The US Already Has Too Much Influence Over Greenland
Even without owning it as a territory, the US already has massive influence over Greenland’s future, from blocking Chinese investment to controlling military installations. As climate change transforms the Arctic, this American influence will only grow stronger.
Sisimiut, west Greenland, July 2022. (Tom Aston)
Donald Trump added a strange sentence into his pre-Christmas announcement of Ken Howery as US ambassador to Denmark. Alongside other recent comments about taking over the Panama Canal and welcoming Canada as his country’s fifty-first state, the president-elect returned to a previous bugbear. “For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity,” Trump posted on Truth Social.
With this statement, Trump was both calling back to his 2019 offer to purchase the Danish territory in “essentially a large real estate deal” and mirroring the words of Senator Owen Brewster, who in November 1945 said that US ownership of Greenland was a “military necessity.” Trump’s declaration of imperial desires on social media indicates simultaneously how much and how little the world has changed in the last eighty years.
Greenland’s 56,000 people retain the ability to decide their own destiny, able to declare independence from Denmark under the self-government act signed in 2009. In Greenlandic prime minister Múte Egede’s New Year’s address, he suggested a referendum on the issue could take place this year. “We must work to remove the obstacles to cooperation — which we can describe as the shackles of colonialism — and move forward,” he said.
Jeppe Strandsbjerg, an associate professor at the University of Greenland and the Royal Danish Defence College, says that while this speech was “very much an election statement” for Egede’s Inuit Ataqatigiit party ahead of elections later this year, it also “reflects a deep frustration with how things are going in certain areas. There’s a perception that the Danish government is too slow in recognizing some of the bad deeds of the not-so-distant past.”
Recent revelations on the disgrace of Danish doctors fitting Inuit women with contraceptive coils without their consent during the 1960s and ’70s, a practice that may have continued under Greenlandic authority until as recently as 2018, offer a reminder that Denmark has not been a uniquely beneficent colonizer.
But there is no getting around the fact that the Danish government currently funds over half the Greenlandic government budget and in the event of full independence would be unlikely to continue doing so. If Greenland wants independence, it will have to find other sources of income that afford it a degree of autonomy.
Trump’s “deal” is not that. “Ownership and control,” which he has not ruled out achieving through military or economic means, is no basis for a strong Greenlandic voice in the affairs of Kalaallit Nunaat, as the Greenlandic Inuit call their homeland. But even if Greenland can carve out an existence between Denmark and the United States, it will still be beholden to American priorities.
Whose National Security?
The idea that US control of Greenland is vital for “world freedom” reflects both an American sense of self-importance and the strategic significance the United States has long attributed to Greenland’s position between New York and Moscow.
During World War II, the US constructed numerous airstrips along Greenland’s coast, having taken responsibility for the island’s defense from Nazi-occupied Denmark. After a failed bid in 1946 to buy the territory described contemporaneously by Time magazine as a “stationary aircraft carrier,” the United States maintained several of these bases during the Cold War.
The US still holds one such installation, the Pituffik Space Base in Greenland’s far north, over which the Danish and Greenlandic governments have no jurisdiction. In 1968, a B-52 bomber carrying nuclear weapons crash-landed near the base, resulting in radioactive contamination of nearby Inuit hunting grounds. While the Danish government protested at the time, having supposedly banned nuclear weapons from its territory in 1957, it was later revealed that the United States’ actions had received tacit approval from the host territory’s colonizer, though not the host territory itself.
Toward the end of the Cold War, many of the other bases became civilian airports, making them a US legacy with continued impacts to this day, as most were deliberately built away from existing settlements. For example, Kulusuk Airport in eastern Greenland, a former airfield in a tiny settlement almost entirely reliant on the airport, acts as the arrival point for Tasiilaq, a town eight times its size situated 24 kilometers away over the sea.
Extending runways and building new terminals in both the capital, Nuuk, and the principal tourist destination, Ilulissat, has been seen as imperative to enable easier access to key locations for commerce and luxury tourism. In its attempts to access new sources of investment, though, the Greenlandic government discovered the limits of what the United States will permit, as efforts to encourage Chinese investment in the airport projects in 2018 resulted in the US pressuring Denmark into providing the funds instead.
Chinese companies have also shown interest in Greenland’s plentiful supply of rare earth elements, with the Chengdu-based Shenghe Resources holding a 12.5 percent stake in the Australian company seeking to exploit the Kvanefjeld deposit of uranium and connected rare earths in Greenland’s south. However, this project has been blocked, along with any extraction of Greenland’s plentiful fossil fuel deposits, due to environmental concerns since the 2021 election of the democratic socialist Inuit Ataqatigiit party.
As a result of this and broader American encouragement of its allies to reduce Chinese involvement in critical infrastructure, China has taken more of a back seat in recent years. Chinese imports to Greenland, as recorded by the Observatory of Economic Complexity, plummeted from $19.8 million in 2018, the year of the airport dispute, to $663,000 in 2019.
Even without the United States purchasing the territory, Greenland’s North American neighbor has a significant say in what it can and cannot do. This influence will only increase as climate change makes Greenland more important.
“Freedom” to Be a US Proxy
Climate change is transforming the Arctic into an area of competition once again, at the expense of its existing residents. As the melting of Greenland’s ice cap accelerates, making more mineral deposits theoretically accessible, sea ice around the Arctic Ocean is present for fewer days each year. Summer shipping will likely be possible straight through the middle of the ocean by 2050, meaning Greenland, as an Arctic island, is ideally positioned to exploit our planet’s collapsing environmental status quo.
In 2024, Greenland’s government released its ten-year foreign policy strategy, titled “Nothing About Us, Without Us,” affirming its desire for greater involvement in Arctic relations. As things stand, that seems more achievable in a close relationship with the Danish state than with a US administration eager to exploit Greenland’s natural resources and look after its own interests internationally.
Yet the United States was offered the most prominent place in the strategy document, which contained little mention of the European Union, historically a larger trading partner. The European Commission opened an office in Nuuk in early 2024, eager to gain ground in relations with the Greenlandic government following the reopening of the US consulate there in 2020. Both actors need Greenland’s minerals, and Greenland needs their investment.
With larger powers keen to demonstrate their interest in Greenland, Denmark is scrambling to defend its kingdom. Trump’s reraising of his country’s relationship with Greenland came hours before the announcement of a $1.5 billion increase in Danish investment in Greenlandic defense, and weeks before Greenland and the Faroe Islands were integrated more prominently into the Danish king’s coat of arms.
But Denmark has been clear that Greenland has the right to decide, and independence remains the stated aim of the Greenlandic government. In the event of Greenland becoming the world’s newest country, the United States, with its long history of involvement, stands ready to benefit, demanding adherence to geopolitical priorities first and foremost. Trump gave an indication of these when citing monitoring Chinese and Russian marine activities in the Arctic Ocean — which he currently views as “all over the place” — as a reason for direct US control.
As Strandsbjerg of the University of Greenland says, “If you are very important for a major power that is your neighbor, it’s very difficult to imagine that you can ever act truly independently without some sort of ramifications.” The movement for independence will come up against the fact Greenland lacks military forces and relies on another nation for defense.
Furthermore, while independence remains a stated priority of the three largest parties in the Greenlandic parliament, the Inatsisartut, its success is likely dependent on an economic alternative to Danish subsidies. Caught between an existing colonizer and a series of would-be “partners,” Greenland may end up being too important to determine its own destiny.
The idea that Greenland could ever be “sold” is far-fetched. But with the United States anxious to maintain its control over the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans and gain ground in its rare-earth competition with China, Trump’s statements outline how difficult Greenland will find determining its own future to be.