Why the Greenland debate concerns you as a CIO

Since his re-election, the newspapers have been full of US President Trump's comments on the annexation of Greenland. In his most recent interview on 7 January, he stated unequivocally: 'It could be a choice between NATO and Greenland' and 'Ownership of Greenland is very important'. With this, the American president is hinting at a direct conflict between NATO allies. After all, Greenland is a territory belonging to the Kingdom of Denmark, and Denmark, like the United States, is a NATO member. Everyone knows that the leader of NATO is the United States. And when the leader of an alliance attacks another ally militarily, and that option is openly on the table, we are in uncharted territory. But it can be said that this would effectively break up NATO.

Photo: Donald Trump (credit: White House)

That is also the analysis of Laurien Crump, researcher in Parliamentary History at Radboud University in the Netherlands and an expert on NATO. "Even if NATO were to remain formally intact for a while, in fact there would no longer be an alliance." She rightly draws a parallel with the Suez crisis of 1956, when the US called back both France and Great Britain from their interventions in Egypt. However, the situation is now much more problematic, as it is the leader of NATO, the US itself, that is threatening an ally with violence and indicating that it has no regard for international law.

Opinions are divided on the reasons why Trump is so keen to annex Greenland. Some attribute it to vanity and a place in the history books, while others point to its strategic location between Kola (the peninsula where a large Russian missile base is located) and the US. The abundance of rare earth metals, which are important for the technology sector, is also often cited. It is likely that all of these factors play a role in Trump's fixation on Greenland.

Greenland and IT

Rare earth metals are indeed of great value to a number of technology sectors, such as battery production, but also specific defence applications. However, there is another aspect that deserves attention in this discussion: the apparent willingness of the US to jeopardise alliances for the sake of national interests. And in that bigger picture, a frightening scenario looms, given Europe's enormous dependence on American technology. Once upon a time, the doomsday scenario of the US using this technology as a strategic weapon was a purely theoretical risk. But it is now becoming clear that this is an increasingly realistic scenario, one that every CIO would do well to include in their risk analyses. Because let's face it: the average IT stack of a company consists to a very large extent of American technology: from cloud providers such as Azure and AWS, via fibre optic connections from Verizon and switches from Arista, to servers from HP or Dell, which may be running Microsoft and VMware with a large number of American software providers. At the beginning of last year, this scenario suddenly flared up when access to Microsoft services for senior staff at the International Criminal Court was suddenly cut off after the Trump administration filed a complaint. Microsoft itself announced the following in a blog post on 30 April:

"In the unlikely event we are ever ordered by any government anywhere in the world to suspend or cease cloud operations in Europe, we are committing that Microsoft will promptly and vigorously contest such a measure using all legal avenues available, including by pursuing litigation in court."

With this statement, the tech giant indicates that this could indeed be a scenario. Whether such a statement would be of much use to an affected Europe is another matter: the fact is that if the service were to be interrupted for even an hour, the whole of society would experience a huge shock with all the consequences that would entail, such as tumbling stock market prices and a total loss of public confidence in technology. This scenario is not very likely, but given the enormous impact it would have on an organization, it should at least be included in the risk assessment.

Unfortunately, this is not the only scenario that current geopolitical relations should put on the CIO agenda. Industrial espionage is also a real risk. Microsoft itself has already admitted in the French Senate that, when push comes to shove, they are obliged to comply with requests from US authorities when it comes to accessing data from European customers. If the US executive leadership (because, mind you, this is not just about Trump, but also a large group of top officials he has gathered around him and placed in crucial positions) is already willing to trade decades-long strategic allies for personal/national gain, then spying on organizations that have a strategic position (think ASML, Airbus, SAP, Swift, but also new players such as MistralAI) is a piece of cake. And that scenario is already a lot more likely.

To counterbalance this, it would be good if all stakeholders, from politicians and IT integrators to opinion makers and IT managers, put this prominently on the agenda and consider what measures can be taken to minimize this scenario. One urgently needed action is for EU cloud providers to collaborate in creating one EU based solution and integrators to include EU based solutions to their portfolio.