President-elect Donald Trump revealed Tuesday that he would not rule out using military force to annex Greenland, leaving many Americans asking: “But why?”
In fact, the ice-covered Danish territory, the largest island in the world, has long been a hot topic among strategists in Washington and elsewhere — despite Copenhagen’s insistence it is not for sale — due to its location along vital shipping routes and the presence of key raw materials that are rarely found anywhere else.
“Why? A few critical reasons,” a source close to the Trump transition efforts told The Post on Tuesday when asked about the president-elect’s goal. “Sending a strong, deliberate message to Beijing. Not just talk. Action. Making America Ambitious Again.
“And the president-elect is laying out the early framework of the ‘Trump Doctrine.’”
The US is currently locked in a three-cornered fight with China as well as Russia over the Arctic region’s natural resources — such as lithium, cobalt and graphite, according to the Wilson Center, a foreign policy-focused think tank in Washington.
“There are two main reasons [to annex Greenland]. The first is the large deposits of rare earth elements needed for critical defense and electronics manufacturing,” Atlantic Council nonresident fellow Alex Plitsas told The Post.
“Second, Greenland has a legitimately large claim to the Arctic and that would provide the US with a stronger position as competition there heats up for navigation and resources.”
Arctic access and resources
The US has been in a quiet contest with China and Russia over access to the Arctic for years, deploying military ice-breaker ships to the region on missions to explore the resource-rich frozen tundra.
Washington has traditionally been over-reliant on China for rare earth minerals, which are most frequently found in the Arctic in addition to Asia — and used in everything from cell phones to weapons of mass destruction.
According to Plitsas, this dependency on Beijing is “not sustainable given geopolitical realities.”
“Other major deposits exist in places like Afghanistan, which is also infeasible for a number of reasons,” he noted.
“With the increasing demand for electric vehicles, renewable energy systems, and advanced electronics, the United States heavily relies on critical materials to drive innovation and maintain its global economic competitiveness,” the Wilson Center wrote in a 2023 report.
“[Rare earth minerals] go into most forms of national defense, technologies, missiles, tanks, satellites, warships, fighter jets, and so as a result, securing them becomes a national security imperative,” explained Center for Strategic and International Studies critical minerals security program director Gracelin Baskaran.
Meanwhile, synthetic real earth elements created in labs, in Plitsas’ words, “don’t perform as well, which leaves the US vulnerable on the defense manufacturing side as tensions with China have continued to rise in recent years.”
The competition over the Arctic has grown more fierce in recent years due to climate change, which has led to melting of the ice caps that previously made resources nearly impossible to reach.
“Warming has led to more freedom of navigation in the Arctic,” Plitsas said.
But the Americans so far have been outpaced by their adversaries, in part due to the US’ limited access to the region and relatively small number of ice-breaker ships.
The problem has long vexed some Republicans, including Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.), Trump’s designated national security adviser.
“In the Arctic where we will compete for natural resources, #Coast Guard needs more than one icebreaker! Russia has dozens!” he posted to X in 2017.
The Coast Guard currently has just two of the vital ships, but Waltz recently vowed to push for more in the 119th Congress in a reply to a post on X calling for “a dozen more” icebreakers.
“That’s the plan!” Waltz promised on Dec. 24.
Additional icebreakers and the acquisition of Greenland are particularly attractive prospects now that the United States is constructing more rare earth mineral processing plants — part of the recent American push to lessen its reliance on China.
But with the US home to just 1.3% of the world’s rare earth minerals — compared to China’s up to 70% — “now we need to source those rare earths from somewhere to process at home … which does give Greenland some appeal, because it could be a source of rare earth minerals,” Baskaran said.
‘Not for sale’
Trump’s ambition has not been well received in Denmark, where Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen reiterated Tuesday that the territory is “not for sale.”
“Greenland belongs to the Greenlanders,” Frederiksen said in an interview with Denmark’s TV 2. “On one hand, I am pleased regarding the rise in American interest in Greenland. But of course it is important that it takes place in a way where it is the Greenlanders’ decision, what their future holds.”
The island only gained full autonomy in 2009, and since then its territorial government has been working to achieve sovereignty, Greenland parliament member Kuno Fencker told CNN on Tuesday.
“In regards to ownership, we can disagree here quite a lot, because we are working on creating a sovereign country which is Greenland, and we want to create the state of Greenland,” Fencker said, adding that the territorial government may be willing to work with the US on a free association agreement.
The US already has such arrangements with Pacific island nations such as Palau. Those compacts require Washington to provide financial assistance to the freely associated countries, and also extends the right to work and live in the United States to island citizens as “habitual residents.”
“The main [point] here is that Greenland [status] should be [a] tremendous decision, what kind of state we would like to be and also who we should cooperate with and our nearest allies, which you know, we have been under the Danish,” Fencker said.
The transition source said Trump, 78, may be willing to discuss alternate arrangements with Greenland officials short of full annexation.
“There’s flexibility in discussing the best means to strengthening America’s security, so I think it’s fair to say there’s more than one option,” the person said.
Not a new idea
The United States has long been interested in obtaining Greenland, considering making a bid for the North Atlantic island in 1867, when it also purchased Alaska from Russia.
Roughly eight decades later, after World War II, the US bid $100 million in gold bullion for Greenland, which Denmark declined.
However, the offer led to a defense treaty that granted the US access to Thule Air Base, now Pituffik Space Base — the military’s northernmost outpost, which became critically important during the Cold War due to its proximity to Russia.
Trump floated the idea of buying Greenland in his first term, musing about the possibility publicly in 2019, only to be flatly refused by Greenland and Denmark leaders.
“They never got anywhere,” former national security adviser John Bolton told The Free Press of nascent negotiations in an interview published last week, “because Trump talked about everything publicly, and the whole thing blew up.”
