Arctic Delusions

By treating Greenland as a piece of real estate, America risks turning the high north into its next geopolitical wound.

Greenland, the world’s largest island and one of its smallest political communities, has spent most of its modern history trying to escape being someone else’s chessboard. That is why Jens-Frederik Nielsen’s blunt declaration in Copenhagen - that if forced to choose between Washington and Copenhagen, Greenland would choose Denmark - matters far beyond the 57,000 souls who inhabit that vast, ice-locked land. It is a rebuke not just to US President Donald Trump’s latest imperial fantasy, but to a centuries-old habit among great powers of mistaking geography for entitlement.

Trump’s renewed threats to annex Greenland by “economic means” or more chillingly, by force are downright dangerous. They cut directly against the principles of self-determination, territorial integrity and the rule of law that America once claimed to embody. Greenland is a self-governing society with its own parliament, language and political memory. To speak of “taking control” of it is to revert to a 19th-century worldview that even the most cynical imperialists have mostly abandoned.

The irony is that Greenland’s strategic value is real, and has been for a century. During the Second World War, the United States, fearing Nazi encroachment, took on responsibility for the island’s defence and built airfields that became vital stepping stones between North America and Europe. In the Cold War, Thule Air Base (now Pituffik Space Base) formed a crucial part of America’s early-warning system against Soviet missiles arcing over the pole. Today, as melting ice opens new shipping lanes and exposes mineral riches, Greenland again sits at the hinge of global power politics.

Yet history also teaches a different lesson: Greenlanders have repeatedly been the losers when outsiders play geopolitics on their soil. Denmark ruled the island as a colony until 1953, often with a paternalism that left deep scars. Forced relocations to make way for American bases, cultural erosion and economic dependency bred a quiet, stubborn nationalism. The home-rule agreement of 1979 and the self-government act of 2009 were meant to put Greenland on a gradual path to full sovereignty, not to swap one patron for another.

That is why the island’s voters have consistently favoured caution over rupture. Independence is a cherished aspiration, but also a daunting one for a society reliant on Danish subsidies and vulnerable to the brutal economics of the Arctic. In last year’s elections, three-quarters backed parties advocating a slow, negotiated transition. Nielsen’s declaration that now is the time to “stand together” within the Danish realm is not a retreat from nationhood.

Trump’s bluster has driven Greenland and Denmark closer together and jolted Europe into rediscovering its Arctic flank. Berlin and London’s talk of a European military presence in Greenland may sound theatrical, but it reflects a hard truth. The North Atlantic and the Arctic are becoming arenas of rivalry between America, Russia and, increasingly, China. Moscow is reviving Soviet-era bases along its polar coast; Beijing styles itself a “near-Arctic state” and covets Greenland’s rare earths. Against that backdrop, Europe cannot afford a vacuum or a unilateral American land-grab.

The American administration’s defenders might argue that Washington merely wants to secure vital territory before its rivals do. But that logic collapses under scrutiny. The United States already has extensive defence rights in Greenland under existing treaties with Denmark. Its forces operate there freely. Worse, Trump’s threats hand propaganda victories to America’s adversaries. When China bullies Taiwan or the Philippines, it invokes international law. To then float the idea of seizing Greenland is to shred that moral authority and invite every strongman to do the same.

Greenland’s quiet, icy landscapes have long concealed their global importance.

But they are no blank slate on which a superpower can scribble its ambitions. Nielsen’s choice of Denmark over America is less an endorsement of the old colonial tie than a defence of the right of small peoples to decide their own fate. If Washington cannot respect that in the Arctic, it will find that the cold winds there blow back.