Greenland's Strategic Value in the New Arctic Cold War

It is the eye-popping headline that the world is about to get used to over the course of the next several years. The commander-in-chief in the United States of America, or in this case the President-Elect at the time of his statement, wants to do something that would upset the geopolitical order as it is currently understood. The commander-in-chief wants to make a purchase: the entire, 800,000-square-mile island and autonomous territory of Greenland.

This idea dates back to Donald Trump’s first term as United States President. The island’s inhabitants do not seem to be fans of the idea, nor does the nation of Denmark, which currently claims Greenland as part of its dominion—but according to the American executive, this massive island belongs under the protection of the United States. This analysis will not be dragged down into the partisan politics of Washington, and will not project how a diplomatic war, a trade war, or even a real military conflict over Greenland would unfold.

Instead, it asks a more important question: Why would anybody be this eager to control what amounts to a frozen wasteland?

A Geopolitical Frontier and a Sought-After Acquisition

From the rapidly swelling effects of global climate change, to an intensifying war for resources above the Arctic Circle, to the real geopolitical effects of a global alignment into a new era of great-power competition, the Greenland story is about a whole lot more than just the egos that dominate Washington or Copenhagen. The battle for Greenland is, in many ways, a window into the battle for Earth’s future. In all the world, there is perhaps no other place like it.

A barren, largely frozen island encircled by the Arctic Ocean along its northernmost shores, and the North Atlantic everywhere else, Greenland is one of the few lands left on Earth that still acts as a frontier to humanity. Mostly covered in what is, today, the only permanent ice sheet outside of Antarctica, Greenland sprawls over 836,000 square miles, or nearly 2.2 million square kilometers. It is not as huge as it looks on traditional maps, as those maps are stretched and skewed in a way that misrepresents reality at the world’s poles, but it is five times the size of California, nearly as large as western Europe or India, or almost exactly the same size as Saudi Arabia.

Think about how many people live in those places, or how many natural resources are abundant there, and Greenland’s sheer emptiness is put into perspective. Not only is it mostly frozen over, but it is home to a population of just about 56,000 people, with the vast majority of them clustered into a few towns and settlements toward the island’s more habitable southern tip. Since 1814, the island and its people have been spoken for by the nation of Denmark, although they have enjoyed ever-expanding benefits of self-rule since the late 1970s.

In the final days of 2024, it was likely a surprise to some that America’s President-Elect would raise the topic of the United States assuming control of the territory. As Donald Trump named his ambassador to Denmark via written statement, he explained that, for purposes of national security and freedom throughout the world, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity. He did not offer any clarification or further details regarding that statement at the time.

Predictably, the statement generated all the usual reactions in the United States: full-throated support from many of Trump’s more devoted allies, immediate protest and criticism from across the political aisle, and a general feeling of predictable repetition from much of the American public. Greenland, of course, took some issue with the idea of having itself acquired by another nation, with its elected Prime Minister, Mute Egede, offering that Greenland is theirs, is not for sale, and will never be for sale, emphasizing that they must not lose their long struggle for freedom.

Historical Ambitions and Cold War Strategic Positioning

Denmark was no less enthused about the prospect, although its defense minister claimed that a large increase in its defense spending for Greenland’s security, announced just after Trump’s statements, had been in the works for some time. But keen watchers of the foreign-affairs world, with a long memory to match, will recall that this is not a new ambition for America’s forty-fifth, and now, forty-seventh president. Back in 2019, Trump repeatedly referenced the prospect of an outright purchase of Greenland, explaining that strategically it is interesting, and claiming that Denmark was losing a tremendous amount of money on the territory.

Back then, the comments led to a rift between America and Denmark, historically very close NATO allies, with Trump cancelling a scheduled trip to the nation as a direct response to the Prime Minister’s unwillingness to discuss the Greenland issue. Trump reportedly inquired in 2020 about swapping Greenland for the United States territory of Puerto Rico, although that idea ultimately went nowhere. But looking further back into the historical record, the idea of a United States purchase of Greenland is not as new a concept as it might logically seem.

It first became an issue all the way back in the 1800s, and again during World War I, when the United States and Britain had a minor diplomatic dispute over who would get to launch a bid on the island if Denmark ever chose to sell it off. Britain, incidentally, considered buying it and giving it to Canada around that same time. In the 1940s, then-President Harry Truman inquired about a purchase, at a price point of one hundred million United States dollars—equivalent to a bit over 1.6 billion dollars in modern currency.

Although the United States has never managed to acquire the territory, it has established an outsize military presence there, both under the auspices of Cold War strategic competition and in the decades after. Greenland has played host to American military ambition in the form of Project Iceworm, an attempt to build a large network of nuclear missile launch sites under the ice sheet, and it is where the United States maintains the Pituffik Space Base, formerly Thule Air Base, 1,200 kilometers or 750 miles north of the Arctic Circle. There, the United States operates numerous missile warning, space surveillance, and satellite control elements, and maintains a network of smaller outposts, radar stations, and more.

In reality, America’s influence over Greenland is already so great that one Danish scholar dismissed his country’s own claim to Cold War dominion over the island as a fiction, although Greenlanders’ recent expansion of self-rule has changed that situation somewhat. Historically, the value of Greenland for the United States has been tied to both America’s national defense and its Cold War posture against the Soviet Union. Because it is so close to the United States, the idea that a foreign power would establish bases and offensive capabilities on Greenland has been a frightening specter, while inversely, it has been regarded as a place for the United States to fight defensive battles across an uninhabited perimeter without letting foreign attackers onto domestic soil.

