Doubling Down

In the weeks leading up to his inauguration, however, Trump has doubled down on his desire for US control of Greenland. The United States needs Greenland “for national security purposes,” he stated in a press conference. Rather than viewing this as a simple real estate deal with Denmark, this time around, the president-elect declined to rule out using military or economic force to take control.

In terms of US national security, the Arctic is of considerable strategic military importance as a staging area for nuclear-armed submarines that can hide beneath the ice. Indeed, the United States has a long and somewhat bizarre history of storing nuclear missiles in Greenlandic ice, including one particular Cold War military project called Project Iceworm and its highly publicized “cover project,” Camp Century.

From Pituffik Space Base in northern Greenland, which the United States has commanded since the end of World War II, military personnel operate early warning systems. The base also facilitates space surveillance and the command of satellites. Of course, US missiles based here are in close proximity to Russia.

Yet in view of the fact that Washington already has this presence without needing direct ownership of Greenland, it seems curious that Trump would now, even against the backdrop of heightening tensions with Russia and China, want to go further still to control the whole country.

Critical Minerals

Most likely, this is because of the vast raw minerals that are believed to be hidden in the melting ice and Greenland’s occasional reluctance to issue mining licenses for those minerals. Over the past forty years, the Arctic has warmed four times faster than the rest of the globe. Greenland’s ice sheets are particularly affected, prompting scientists to raise the alarm on rising sea levels, extreme weather events, and increased greenhouse gas emissions.

Where some see the greening of Greenland as cause for concern, others see an opportunity. The melting ice is making accessible shipping routes, land, minerals, and metals that have been inaccessible for thousands of years, including minerals designated “critical” for the so-called green transition. The hottest natural resources in an age of climate catastrophe are those required for electric vehicles, wind turbines, and solar panels. This includes rare earth elements.

We should note here a rather bold statement by one Australian mining company, Energy Transition Minerals (ETM), suggesting that Greenland has the potential to become the most significant Western world producer of critical rare earths. At present, China is the leading exporter of rare earths.

According to the International Energy Agency, China is dominant in rare earth ore extraction (60 percent of the market) and refinement (90 percent of the market). It has been exploiting this market dominance, including through recent bans on the export of technologies to extract, separate, and refine rare earths. Breaking this near monopoly has been a key objective for Western green industrial plans, which have been focusing on securing global value chains in what Thea Riofrancos has called the “security-sustainability-nexus.”

ETM is currently embroiled in investment arbitration against Greenland to force either compensation amounting to an eye-watering US$11.5 billion or an extraction license. In 2021, a new Greenlandic government, led by the left-wing anti-mining party Inuit Ataqatigiit and favored by independence-seeking Indigenous Inuit, canceled the licenses previously handed out to ETM due to uranium pollution risks.

ETM’s arbitration claim is backed by capital from a London-based litigation financier. No doubt, such arbitration is the kind of legal-economic force that Trump was referring to. The potential of (coerced) rare earth exploitation is also most likely the reason why the responses by other hegemonic powers of the green transition have been so much more forceful this time around. Greenland holds promise as the next extractivist frontier.

An Arctic Treasure Hunt

In this interimperial dance around Greenland, Denmark plays the central role. “Greenland belongs to the Greenlanders,” stated Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen in response to Trump’s remarks. Yet this is not quite true.

Greenland is not in fact an independent nation-state but a so-called autonomous province of the Danish Realm. It has had some form of devolved power since the 1950s, but the relationship with Denmark remains strained. There is a history of settler colonialism by the Danish, involuntary birth control for Indigenous women and girls, and taking of Indigenous children to be educated as “role models” in Denmark. Danish rather than Greenlandic remains the language of political, administrative, and cultural elites.

A key area where Denmark retains colonial-style power over Greenland is in the field of foreign and security policy, which accounts for Trump wanting to purchase Greenland from Denmark. International lawyers call this retention of power the denial of the right to self-determination.

This is not the first time that the United States has tried to purchase Greenland from Denmark; the Danish state declined a previous offer in 1946. In a symbolic gesture, Donald Trump Jr posted a picture on X of himself standing in front of the statue of Hans Egede on his recent “day trip” to Nuuk, the capital of Greenland. Seeming to recognize a kindred soul of imperial violence, Trump Jr recorded a video beside the statue, referring to the Norwegian missionary and colonialist as the “founder” of Greenland.

This same statue was daubed with red paint and marked with the word “decolonize” in 2021 — the year in which celebrations to mark three hundred years since Egede’s arrival on Greenlandic shores were subsequently canceled. Under international law, it would not be legal for Denmark to “sell” Greenland. But as brutal acts of occupation and annexation in the contemporary world show us, from Gaza to Ukraine, the denial of the right to self-determination is a common practice by imperial states. Such denial regularly goes hand in hand with the racialization and dehumanization of the Indigenous population.

If Denmark is the principal imperial dancer, then the European Union (EU), Russia, China, and various billionaires are further soloists. In 2024, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen traveled to Nuuk to open an EU office, intended to mark “greater cooperation” between Greenland and the EU. The cooperation agreement promises investment in education and skills on the island in exchange for securing critical raw materials for the EU. This may explain why Germany and France were quick to issue warnings to Trump about the inviolability of borders.

To further illustrate the jostling over Greenland, a Danish intelligence report published in December 2024 stated that Russia is moving more aggressively in the Arctic. The report also suggested that Moscow is willing to grant China greater access to the region, albeit reluctantly. Indeed, the status of Sino-Russian cooperation over a Polar Silk Road initiative, intended to provide investments for transportation infrastructure in the Arctic, remains a concern for Western interests in the region.

And then there are the billionaires. In 2022, Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, and Bill Gates hit the headlines by investing in a “massive Arctic treasure hunt” in Greenland. These actors are all wrangling for control of resources, while the wishes of the Greenlanders are drowned out or canceled through legal means.

A New Sacrifice Zone

Meanwhile, the Greenlandic prime minister has again expressed the desire to pursue independence. There is enormous pressure on Greenlanders to achieve greater economic independence from Denmark. The Danish state continues to present itself as a benevolent benefactor to Greenland, evidenced through its subsidies.

Whether Greenlanders should exploit the mineral deposits is a major topic of political contention. Here, it is worth recalling that the “rare” in rare earths is a misnomer. Rare earths are not in fact unusually scarce.

What is rare is the willingness of peoples and communities to have rare earth deposits exploited, as this is almost always connected to uranium pollution and poisoning of human and nonhuman nature. In this sense, a drive for economic independence in an imperial and nationalist framework may well lead to Greenland becoming a new energy sacrifice zone emerging at the extractivist frontier of the green transition.