Donald Trump’s demand for Greenland is no 19th-century imperial throwback. Rather it signals a hypermodern reality: a world transforming thanks to climate change, with China, Russia and the United States jostling to take advantage.
Greenland’s ice sheets are losing 270 billion tons of water per year, while Arctic sea ice is vanishing so rapidly that the polar sea may be ice-free by some summer in the 2030s.
This unfreezing opens new possibilities for resource extraction, faster trade routes, space and military bases, new fishing zones and great power confrontation. Moscow and Beijing are moving to exert control over the Arctic region, which is warming faster than anywhere else on the planet.
Against this backdrop, Trump’s demands for Greenland begin to look, if not reasonable, then reasoned.
The incoming U.S. president flirted with the démarche during his first term but was flatly dismissed in Nuuk and Copenhagen.
On Tuesday, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen again rebuffed Trump’s request to buy the island, an autonomous territory Denmark has controlled since 1814 and home to America’s most northerly military base.
But Frederiksen added she was “really happy regarding the rise in American interest in Greenland.”
It was a comment that belied a nagging anxiety among the U.S. and its allies that they have failed to respond to Russian and Chinese efforts to seize the initiative in the high north.
“We’ve sort of been asleep at the switch,” said Michael O’Hanlon, director of research in the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.
A succession of Pentagon white papers over the last decade raised concerns about the growing intent of China and Russia in the region. Yet the U.S. has done little to back its interests in the high north. “All the hoopla about the importance of the Arctic is somewhat belied by a lack of the resources really being devoted to it,” O’Hanlon said.
Ice melting, ice busting
Russian President Vladimir Putin has long dreamed of turning the Northern Sea Route — which runs along Russia’s coast and in the past has been ice-bound — into a cold water Suez Canal. That would slash the time it would take to transport products from China to Europe and open Siberian ports and energy products to Asian markets.
!function(){“use strict”;window.addEventListener(“message”,(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data[“datawrapper-height”]){var e=document.querySelectorAll(“iframe”);for(var t in a.data[“datawrapper-height”])for(var r=0;r<e.length;r++)if(e[r].contentWindow===a.source){var i=a.data[“datawrapper-height”][t]+”px”;e[r].style.height=i}}}))}();
In April 2000, just 10 days after winning his first presidential election, Putin stood aboard the nuclear icebreaker Rossiya and delivered a message to the heads of shipping and energy companies: Russia’s economic future lay in control and development of the Arctic Ocean passages and the great Siberian oil and gas fields.
The location of his speech was key. While climate change is making the northern seas progressively more accessible, icebreaking ships are likely to remain necessary to keep trade routes open through the winter for years to come.
It is hardly insignificant, then, that a brand new Rossiya is under construction in a shipyard near Vladivostok. It is the first in a class of nuclear-powered icebreakers that, once built, will be the largest on Earth — able to smash through 4-meter-thick ice. (You can watch it being built live on a Rosatomflot webcam.) It’s only the largest of several new icebreakers under construction, with more in the pipeline to bolster Russia’s already significant fleet.
Contrast that with U.S. icebreaking capabilities, which consist of just two ships, one of which is almost 50 years old. A Mississippi shipyard got approval to begin building the first in a new, modern generation of vessels just before Christmas.
China is also looking north — and money is following its gaze.
In 2018, China announced the Polar Silk Road, its own plan to develop the Arctic and in particular open up trading and energy routes across Russia’s far north. During an October visit to China, Putin invited investment in the Northern Sea Route. Chinese energy companies have already taken major stakes in Siberian gas projects, while other Chinese companies have helped develop port infrastructure.
Chinese companies have also shown interest in mineral exploitation in Greenland, which is becoming easier as the ice sheets retreat. It’s a prospect that has caused American panic. But in reality, Chinese firms have made little headway.
Power politics at play
It’s this shifting landscape that Trump is using to justify America’s claim to the world’s largest island.
“I’m talking about protecting the free world,” Trump said in a news conference on Tuesday, which took place while his son, Donald Trump Jr., was on a surprise visit to Greenland. “You don’t even need binoculars. You look outside, you have China ships all over the place, you have Russia ships all over the place. We’re not letting that happen.”
He even refused to rule out using military force to take the island from his NATO ally. O’Hanlon dismissed Trump’s comments as trolling. “It sounds so fantastical that I can’t even take it that seriously.”
The Danes appear more inclined to take Trump at his word. Last month, King Frederik issued a decree that edited Denmark’s centuries-old coat of arms to more prominently feature the Greenlandic polar bear. Meanwhile, Greenland’s government has renewed its calls for independence.
At the least, Trump’s move was “very crude diplomacy,” said Arild Moe, an expert in Russia’s development of the Northern Sea Route from the Fridtjof Nansen Institute in Norway. “Just the idea that you can buy an autonomous territory is so outrageous. But I think you can leave that a little bit aside and then you can talk about U.S. interests because there is something behind this.”
The melting sea ice and the rise of China had inserted new tension into strategic decision-making in the region, he said.
Until now, O’Hanlon said, U.S. strategy for the Arctic had been less about “aggressively pursu[ing] American unilateral access” and more about preventing Russia or China from blocking “other people’s access to the Arctic, the same way the Chinese have threatened to do with the South China Sea.”
Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, told journalist Adam Rubenstein last week that he had urged the president during his first term to tone down his demands for sovereignty over Greenland, seeking instead to expand U.S. presence and influence on the island through backroom discussions with the Danes and the Greenland government. “It’s obviously a strategic interest,” he said.
That is a conversation Frederiksen appeared to be inviting in her comments to Danish media on Tuesday. Danish officials also question the necessity for the U.S. to own Greenland when its ally would be open to further American investment and military presence.
The Arctic is unfreezing and in motion. And it’s unlocking a new irony about climate change: While Europe and America’s greatest advocates for tackling global warming seem to have been caught napping by one of its fastest-moving manifestations, China and Russia — which both dragged their heels on cutting emissions — have moved to take advantage.
Compounding the irony, it’s Trump, a dogged climate skeptic, who seems to have found a climate change response he apparently won’t let go.
This article was amended to reflect John Bolton’s role in the first Trump administration.
