Asked if it could include NATO exercises in Greenland, Cooper said the effort is about countering the forces that have drawn Trump\u2019s attention in the first place. \u201cThis is about the whole of the high north. If you look at some of the key areas \u2014 for example, the Greenland-Iceland gap, the Iceland-U.K. gap, the shipping channels \u2026 are crucial for the transatlantic alliance, security and defense,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n
\u201cSo that\u2019s why this is about the Arctic as a whole. That includes [Norway] \u2026 but it also includes Iceland, Greenland, it includes the work that Canada has been talking about [in] the high north. So it\u2019s a broad approach to Arctic security.\u201d<\/p>\n
Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide said Thursday that he welcomed the \u201cArctic Sentry\u201d proposal and had discussed it with Cooper.<\/p>\n
\u201cActually, it’s an old Norwegian idea \u2014 not exactly that name, but to have a co-operation on [the] Arctic in NATO,\u201d Eide told POLITICO. That\u2019s linked to what he termed the \u201cA7\u201d \u2014 the seven NATO countries with Arctic territory.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have always thought that it’s useful to have a stronger focus on the Arctic, and what we call the \u2018A7\u2019 has been cooperating more and more on this,\u201d Eide added. \u201cWe’ve seen that countries that were less interested in the Arctic are now becoming more interested, which is a good thing. And NATO is there for military cooperation on whatever challenge we find.\u201d<\/p>\n
He cautioned, however, that Norway\u2019s focus was still more on Russia\u2019s live threat to the European high north than a future threat to Greenland. \u201cAccording to our own and allied intelligence, there is not so much activity around Greenland as sometimes is being described,\u201d he said. \u201cThere’s hardly any military activity from, for instance, Russia and China in Greenland. It\u2019s much more over here and in our north, and we follow that very closely.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Asked if it could include NATO exercises in Greenland, Cooper said the effort is about countering the forces…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":371824,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[41851,59,57,58,6232,151,50,4160,1351,56,54,55,20765],"class_list":{"0":"post-371823","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-kingdom","8":"tag-arctic-ocean","9":"tag-gb","10":"tag-great-britain","11":"tag-greatbritain","12":"tag-greenland","13":"tag-military","14":"tag-news","15":"tag-norway","16":"tag-security","17":"tag-uk","18":"tag-united-kingdom","19":"tag-unitedkingdom","20":"tag-yvette-cooper"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371823","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=371823"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371823\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/371824"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=371823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=371823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=371823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}