It is an era of superpower conflict and competition for natural resources. Newly accessible sea routes are transforming the world’s political geography. The US government eyes a strategically located island territory, currently under the control of the Kingdom of Denmark, which Washington believes is necessary for its national security and economic interests. After first making an offer to buy the territory — one rejected by Copenhagen — the US suggests that it won’t rule out the use of military force to take it. The Danes, in response, grudgingly take the deal.
The year is 1915 and the territory in question is the Danish West Indies, known today as the US Virgin Islands. In the wake of the sinking of the passenger ship Lusitania by German submarines, President Woodrow Wilson’s administration wanted control of the Caribbean islands out of fear they could be annexed by Germany, and used as a base to attack shipping through the recently opened Panama Canal. That deal – which was finalized in 1917 for $25 million, or a bit less than $600 million in today’s money — was the last major territorial purchase by the United States.
Such territorial acquisitions were a relatively common practice in the age of overseas empires, but are nearly unheard of today. This musty topic, though, is unexpectedly back in the news, thanks to President-elect Donald Trump’s very public coveting of Greenland: another Danish-administered island.
How serious Trump is now is known to him alone, but he has not let the idea go as he prepares to return to the White House. In December, in a social media post announcing his pick of PayPal co-founder Ken Howery to serve as ambassador to Denmark, Trump posted, “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.”
Things got more serious on Tuesday at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago when Trump refused to rule out using “military or economic coercion” to take Greenland or the canal. (Canada, it seems, is off the hook for military force but not economic.) Also this past week, the president-elect’s son, Donald Trump Jr., visited Greenland for a brief and heavily-documented stopover.
Now that the president-elect of the United States has refused to rule out military force against a NATO ally in Denmark, European leaders clearly no longer find this funny. Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany posted on X, “Borders must not be moved by force” — the sort of admonition usually used against Russia and China.
Even if we take Trump entirely at his word that he is serious about this and will make it a priority, the acquisition of Greenland is extremely unlikely to happen. But perhaps inadvertently, Trump has highlighted some thorny issues about geopolitics in a rapidly transforming and geopolitically important Arctic, and the suddenly contested borders of what had seemed like a settled world map.
Greenland’s political status, explained
Greenland, an 836,000-square-mile island mostly covered by ice, has been under Danish rule since the 18th century, except for a period of German occupation during World War II followed by brief US protectorate. As Trump has pointed out, President Harry Truman made an offer (rebuffed by the Danes) to take permanent control of Greenland after the war.
But Greenland is also not simply property that Denmark could sell at will. In recent decades, Greenland’s population, which is nearly 90 percent Inuit, has been moving gradually toward full independence. Greenland attained home rule, including its own parliament, in 1979, and took on even greater political autonomy following a 2008 referendum.
Greenland now has its own prime minister, domestic laws, and court system. Its foreign and security policies are still dictated from Copenhagen, although Greenland is seeking more autonomy on those issues as well. In a New Year’s speech, made in the context of Trump’s remarks, Greenland Prime Minister Múte Egede suggested the time may have come to move more quickly toward independence.
The Greenland Self-Government Act, passed in 2009, stipulates that if the people of Greenland decide to move toward full independence, they will enter into negotiations with Denmark on making that happen. The push for independence has been coupled with a historical reckoning over colonial-era practices including the removal of Greenlandic children from their families to be raised by Danes. “Greenlanders are very tired of being, in a sense, treated like second-class citizens or like teenagers that are not really responsible for their actions,” said Ulrik Pram Gad, a senior researcher on Arctic issues at the Danish Institute of Security Studies.
On the other hand, there are also reasons why full independence hasn’t happened yet. For one thing, while Greenland would be one of the biggest countries in the world by land area (it’s larger than Mexico), it would be one of the world’s smallest by population with just 57,000 people (less than the capacity of an NFL football stadium). And that population is only shrinking.
Despite some painful history, many Greenlanders also have close family and cultural ties to Denmark. The island also receives about $500 million per year in social welfare payments from the Danish state, and Greenlanders have access to free medical care and free tuition at Danish universities. (All of which is to say, Puerto Rico-like status in Trump’s America might be a tough sell for a people used to the generous Nordic welfare state.)
Of course, Greenland independence could become a lot more viable if the territory, which is currently reliant mainly on fishing for income, developed more independent sources of wealth. Which is where Trump’s interest in the place comes in.
It’s not entirely clear when Trump decided that control of Greenland is an “absolute necessity,” for US national interests, but one theory, reported by the New York Times back in 2021, was that it came after a briefing at the White House by Greg Barnes, an Australian minerals prospector who has long touted Greenland’s mining potential. (Cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder, an old friend of Trump’s, also seems to have pushed the idea.) Greenland has substantial reserves of metals like lithium, niobium, and zirconium, which are used for producing batteries, as well as rare earth elements that are considered vital for the green energy transition, but which China currently enjoys a near monopoly over.
Greenland’s Arctic climate and geology make it a difficult place to extract these materials — there are currently only two active mines on the island — but as the ice sheet covering 80 percent of Greenland melts, the idea is that they will become more accessible. (There’s something a bit perverse about the notion of Greenland’s shrinking glaciers, which could raise global sea levels by 20 feet if they melted entirely, as a solution to climate change.) This has attracted interest and investments from a number of mining companies and governments, including China — likely another reason for Trump’s interest. These projects have also encountered local resistance: In 2021, Greenland’s parliament passed legislation banning uranium mining and halting a major rare earths mining project.
