President-elect Donald Trump’s proposals to acquire Canada as the 51st state and regain control of the Panama Canal may sound facetious, but his offer to buy Greenland, an offer he first made during his first presidential term in 2019, has a serious history behind, a history of both geopolitics and geoeconomics.
Trump is not the first American President to think about buying Greenland. There are not many examples like the United States, which has added to its territory areas not only by military conquest (Texas, New Mexico, and California from Mexico) but also through outright purchase (Louisiana from France for US$15 million and Alaska from Russia for US$7.2 million in the 19th century; in 1917, the US acquired the Danish part of the Virgin Islands for US$25 million).
In 1867, when President Andrew Johnson bought Alaska, he also considered purchasing Greenland from Denmark, which had sovereignty over the island. And, at the end of World War II, the Truman administration was reported to have offered Denmark US$100 million for the island.
If Trump succeeds in his plan to buy Greenland, geographically the world’s largest island, then according to a New York Times report, the price could be worth between US$12.5 billion and US$77 billion.
After all, Greenland’s natural resources are increasingly becoming more and more valuable. The island contains vast deposits of minerals like rare earth metals, uranium, lithium, and cobalt. Rare earth metals, which are crucial for manufacturing everything from smartphones to electric vehicles, are supplied the most by China now, an over-reliance that America would like to overcome.
Furthermore, Greenland’s offshore areas are becoming increasingly accessible for oil and gas exploration, which, despite environmental concerns, presents a lucrative opportunity for energy-hungry nations.
That neither Greenland nor Denmark, which controls the island, is ready for sale is a different matter. Greenland is a country but not an independent state. Originally, Greenland was part of the Norwegian kingdom.
It became part of Denmark-Norway from 1380 onwards when Norway entered into a personal union with Denmark. When Norway achieved independence in 1814, Greenland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands remained under Danish control.
However, Greenland enjoys extensive autonomy and can decide on many policy areas without interference from Copenhagen (Greenland, for example, left the EU in 1985, while Denmark remains in the Union).
More than anything else, Greenland is becoming more and more vital for American security. All told, Greenland is part of the North American continent and is now an important component in the North American security framework.
It may be noted that when Germany occupied Denmark during World War II, the latter made Greenland a protectorate of the United States in 1941. This led to naval patrols by the US, establishing bases, and other military facilities such as the “Greenland Patrol,” an Arctic fleet.
After the Second World War ended, Denmark reassumed control of Greenland, but the U.S. was allowed to maintain its military presence there. Denmark joined NATO in 1949, and in 1951, the United States started building the Thule Air Base “in secrecy.” It was considered an important base for defending against possible Soviet attacks on North America during the Cold War and a potential refueling point for U.S. aircraft.
There is no longer any secrecy about the base, which remains an important strategic asset for the U.S. military and its allies. Thule base has been renamed “Pituffik,” and it is now a part of the US Space Force.
In fact, the strategic importance of Greenland for the U.S. was further cemented by the Biden Administration when it appointed Mike Sfraga as the first US Arctic Ambassador-at-large. Last summer, the Pentagon presented a new security strategy for the Arctic in response to the changing geopolitical situation after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
It is also noteworthy that following World War II, US forces had also established a secret polar base known as Camp Century. U.S. government officials described it as a “remote research community,” but in reality, it stationed nuclear weapons capable of reaching the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
As part of the covert “Project Iceworm,” the U.S. housed missiles under the ice to hide them from Moscow. However, engineers quickly realized that storing nuclear weapons under shifting ice sheets was risky. The project was terminated in 1966, and the base was buried under ice.
As Andreas Østhagen, a Fulbright fellow at the Arctic Initiative at Harvard University and the Polar Institute at the Wilson Center, explains, there are three ways that one can look at the increasing strategic significance of Greenland for the United States.
First, Greenland is important for the security of the American part of the Arctic, i.e., Alaska, the US’ largest state. The shared boundary with Russia across the Bering Strait and Sea entails proximity to Russian strategic forces in the Russian Far East. Thus, the more tense the relations between Russia and the US, the greater the need for the Air Force to be able to control and respond to Russian airborne activity across the Bering Strait.
Moreover, Russia is increasingly seeing the whole Arctic coastline – stretching from Norway in West Europe to the shores of the Aleutian Islands in the Far East – as a continuous strategic domain within reach of its ballistic missiles.
