What’s the deal with Greenland?
Six months ago nobody would have imagined Greenland making headlines. Almost the only things most people know about the place is that it’s not as big as it looks on maps, and it is covered in ice that’s melting due to global warming.
Then came US Vice-President Vance’s unwelcome and controversial visit to the island in late March. The ensuing furore fortuitously diverted media attention from ‘Signalgate’, the disastrous security blunder which made Trump’s senior appointees look like fools. Democrats furiously demanded the resignation of Mike Waltz, the National Security Advisor, who inadvertently included a journalist in top-secret discussions about bombing the Houthis in Yemen, and Pete Hegseth, the Defense Secretary, who blithely joined in the chat from his – possibly monitored – hotel room in Moscow. Russia, be it noted, is friends with Iran, who are friends with the Houthis. Republicans too must have been quietly alarmed at such blithering incompetence on the part of people put in charge of US national security. Trump’s self-estimation as a genius clearly depends on him surrounding himself with loud-mouthed buffoons. His protégés duly followed Trump protocol – lie, deny, and go on the offensive – but he probably realised that he ought to sack them and hand the Democrats a big win, because covering for them would undermine his own credibility. But as we later saw with his astounding tariffs and subsequent craven roll-back, he believes his credibility is indestructible.
A handy diversion
In the event, Vance’s impromptu and perhaps calculated excursion to the Pituffik airbase in Greenland provided a useful distraction from the Signalgate fiasco. Vance publicly hectored Denmark for its supposedly poor stewardship of the island, reinforcing Trump’s claim that a US takeover was not just desirable but inevitable. Not surprisingly the Danes were politely enraged, saying ‘this is not how you talk to your allies’ and calling the move Trump’s ‘Crimea script’. Even Pituffik’s own commander tried to distance herself from Vance’s remarks, promptly earning herself the sack. The Greenlanders were also not best pleased. In polls, 80 percent of them want independence from Denmark, but 85 percent of them do not want to be annexed by the USA. What they do want, one can only imagine, is some sort of unworldly solution in which they no longer have to scrape by on Danish subsidies yet somehow manage to prosper as a lone island state the size of western Europe, with no industry or infrastructure, or even roads, and a population only one third the size of the Isle of Wight’s.
There is zero chance of that happening, because Greenland is just too important to major powers. Trump has been wanting Greenland since his first Presidency in 2016, and the US, for various reasons, has been wanting it since 1867. That was the year the US bought Alaska off the Russians for $7m. The US Secretary of State William H Seward, who oversaw the Alaska purchase, was also keen on buying Greenland and Iceland at the same time, in order to wedge Canada in on three sides and force it eventually to become part of the US. Trump may well be aware of this Seward plan, which would add context to his comments about annexing Canada. In 1868 Seward began negotiations with Denmark to buy Greenland. But Congress failed to ratify his similar plan to purchase the Danish West Indies (now the US Virgin Islands), and the Greenland plan was dropped.
Following a wartime occupation from 1941 to 1945 to stop a German invasion of Greenland, in 1946 the US secretly offered to buy it. Denmark refused, but did allow the US to build air bases there, as both countries were in the process of founding NATO. US interest in Greenland was now mainly military, as the island sits in the middle of the shortest missile flight path to Russia. It’s also part of a crucial choke point in the North Atlantic called the GIUK Gap, between Greenland, Iceland and the UK. Were Russia inclined to attack the US east coast using its Northern Fleet, based at Murmansk on the Barents Sea, its forces would have to pass through the gap. At the same time, a good reason not to press the Danes too heavily on the issue would have been that Denmark sits across the mouth of the Baltic Sea, meaning it could potentially bottle up the Russian Baltic Fleet at Kaliningrad.
Cold war refreezes
US interest cooled somewhat after the Berlin Wall fell and relations with Russia temporarily became less frosty. But now Russia has remilitarised all its old Soviet naval bases in the Arctic, heavily outnumbering equivalent NATO bases, with increasing Russian submarine patrols around the GIUK Gap. The global internet has also intensified concerns over this gap, as critically important undersea data cables pass right through it, or just south of it, making them vulnerable to submarine sabotage. This could potentially blind the USA and cripple its ability to respond in the event of any future Russian incursion into, say, the Baltic States or Finland.
In addition, the US needs ground stations for its military satellites, including in the Arctic Circle. Two of these are in Alaska and Svalbard, but the main base is Pituffik, scene of Vance’s recent outburst against Denmark. And the US very likely wants many more such bases on the island. As things stand, Greenland is terra incognita, a ‘security black hole‘ that’s impossible for Denmark’s meagre forces – mostly one aeroplane and some dogsled teams – to effectively monitor.
