With all eyes on Greenland as the Danish territory remains in the crosshairs of Donald Trump, a UK geopolitical analyst said he was deadly serious when he twice invoked the possibility of Bermuda appearing on the “shopping list” if the US president gets what he wants to our north.

Klaus Dodds, an interim faculty dean at Middlesex University, told The Royal Gazette that if one European power’s Atlantic territory ended up under some form of US control, others could follow.

Britain, Dr Dodds added, is the European country with “the highest number of overseas territories in the Americas” — including Bermuda.

He added: “I wasn’t being flippant — is it so preposterous to think that someone in that administration might say, Mr president, there’s an island called Bermuda located in the Atlantic off the US?

“The British are distracted; they don’t have enough resources. Wouldn’t it be safer if it came under our purview?”

He noted that the US had maintained a significant military presence in Bermuda until the closure of the US bases in 1995.

“That’s what I had in the back of my mind — how these past relationships, past examples of a US military footprint, can be turned against you.”

Dr Dodds said his media comments this month regarding Denmark, the US and Greenland, on BBC5 as well as a leading UK news magazine, were part of his attempt to “get into the Trump mindset”.

“It was to say, look, if we do not, as Europeans in particular, resist this quest to annex Greenland, then we at the very least, particularly the UK, ought to recognise ‘Denmark today, the UK tomorrow’.

“If the Danes feel betrayed, which they really do at the moment, is it beyond possibility that we might?”

Dr Dodds, a professor of geopolitics whose specialities include territorial sovereignty, has advised Nato as well as UK parliamentary committees and the British Government.

His interest in Arctic governance, which resulted last year in Unfrozen: The Fight for the Future of the Arctic, co-authored with Mia Bennett, has made him a sought-after authority on the Trump administration’s insistent designs on Greenland.

Dr Dodds included “how geography shapes power” in his list of interests online.

In a January 11 article for The Spectator news weekly in Britain, Dr Dodds wrote that Trump was “playing geopolitical Monopoly with Greenland”, which holds substantial mineral as well as strategic value in the president’s eyes.

Noting Trump’s shifting ambitions for Canada and the Panama Canal along with Venezuela, Dr Dodds cited the president’s last year of persistent focus on acquiring Greenland.

He identified presidential “ego-politics” as a plausible top reason, along with a US quest for hemispheric power and sending a message to rival powers.

Trump’s next move, he wrote, would likely be the offer of a free association agreement to the people of Greenland — but that “things could get uglier”, in the event a deal were rejected.

The article closes by noting that both Britain and France hold territories in the western hemisphere, adding: “From Bermuda in the north to the Falkland Islands in the south. Could they be next on Trump’s list?”

Dr Dodds told the Gazette it underscored the importance of taking the threat to Greenland seriously.

“Imagine if the president got his way in Greenland,” he said. “Why would he stop at Greenland? Why would he not then start to develop a shopping list — Greenland and then Iceland?”

He said an offer to Bermuda for a closer US relationship was not outside the realm of possibility, if Trump were to become “worried about Russian and Chinese activity around America”.

Dr Dodds said The Falklands, where Britain went to war in 1982 against Argentina, might face a “shopping list” scenario — for example, if the Panama Canal “became unusable”.

The islands, he noted, represent “a strategic gateway around the bottom of South America”.

Ultimately, Dr Dodds said his takeaway point was that Trump’s Greenland talk should not be taken for bluster.

“Trump is like Putin, in the sense that I always take very seriously what both of them say, because they do have a habit of following through — even if they way they express themselves can at times look and feel a bit discombobulated.”

He added: “It’s very, very clear that western hemispheric dominance is the top priority for this administration.

“America has always had this sense of places like the Caribbean being part of its backyard, but I don’t think I have ever seen it said so bluntly.”

Dr Dodds said he had never visited Bermuda, but that his father had called on the island “a number of times” through his service in the Royal Navy.

“My mother and father loved Bermuda. I’ve always genuinely had a huge interest in the island.”