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Trump, as he has shown most recently in the Middle East, will in a sense do whatever he wants,” Dr Neil Melvin, international security director at the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi), told The i Paper. “It won’t necessarily be that these security discussions will have much impact on his ultimate approach to Greenland, because for him, he’s made a political commitment to bringing Greenland into some kind of closer relationship to the US as part of his political legacy – he’s been clear about this on many occasions.” Melvin added: “Trump is quite idiosyncratic. I think he’s going to return to his political agenda at some point and is likely to pose similar demands that we’ve seen in the past about increased US access, even infringing on current sovereignty arrangements around Greenland. “It’s going to be difficult for the Europeans to oppose that, even after some of the setbacks that the US is experiencing in the Middle East.”

A considerable number of ships may be needed to enforce the restrictions, according to Sidharth Kaushal, a naval power expert at the Royal United Services Institute, a defense and security think tank in London. "A lot depends on the early days of the blockade, how many vessels the Americans can seize, how much they can convince vessels attempting to slip through a cordon that they're likely to be seized," Kaushal said. "But in all likelihood, I'd say it will prove difficult for the U.S. to enforce."...Blockades historically haven't been enough on their own but have been used to exert pressure on other countries and their economies during conflicts, experts say. "There are always ways to economize, import, substitute, or just give up on certain things that you can no longer build for want of foreign inputs," Kaushal said. "It can make things a lot harder in a lot of ways, but it doesn't necessarily achieve decisive outcomes."

Matthew Savill, the director of military sciences at Rusi, said if China were to invade Taiwan, the Taiwanese would make use of massed cheap drones as part of what he described as a “porcupine defence”...“If they [Chinese forces] can get ashore in large numbers, that hugely swings their chances of mounting a successful invasion. An asymmetric approach could be to conduct a long guerrilla campaign once they were ashore, rather than try to hold off the initial invasion. But that would be betting on the ability to bleed occupying forces and to outlast a Chinese political commitment to retain control,” he said.