Not just wargames
There are also pressing non-military considerations. As the Arctic melts and the sea lanes open up permanently, Greenland could come to dominate global shipping, due to the fact that the two trans-Arctic routes, the Canada-hugging Northwest Passage (NWP) and Russia-adjacent Northern Sea Route (NSR) have the potential to cut 4,000 km off the Panama route and make the Suez Canal largely redundant. Just as the US wants back control of the Panama Canal, it will also be keen to control this polar traffic. Annoyingly for the US, in 1985 Canada claimed sovereignty over the NWP, while the US insists it is an international waterway. That might be another reason why Trump wants to annex Canada.
Then there are the untapped resources. Greenland could be the key to breaking China’s near global monopoly on producing rare earth elements (REEs) and critical minerals, as the biggest deposits of these outside China are in, you guessed it, Greenland. It is thought to have the 6th largest deposit of uranium in the world, and to be very rich in lithium, REEs, graphite, iron, nickel and copper. There is also gold, along with diamonds, rubies, sapphires and a host of other quartzes and gemstones. It has 43 out of the 50 critical minerals needed for the US economy, in particular green tech and electric vehicles. Elon Musk and the other tech bros have declared an interest for this and other reasons, including the fact that the vast territory and freezing temperatures are ideal for server farms, of which an order of magnitude more may be required to enable the AI revolution. And then there are the estimated reserves of oil and gas, which put Greenland on a par with Nigeria and Kazakhstan, and superior to Qatar.
What’s in it for the Inuit?
Almost certainly nothing. The local population doesn’t have the people, money, skills or infrastructure to exploit any of this stuff themselves, so Greenland is a sitting duck for whichever major power acquires it, either through a business deal or by military action. What could very well happen if these resources are exploited in an unregulated way by a ruthless foreign power is that Greenlanders could suffer the notorious ‘resource curse’ of places like the Congo, with the country becoming a corrupt rentier state whose ruling elite siphon off the wealth and defend their position by becoming more repressive and authoritarian (youtu.be/x8j2uWw3WfU). Faced with this awful prospect, the idealistic islanders may realise that their best chance is to do some kind of mutual back-scratching deal with the US, while retaining a fig-leaf of independence.
Deals under the table
After the Vance visit, Russia’s Vladimir Putin told journalists that relations between the US and Greenland were nothing to do with Russia, and that he had no interest in the place. This blithe response strains credulity, given Russia and China’s keen interest in the NSR, and given that a US takeover of Greenland would be as much of a strategic threat to Russia as Ukraine being in NATO, if not more so. Missiles based in Greenland, especially hypersonics, could take out Moscow, St Petersburg and Murmansk before the Russians could even react. And that’s beside the fact that Russia is – since the Ukraine invasion – now hemmed in with the addition of two new NATO members, Finland and Sweden, as well as NATO Norway.
One possible explanation for Putin’s professed indifference is that Transactional Trump has offered a private deal in which Trump takes Greenland and Russia gets to keep its captured territory (and the largest European gas reserves outside Norway) in Ukraine.
Is a similar Trumpian quid-pro-quo over Taiwan possible, making for a three-way neo-colonial carve-up? On the face of it, no. Hegseth continues to sabre-rattle at China by reiterating US backing of Taiwan, and Vance is also waving his stick at China for wanting to expand operations in Greenland. But China has operations almost everywhere, and anyway rejects any comparison with Taiwan, arguing that Greenland is a sovereign foreign state whereas Taiwan is China’s intrinsic territory. Why would they do a deal over what they see as already theirs?
Even so, TSMC and other Taipei chipmakers are racing to set up shop in Texas, California and Arizona in an energetic US bid to make Taiwan less of an Achilles heel for western tech industries. Should this attempt succeed – and there are wage-rate, skill-set and supply-chain reasons why it might not – US support for Taiwan could evaporate.
Take the money and run?
It seems hard to believe that the US would actually invade Greenland by force. But given its tiny population of around 56,000, one intriguing possibility is that the US could wait until the expected declaration of independence from Denmark, and then offer to pay the entire Greenland population $1m each to buy the place. $56bn might sound like a lot but it’s approximately what the place is valued at in potential revenues, and it’s only 1/15th of the planned 2025 US military budget, or about 1/8th of the US annual debt-servicing bill. That way, Greenlanders could all be millionaires and retire to beach houses in Bali. But would they take the payout and emigrate, or opt to stay poor for the sake of patriotism? It’s hard to say. Nationalism is powerfully embedded in capitalism’s ideology, and objective logic often plays very little part.
PJS
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