), used for signals intelligence, and Eureka (8 personnel, est. 1947), a weather station. The largest structure in The Queen Elizabeth Islands is the Polaris zinc mine on Little Cornwallis Island, closed since 2002.

The only two permanently inhabited towns are Resolute on Cornwall Island (pop.183, est. 1953) and Grise Fjord on Ellesmere (pop.144, est. 1953), both created through the controversial and forced High Arctic Relocation program intended to lay legal claims to the archipelago (for which the Canadian government only apologized, with reparations, in 2010). Both towns were populated mostly by eight Inuit families relocated more than 2,000 km northward from Quebec. When the promise that they could return home after two years was rescinded, they were then trapped as “human flagpoles” in territory they had not inhabited for nearly a half-millenia. By CE 1600 the last Thule ancestors of these Inuit had migrated south out of the Queen Elizabeth Islands, because the Little Ice Age (1275-1850) ended whale hunting. The British and Russian practice of inhabiting remote territories with prisoners in Australia and Siberia respectively, would likely have proved too costly. 

Resolute and Grise Fjord each have the presence of a platoon-sized 1^st Canadian Ranger Patrol Group, and an RCMP detachment, the former of which are primarily trained for reconnaissance and search and rescue. A U.S. conquest would consist of flying a squad and their supplies to each of these four locations by HC-130J, and switching flags, almost as easily as the 1846 U.S. conquest of California. The principal Canadian Forces Arctic base is the controversially still unfinished, and unoccupied, Nanisivik Naval Facility. It was planned in 2007 to refuel six of Canada’s controversially unarmed icebreakers and unsubmersible submarines. It was located for cost convenience on the wrong side of the Northwest Passage, facing Greenland rather than Russia and China, and to the south of the Northwest Passage, and will consequently have no interdictive effect on a U.S. occupation of the Arctic. Its stated purpose was to assert Canada’s sovereignty claim over the Northwest Passage, which is universally unrecognized as it stands in violation of the United Nations Law of the Sea.

The indigenous inhabitants will likely be offered U.S. citizenship rights and the First Nations status card for border crossing, and are very likely to be indifferent to conquest if well treated. 80% of the Queen Elizabeth Islands are 25% of the land area of Nunavut, a primarily First Nations governed territory, which Washington may be incentivized to recognize. The U.S. will additionally need to garrison both ends of the Northwest Passage, including abandoned Mould Bay on Prince Patrick Island facing Russia, which possesses a Canadian Forces airfield, or Melville Island, and Devon Island in the East.

Extending the argument further, an invasion might be expanded for economy of scale to include Canada’s sparsely inhabited Arctic islands to the West, including Banks (Sachs Harbor pop.104), Victoria (Cambridge Bay pop.1,760, and Ulukhaktok pop.408), King William (Gjoa Haven pop.1,349), and uninhabited Prince of Wales Island. Victoria Island alone is almost the surface area of the United Kingdom. Baffin (pop.13,000) and Somerset Islands are either too heavily populated or nearly contiguous with continental Canada to facilitate an easy consolidation. Located on Baffin Island is the Mary River and Milne Point iron mine, Canada’s second largest iron mine, and whose largest share-owner is UK-based Lakshmi Mittal.

As I have discussed elsewhere, Canada obtaining nuclear weapons, building up a conscript cum insurgent force, or relying on NATO European allies like France, are all destined to fail. Canada needs a two-fold strategy for protecting the Arctic that appeals both to hard deterrence standards used by Pentagon planners, as well inconveniencing the eccentric adventurism of certain U.S. Presidents. Ottawa needs to demonstrate that there is a lot of activity and attention in the Arctic, so that there is the impossibility of a swift fait accompli. Without regular patrols, Pakistan was only alerted by chance civilian reports of the Indian Army’s presence on the Siachen Glacier in 1987. Soviet patrols discovered and ejected Canadian adventurers who had claimed Wrangel Island for the British Empire in the U.S.S.R’s Arctic.

It is a long-term bargain for Ottawa to spend a billion dollars per annum, funding grants and co-sponsoring a proliferation of economical research and even less expensive adventure expeditions to establish a seasonal or permanent presence on every single major island in Canada’s Arctic. Initiatives should include cruise ships, paleontological and climatological excursions, Muskox safaris, big game hunting, Iditarod dog-sled and vehicle racing, hiking, with the goal of putting 20,000 sightseers and scientists a year into the Queen Elizabeth Islands. This web of frenzied tourism will raise the Canadian and American awareness of the Arctic as under continued use.

Second, Canada needs to establish road and rail infrastructure to facilitate travel and cement Canada’s Arctic to its main population centers in the south. Concern with the construction of the Russian Trans-Siberian Railway compelled Qing Dynasty China to open up Manchuria to immigration and for the Japanese to impose control on the Island of Hokkaido. Canada needs to build a rail line adjacent to Yukon’s Dempster Highway that ends on the Arctic Coast, and then to extend the highway itself Eastward to connect to Nanisivik. A second line should be pushed-up from Churchill through Rankin Inlet and linked up. This author is aware of the high cost, given that his Army Engineer Regiment (3FER) built a bridge at Rankin Inlet on Hudson Bay, and that his trips to Pakistan on the reverse side of the planet were less costly. This accelerated building project will give the army cheaper rotational access to the north, in addition to the deployment of actually armed ships, not Coast Guard icebreakers, and is a sine qua non of Canada’s continued territorial integrity. President Donald Trump is in office for at least three more years, and currently on a foreign policy winning streak. The imagination of a Fortress America that he has proposed may reverberate in the U.S. Congress for years if not decades.  

Dr. Julian Spencer-Churchill is associate professor of international relations at Concordia University, and author of Militarization and War (2007) and of Strategic Nuclear Sharing (2014). He has published extensively on Pakistan security issues and arms control and completed research contracts at the Office of Treaty Verification at the Office of the Secretary of the Navy, and the then Ballistic Missile Defense Office (BMDO). He has also conducted fieldwork in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Egypt, and Taiwan, and is a consultant. He is a former Operations Officer, 3 Field Engineer Regiment, from the latter end of the Cold War to shortly after 9/11. He is currently collaborating with the Combat Modelling group at the Trevor Dupuy Institute.