On the less climate-friendly side, the US Geological Survey has also estimated that Greenland may have as many as 31 billion barrels of oil, though no oil has actually been found despite nearly 50 years of exploration, and the government ended exploration in 2021, citing environmental concerns.
In an era of rising great power tension, governments around the world are also increasingly looking at the Arctic as an area of strategic importance and competition. Part of this is the region’s potential mineral reserves. Part of it is shipping routes that have become newly navigable thanks to melting Arctic Sea ice.
Russia, which generates much of its GDP from oil and gas extracted above the Arctic circle, has taken a particular interest in the region. Under President Vladimir Putin, the Russian government has reopened 50 previously shuttered Soviet-era military bases in the area. Perhaps not coincidentally, the Arctic has seen alleged “gray zone” attacks by Russia against telecommunications infrastructure and an increasing number of close encounters by military aircraft. Geopolitical tensions in the Arctic have only grown since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
China, which describes itself as a “near-Arctic state” even though it is nearly a thousand miles away from the Arctic Circle at its closest point, has been increasing its economic and military assets in the region as well. Critics say the US, an Arctic power thanks to Alaska — another old territorial purchase — has been slow to respond to these developments: case in point, the US currently has only has one operational icebreaker in its fleet and likely won’t have a new one until the 2030s.
The Arctic’s geopolitical importance is also a reason why Denmark (as well as the European Union) would be reluctant to part with Greenland. Thanks to Greenland, Denmark is not only 50 times bigger than it would be otherwise, it is also the only European Union country with an Arctic coastline. (Arctic Norway is not an EU member.) This gives it a seat on the Arctic Council and a say on issues involving an increasingly contested region of the world. “There has been a kind of Greenland card, which has made Denmark more important security-wise than a standard, small European country,” Gad said.
It should be noted that none of the reasons why Greenland is strategically important for the United States explain why it needs to be part of the United States. American companies, including a new mining venture backed by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, are already investing in Greenland’s minerals. The US also already has a military base in the country: Pituffik Space Base, formerly known as Thule Air Base, is both the northernmost US military base in the world and a key node in America’s missile early warning system.
The US benefits from Greenland being under the jurisdiction of a friendly NATO ally: In 2017, the Danish government blocked an effort by a Chinese mining company to acquire an abandoned military base in Greenland, in part out of a desire to maintain good relations with the US. These are the sort of relations that are potentially threatened by publicly musing about annexing territory by force.
Trump’s world of real estate
It’s worth briefly considering just why Trump’s Greenland idea seems so bizarre. The United States acquired more than half of its current land mass by paying for it through transactions like the Louisiana Purchase, the Alaska Purchase, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, under which Mexico ceded the territory for much of what became the American West. It was once relatively common for countries to trade, say, the north sea island of Heligoland for the African archipelago of Zanzibar, as Britain and Germany did in 1890.
Britain acquired Bombay (now Mumbai) from Portugal as part of a wedding dowry for the marriage of a Portuguese princess to King Charles II. (Barron Trump is probably safe from being married off to a Danish princess as part of a deal, but never say never.)
The main reason why the market for national sovereignty isn’t what it used to be is probably that while much of the world’s landmass was once covered by colonial empires, it is now mostly covered by sovereign nation-states, in which citizens have some expectation of sovereignty — which includes the right to not simply be sold off to the highest bidder.
Greenland’s political status makes it something of a holdover in this regard, but that doesn’t mean its people and leaders — who’ve been steadily moving toward greater political independence — will simply acquiesce to being treated as an imperialist bargaining chip. “We are a proud Indigenous people with a right to self-determination and not some sort of good that can be traded,” Aaja Chemnitz, a member of Greenland’s parliament, told NBC News.
(Though Trump has claimed that the “people of Greenland are ‘MAGA’” and will “benefit tremendously” from US acquisition, it’s not clear if he envisions them having any say in the matter.)
As for Trump’s refusal to rule out military force, wars of territorial conquest are thankfully also a lot more rare than they used to be and a lot less likely to be successful. That’s one reason why Russia’s invasion and annexation of parts of Ukraine has been such a shock to the international system.
At least since the days of Woodrow Wilson, US governments have — with some notable exceptions — had a bias toward preserving international borders rather than redrawing them. But Trump, who broke from most of the international community by recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights and Moroccan control of Western Sahara during his first term, clearly has a far more transactional view of borders and sovereignty than the last century of American presidents. Describing his Greenland plan, the former developer has compared it to a real estate deal: ““I look at a corner, I say, ‘I’ve got to get that store for the building that I’m building,’ etc. It’s not that different,” he told reporters interviewing him for a book at the end of his first term.
The risk of treating the world map like a game of Risk, even just in rhetoric, is not merely that it strains relations with US allies. It’s that it could validate territorial claims by US enemies.
It’s hardly surprising that Russian pundits and politicians have taken a keen interest in Trump’s Greenland plans. As The Economist’s Shashank Joshi writes, “If the next US government normalises the idea of absorbing territory by force … it makes it more likely that China will believe that the US will ultimately stand aside during an invasion of Taiwan.”
Back in 2014, when Russia first annexed Crimea, then Secretary of State John Kerry scoffed, “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th-century fashion by invading another country on a completely trumped-up pretext.” Now, it appears, it’s the US that wants to take the world back to the age of empires.
