For an alternate viewpoint, see “Counterpoint: Why America Should Take the Lead in Greenland — Before Our Adversaries Do.”
There’s only one way to describe President Trump’s fixation with seizing Greenland: madness.
It’s a preoccupation that’s untethered from reality and lacks any rational justification. Indeed, none of the shifting rationales offered by the Trump administration makes any sense — particularly the supposed national security grounds for annexation.
It’s impossible to say what the United States might gain from such a move because the country would not gain anything from it. The U.S. military already possesses extensive access to Greenland, thanks to the 1951 agreement between Washington and Copenhagen. The U.S. Space Force maintains a base at Pituffik in the territory’s far north that helps monitor for ballistic missile attacks.
Moreover, America is already committed to defending Greenland against aggression via Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Per that provision — invoked only once in response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the United States — an armed attack on Greenland, an autonomous and self-governing territory under Danish sovereignty, would be considered an attack on the United States itself.
What’s more, the Danish government has already made it crystal clear its willingness to discuss even deeper security cooperation with the United States in Greenland.
Put bluntly, there is no national security reason for the United States to annex or otherwise assume direct control over Greenland. Even if they could somehow mount a military expedition to Greenland — and they can’t — China and Russia could not “take over” the island without triggering Article V of the NATO Treaty and provoking an American-led military response.
It makes absolutely no sense for the U.S. government to contemplate destroying the alliance that obliges the United States to come to Greenland’s defense and tearing up a decades-old security agreement that gives the U.S. military wide-ranging access to the island in order to acquire Greenland, supposedly for national security purposes.
The mooted economic rationale for acquiring Greenland makes just as little sense.
It’s true that Greenland possesses significant reserves of rare-earth elements and other critical minerals, but it’s nowhere near the motherlode the Trump administration claims. Indeed, the island’s rare-earth reserves rank just below those of the United States.
If American mining companies aren’t operating in Greenland, it’s because of a lack of interest, not a lack of access. It’s almost certainly cost-prohibitive to mine these minerals given the ice sheet that covers the island, the remoteness of the deposits, and the near-total absence of necessary mining infrastructure.
In short, it will take a long time and cost a lot of money to extract these minerals — and there are much easier prospects elsewhere.
Concern about possible Chinese attempts to corner the market for these resources does not justify an American attempt to seize Greenland. Such worries ought to motivate the United States to work more closely with Greenland’s democratic government, Denmark, NATO, and the European Union to bar Chinese investment in Greenland’s critical minerals and infrastructure, and, more important, to invest more themselves in Greenland. (Canada and the United Kingdom hold 23 mining licenses each, the most of any one country.)
Again, it makes no sense to destroy these relationships in the pursuit of presidential fantasies of territorial expansion.
So why does Trump appear dead-set on annexing Greenland, strategic and economic costs to the United States — to say nothing of America’s allies and the rest of the world — be damned?
Trump’s ego and personal vanity appear to be a major factor. The president told New York Times reporters that ownership of Greenland is what he feels “is psychologically needed for success.” Annexing Greenland, in other words, will make Trump feel like a big man — especially since he has been denied the Nobel Peace Prize he thinks is his due. He also seems to find Greenland a tempting target because it looks “massive” on Mercator map projections that exaggerate the size of landmasses near the poles.
More ominously, though, Trump’s drive to take Greenland any way he can is a logical outgrowth of his gangster-style approach to the world, and in particular his apparent desire to carve the globe up with his idol Vladimir Putin and Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.
Echoing Putin’s nauseating pre-war assertions that Ukraine should “bear with” the Kremlin’s brutal impending invasion, “whether you like it or don’t like it,” Trump has vowed to “do something on Greenland, whether they like it or not.”
Congress can stop this insanity before it proceeds any further, but only if it grows the backbone needed to act.