From NORAD to NORAD-Plus?
Greenland and the Strategic Question Canada Can No Longer Avoid
Donald Trump’s talk of annexing Greenland was never a serious policy proposal. It was provocation—crude, undisciplined, and revealing. Canada’s reflexive response was familiar: indignation, reassurance, and an insistence that nothing fundamental was at stake. That reaction was comforting but misplaced. The episode exposed a deeper problem that Ottawa has been reluctant to confront. The architecture of continental defence is changing, and Greenland has become central to that shift. The question is no longer whether Greenland matters, but whether North America’s core defence institution will adapt to that reality—or continue to lag behind it.
The World NORAD Was Built For
NORAD was designed for a stark and unforgiving strategic environment. The threat was kinetic, existential, and fast. Bombers and missiles would cross the Arctic. Warning time would be measured in minutes. Defence depended on centralized command, trusted information, and seamless cooperation between Canada and the United States. Geography did much of the work. Canada mattered because the threat passed overhead. Greenland mattered because it extended the warning line forward.
That world has not disappeared. Ballistic missiles remain. Cruise missiles are harder to detect. Hypersonic systems compress decision time even further. Space systems are now openly contested. These are classic air-and-space threats, and they continue to require the kind of integrated warning and command-and-control that sit at the heart of NORAD’s mandate.
What has changed is the strategic context in which those threats now sit.
Hybrid Conflict as a Parallel Arena
Hybrid threats and gray-zone conflict are often described as activity that undermines the foundations of kinetic defence. That is true, but incomplete. These forms of competition do not exist merely to prepare the ground for missiles and bombers. They constitute a parallel arena of conflict, one designed to achieve strategic effects without crossing the threshold of open war.
Cyber operations against civilian infrastructure, interference with satellites short of physical destruction, manipulation of information, economic coercion, and the exploitation of legal ambiguity are not preludes to conventional attack. They are alternatives to it. Their purpose is to shape outcomes while avoiding escalation, to impose costs without triggering a decisive response.
Defending against this form of competition follows a different logic. Success depends less on interception and retaliation than on attribution, resilience, and coordination across military and civilian systems. Any serious conception of continental defence must now account for both environments simultaneously, without collapsing them into one.
Greenland’s Expanding Strategic Role
Greenland’s growing importance reflects this dual reality. Its value is no longer confined to hosting a single radar site. It anchors space sensing, polar communications, North Atlantic–Arctic data flows, and undersea infrastructure that connects North America to Europe. These systems matter for detecting kinetic threats, but they are also prime targets in gray-zone competition.
Hybrid activity frequently targets connective infrastructure rather than frontline military assets. Greenland sits astride precisely those seams—between domains, jurisdictions, and thresholds of conflict. That is why it has become strategically indispensable, not as an object of conquest, but as a pillar of awareness and resilience.
Operationally, Greenland is already integrated into continental defence. Institutionally, it remains outside the command structure that coordinates that defence. That gap is becoming harder to justify.
Why Institutional Evolution Is Now Necessary
NORAD has been adapting incrementally. Space domain awareness has become inseparable from missile warning. Maritime and undersea awareness now matter because they protect the data flows on which warning depends. Civilian infrastructure has moved from background condition to strategic asset.
This is not mission creep driven by bureaucratic ambition. It is adaptation driven by operational necessity. The danger lies in allowing this evolution to continue informally, through bilateral arrangements and ad hoc fixes, rather than through deliberate institutional design.
Greenland’s status exposes that danger. Functional integration without institutional inclusion leaves decision-making fragmented and influence unevenly distributed.
Bringing Greenland Into NORAD—Voluntarily
The logical response is not annexation rhetoric or improvised workarounds. It is institutional evolution. Greenland should be brought into NORAD—voluntarily, and through Denmark—as part of a carefully bounded expansion of the command’s remit.
The goal would not be to turn NORAD into a catch-all security organization. Its core mission would remain continental defence. But that mission must now encompass protection against both traditional kinetic threats in air, space, and the maritime and undersea domains, and persistent hybrid threats in the gray zone that target the systems enabling that defence.
Such an expansion would enhance clarity rather than dilute it. It would anchor Greenland’s growing role within a trusted command structure, reduce the incentive for unilateral workarounds, and preserve Canada’s position as a central—not merely adjacent—partner in continental defence.
Canada’s Interest, Clearly Stated
For Canada, this is not a question of symbolism or sentiment. NORAD has long anchored the claim that Canada is a serious and equal partner in the defence of North America. That claim cannot rest on history alone. It holds only if Canada helps shape how continental defence adapts to new strategic realities. Greenland’s growing operational importance is one of those realities. If Canada treats it as peripheral or politically awkward rather than strategically central, its influence within the evolving defence architecture will erode accordingly.
Assertions of sovereignty are not enough. In contemporary defence institutions, influence follows contribution, design, and operational relevance. Countries that help define problems and build solutions shape outcomes. Those that cling to inherited structures without adapting to new conditions are gradually sidelined, often without drama or confrontation.
The Choice Ahead
Trump’s comments unsettled Canadians because they sounded blunt and transactional. The deeper risk is less theatrical and more enduring. Continental defence is being reshaped to address a strategic environment in which coercion often unfolds below the threshold of war, where kinetic threats coexist with gray-zone pressure, and where geography matters again in concrete operational terms. Institutions will evolve to meet those demands whether Canada leads, follows, or stands aside.
Bringing Greenland voluntarily into NORAD would recognize that reality and allow Canada to remain a co-architect of continental defence rather than a custodian of an outdated framework. The alternative is not stasis but gradual marginalization. In an era when power is increasingly exercised without firing a shot, the most consequential strategic failure is not escalation, but losing the ability to shape events at all.
Andrew Latham, Ph.D., a tenured professor at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He is also a Senior Washington Fellow with the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy in Ottawa and a non-resident fellow with Defense Priorities, a think tank in Washington, D.C.