Vladimir Lenin famously wrote that imperialism is the “highest stage of capitalism,” by which he meant that a global economy based on the profit motive would inevitably end up with rich capitalist countries subjugating less developed territories and exploiting their resources. As Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House, he seems determined to put fresh life into this subversive description. In an online post last month, Trump said it was an “absolute necessity” for the United States to take ownership of Greenland, the vast and resource-rich island in the Arctic. A couple of weeks later, at a press conference, he refused to rule out using military force to seize Greenland in addition to taking control of the Panama Canal, a key trade route, which the late Jimmy Carter agreed to transfer to its home country in 1977.
As often with Trump, the question arises of how serious he really is. The Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren suggested that his comments were designed to shift the spotlight away from his controversial cabinet selections and their upcoming confirmation hearings. Other observers speculated Trump was directing attention to smaller and weaker countries because as President he will likely encounter difficulty in facing down stronger opponents, particularly China. But one thing is certain: when Trump posted online a map of the U.S. occupying the entirety of the North American continent north of the Rio Grande, he knew that many of his most ardent supporters would cheer.
Still, it may be a mistake to dismiss his statements entirely as bluster. The idea of expanding the United States to include Greenland and parts of Canada has long appealed to some American hyper-nationalists, such as Pat Buchanan. And Trump’s brand of America First isolationism has always sat awkwardly with his Napoleonic tendencies. Then, there are economic considerations. As climate change lengthens the shipping season, Greenland occupies an important strategic location. Moreover, the island and its offshore territories are believed to contain large untapped stores of fossil fuels and rare minerals that are so potentially valuable that they would attract the attention of any modern-day reincarnation of Theodore Roosevelt or Cecil Rhodes. The U.S. Geological Survey estimated that the offshore areas surrounding the island contain up to 17.5 billion barrels of oil and a hundred and forty-eight trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Among the minerals that Greenland possesses in significant quantities are many so-called rare-earth metals used in green-energy technologies, such as electric batteries, wind turbines, and high-power transmission lines.
This wasn’t the first time Trump has suggested that the U.S. should acquire Greenland. In August, 2019, during his first term, the Wall Street Journal reported that he had ordered his aides to look into the idea of buying the island from Denmark, which has colonized it since the eighteenth century. When the Danish government dismissed the idea as absurd, he cancelled a state visit to Copenhagen. In an interview for the 2022 book “The Divider,” by my colleague Susan B. Glasser and the New York Times reporter Peter Baker, Trump said, “I love maps. And I always said: ‘Look at the size of this. It’s massive. That should be part of the United States.’ ”
Even after the rebuff from Denmark, Trump took steps to build up the American presence in Greenland. In June, 2020, his Administration opened a consulate in Nuuk, the capital. That diplomatic move didn’t create many headlines, but Europeans took notice. As a self-ruling territory of Denmark, Greenland is classified as a European Union Overseas Country and Territory. Although it’s not technically part of the E.U., it does, however, receive some funding from the union, primarily for education and economic development. Policymakers in Brussels, the political headquarters of the E.U., are well aware of Greenland’s strategic importance.
In November, 2023, officials from the E.U. and Greenland announced a strategic partnership to develop a value chain for sustainable raw materials. In recent years, the E.U. has committed to shifting rapidly to a low-carbon economy, and a memorandum of understanding about the agreement acknowledged that the E.U. “needs to secure a sustainable supply of raw materials, especially critical raw materials, as an essential prerequisite for delivering on green and clean energy objectives.” The release also noted: “25 of the 34 critical raw materials identified by the Commission as strategically important for Europe’s industry and the green transition can be found in Greenland.” Then, in March of last year, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, visited Nuuk to open a new office and establish a permanent E.U. presence. Standing alongside Greenland’s Prime Minister and his Danish counterpart, von der Leyen hailed “the beginning of a new era of the EU-Greenland partnership.”
It’s hard to imagine Trump closely following E.U. diplomacy from Palm Beach. But the agreements between Brussels and Nuuk underscore the importance that Europe attaches to peacefully developing Greenland’s resources, and it helps explain why senior officials from France and Germany, the two most powerful countries in the union, reacted immediately to Trump’s statements. Olaf Scholz, the German Chancellor, said the inviolability of borders applied to every country, “no matter whether it’s a very small one or a very powerful one.”
To find out more about how Europeans were reacting to Trump’s provocations, I contacted Florian Vidal, a French political scientist at the Arctic University of Norway, who studies geopolitical and economic developments throughout the region. Speaking over Zoom, Vidal told me that in 2019 many people took Trump’s suggestion about buying Greenland as a joke. Not this time. “In the power game that is developing over Greenland, there is one big potential loser, and it’s the European Union,” Vidal said. “It needs the resources for its energy transition. It’s heavily reliant on Greenland. And it faces the potential danger of being squeezed out.”
Vidal also pointed out that, though many Europeans regard Trump as sui generis, U.S. governments have expressed strategic interest in Greenland for more than a century. During the Second World War, U.S. forces occupied the island to prevent Nazi Germany from seizing control of it. After the war ended, President Truman offered to buy the island for a hundred million dollars, but Denmark said no. The U.S. established a permanent military presence on the northwest coast of Greenland, Thule Air Base, which operated as a ballistic-missile early-warning station during the Cold War. (It’s now run by the U.S. Space Force, which Trump created in 2019, and was renamed Pituffik Space Base.)
As warming temperatures have been melting the Arctic, thus creating a shorter route from northern Europe to Asia than the Suez Canal route, China has also made economic overtures toward Greenland. In January, 2018, Beijing announced its goal to develop a “polar Silk Road” by building transport infrastructure in the Arctic. Later that same year, a Chinese-owned company emerged as a finalist in the bid to expand and refurbish three airports in Greenland. By that stage, an Australian mining firm in which a Chinese company held a significant stake announced plans to dig for rare earths at the southern tip of the island. Neither project went ahead. Citing environmental concerns, the Greenland government refused to give the Australian firm a mining license. And it chose Denmark rather than China as its partner in the airport projects.
Although these developments represented setbacks for Beijing, they didn’t really undermine China’s over-all economic prospects, or its ambitions in the Arctic region, Vidal noted. It still controls the vast majority of the world’s supplies of rare earths, and, as of late, it has started constructing docks at five Russian ports in the Arctic. From Beijing’s perspective, coöperating with Russia represents an alternative Arctic strategy to developing ties with Greenland. For Brussels and Washington, that option isn’t really available—unless, of course, Trump were to reach some sort of strategic accommodation with Vladimir Putin.
“Geographically speaking, Greenland is part of the North American landmass,” Vidal said. “I can understand the strategic logic of building up a U.S. presence there, but of course we are in the twenty-first century, no longer the nineteenth.” Vidal also suggested that Trump might be talking tough to bolster his position in subsequent negotiations. Last week, Denmark’s foreign minister said that his government was “open to dialogue” with the United States on how the two countries could coöperate in the Arctic region, including Greenland. “I presume the idea is not to start a war or to invade,” Vidal said. “But over time there could well be significant economic and military deals that would bring Greenland a lot closer to the United States. That is the most likely outcome, in my opinion.”
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Publish date : 2025-01-12 22:00:00
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