With the ever-increasing ice-melting north of the Bering Strait and expectations of increased civilian and military traffic in the area, Russia has also increased military exercises in the area.
Ice-melting in the Arctic has opened up opportunities for Russia that could significantly alter global trade dynamics. As the EurAsian Times had once explained, the Northern Sea Route (NSR) along Russia’s coast and through the Bering Strait could cut transit times between Asia and Europe by as much as 40%, bypassing traditional routes through the Panama and Suez Canals.
Russia defines the Northern Sea Route as a shipping lane from the Kara Sea to the Pacific Ocean, specifically running along the Russian Arctic coast from the Kara Strait between the Barents Sea and the Kara Sea, along Siberia, to the Bering Strait.
The NSR is expected to give Russia enormous strategic and commercial benefits. For instance, compared to the Suez Canal route, the estimated shipping through the NSR will reduce the distance between Shanghai and Rotterdam (Europe’s largest commercial port in the Netherlands) by almost 2,800 nautical miles or 22 percent. This route will also likely reduce the transportation cost by 30 to 40 percent.
Similarly, while a container ship from Tokyo to Hamburg (Germany’s major port city) sails for about 48 days via the Suez Canal, it can cover the same distance in about 35 days via the NSR.
No wonder why the NSR is now the lynchpin of Moscow’s new energy strategy. It has constructed ports, terminals, and icebreaker fleets to leverage the new shipping routes to export oil, LNG, and other resources from the Arctic regions to global markets. Accordingly, it has also expanded its military presence in the region, much to American discomforts.
The second way to look at Greenland is that it lies on what was one of the Cold War’s more critical strategic maritime transit routes: the so-called Greenland–Iceland–United Kingdom (GIUK) Gap. After a long period of post-Cold War neglect, the GIUK Gap has returned as one of NATO’s major strategic maritime concerns after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Østhagen argues that if direct conflict between a NATO country and Russia breaks out along the Baltic countries or Finland, that conflict is likely to rapidly spread to the European Arctic due to the presence of Russian nuclear submarines on the Kola peninsula.
“The job of deterring Russia in the North Atlantic and European Arctic became more pressing after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but this is a constant and continuous task that will require attention as long as Russia is a belligerent country vis-à-vis the West.”
The third way of looking at Greenland is the increasing challenges from China to the U.S. in the Arctic. Though not an Arctic state and thousands of miles away, in 2018, China termed itself a “near-Arctic state” in the first iteration of an Arctic policy paper.
China has been showing an Arctic interest, investing in various natural resource projects across Arctic states and engaging in developing the NSR as part of its Belt and Road Initiative (popularly termed “the Polar Silk Route”).
In fact, China has been systematically trying to increase its investments in Greenland. In 2016, a Chinese company emerged as one of the few buyers of an old naval station in Greenland.
In order to prevent the Chinese from buying it, then-Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen allegedly worked to reopen the former military station. In 2018, Lokke Rasmussen rushed to Greenland to offer investment to help upgrade airports after a state-owned Chinese company was preapproved for construction.
According to Peter Viggo Jakobsen, Associate Professor at the Institute for Strategy at the Royal Danish Defense College, China’s goal with these investments has been to gain a foothold in the Arctic, and Beijing sees Greenland as a potential gateway for influence in the region—especially if Greenland at some point achieves independence.
“They believe that because almost 20 percent of the world’s population live there, they should have access to the Arctic and 20 percent of the potential resources there,” he argues.
For Eyck Freymann, author of the book ‘One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World,’ the U.S. interest in Greenland is about keeping China from gaining influence. After all, when Trump proposed in 2019 to buy Greenland, his officials cited the China-factor for the decision.
Viewed thus, far from being idle musings, Trump’s views on Greenland reflect Washington’s determination, irrespective of the regimes there, to strengthen its Arctic foothold to counter the encroaching presence of Russia and China.
The scramble for the Arctic, as strategic analyst Thomas Fazi says, is one of the new “Great Games” of the 21st century and one that is already playing out.
- Author and veteran journalist Prakash Nanda is Chairman of the Editorial Board of the EurAsian Times and has been commenting on politics, foreign policy, and strategic affairs for nearly three decades. He is a former National Fellow of the Indian Council for Historical Research and a recipient of the Seoul Peace Prize Scholarship.
- CONTACT: prakash.nanda (at) hotmail.com