The Expanding Battle for Arctic Resources and Global Leverage

During the Cold War, Greenland was about halfway between Washington and Moscow, sitting right in the corridor where intercontinental ballistic missiles would stream over the North Pole in a world-ending exchange. It was a bridge to potentially critical naval and submarine confrontations in the high Arctic, and a place that neither the United States nor Denmark felt Copenhagen could defend without some serious assistance. But in the twenty-first century, factoring in the motivations for proposing a territorial acquisition, the value of Greenland is rapidly evolving.

It is still a problem location for rather traditional questions of national defense, with American policymakers and strategists occasionally caught off-guard by foreign vessels patrolling unmonitored in Greenland’s waters, and with critical undersea cables running near the territory. But its true value to the United States is as the center of a whole new sphere of international competition between the United States, China, the European Union, Russia, and potentially even others. All those nations are laying plans to seize upon new Arctic land as it is revealed from under ice caps, build new trade routes crisscrossing the high north, and take the lion’s share of a part of the world that has been historically neglected.

To explain Greenland’s place in that new dynamic, Walter Berbrick, the founding director of the Arctic Studies Group at the Naval War College, spoke to Politico about the Greenland statements back in 2019. He noted that whoever holds Greenland will hold the Arctic, describing it as the most important strategic location in the Arctic and perhaps the world. The idea that a great global competition in the Arctic would be just on the verge of kicking off is not a new concept in the international-affairs world.

For the last couple of decades, as global environmental tracking indicates that the globe is heating up, the implications in the Arctic have been clear to see. But in recent years, the long-told prophecy of an Arctic flashpoint is finally being realized, with NATO expanding northward, China and Russia increasingly collaborating in the high north, and other world nations taking notice of what may be a new opportunity for them. At the core of this new competition is the matter of natural resources—and specifically, how an abundance of natural resources in the Arctic has the potential to change the global order.

Every nation on Earth will be richer in some resources and poorer in others; Saudi Arabia, for example, is very rich in oil, but not at all rich in water. Nations like Zambia and Chile have an abundance of copper, the Democratic Republic of the Congo mines most of the world’s cobalt, and Australia produces over half of the world’s lithium. Every nation that has a resource that they can make more money off of, by using or trading it, than they have to spend in order to harvest it, will use or export that resource.

Nations that need a resource they are not able to extract or do not want to pay to extract from their territory will buy from a nation that has surplus. The current balance of who has which resources, who can make up for their shortfalls by relying on their allies, and who has to buy from or sell to their adversaries, has all been stable over the last several decades. That state of affairs really has not involved the Arctic, where harsh weather conditions, remote locations, and most of all, ice on the seas and ice covering the land, have been too much of a challenge for world nations to overcome.

If a nation wants oil, it is much cheaper to buy from the global oil market than to set up a drilling operation in extremely adverse Arctic conditions. Now, however, that calculus is changing.

Unlocking the Trillion-Dollar Subglacial Vault

Sea ice is thinner and covers the Arctic for less of the year, making it far easier for icebreaker ships to get through. Glaciers and thick sheets of ice are melting, and before too long, they will leave behind exposed land that can be mined for whatever is underneath. With all that ice of the Arctic beginning to come unstuck, the world has been trying to figure out what lies underneath—and the numbers, as best understood, are staggering.

According to one report by the United States Geological Survey, taken back in 2008, the Arctic is estimated to hold up to 90 billion barrels of oil, far more than major oil-producing nations like the United States, and enough to make the Arctic, if it were a nation, the ninth-largest source of oil on Earth. That goes alongside 669 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, equivalent to the reserves of the global leader, Russia, and 44 billion barrels of natural gas liquids. Already, millions of barrels of fossil fuels are extracted from the Arctic each day, but that is just a fraction of what is there to exploit.

But these fossil fuels are not even the highest priority for the nations eyeing the Arctic. Instead, it is the minerals race that has taken center stage, especially as it relates to rare Earth metals that are absolutely critical for the world’s transition to electric vehicles, renewable energies, improved batteries, and more. Alongside rare Earth metals are everything from precious items like gold, platinum, and diamonds, to nickel, zinc, copper, and other substances that the global economy simply cannot go without.

The mineral and fossil-fuel valuation of untapped Arctic resources could very well run into the tens of trillions of United States dollars. With that information, it is clear that control over the Arctic and its resources could make a nation exceptionally wealthy. Any nation or company that can set up shop in the Arctic and turn a profit doing it will be tapping into resources on a scale they could never do elsewhere.

As a result, it is of paramount importance for anyone looking to extract those resources that they secure territory, access rights agreements, international cooperative treaties, and all the other geopolitical agreements that will dictate who gets what. But looking at where these global resources are currently distributed, the value of the Arctic gets even greater. It is no secret that the world appears to be headed into a new era of great power competition—perhaps a new cold war, perhaps something else, but probably a showdown that features the United States, Europe, and places like Japan, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and most of Latin America on one side, with China, Russia, Iran, much of Africa and Asia, and a smattering of additional nations on the other.

In that competition, control over resources is not just about making a profit. It is about the ability to amass power, the ability to gain and utilize leverage over adversaries and allies, and the ability to progress faster, using more and better resources, than the opposing side. China, for example, currently controls about seventy percent of the global market for rare Earth metals, giving Beijing the ability to trade, withhold, or throttle the entire market as they see fit.

The top two world reserves of natural gas are located in the mutually friendly nations of Russia and Iran, who together control at least nine times the natural gas of any other nation except Qatar. Indonesia produces just short of half the world’s nickel, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is thoroughly exploited by world nations vying for control of the cobalt that only it and Zambia produce, and China produces nearly five times more lead than the runner-up, Australia. All around the world, nations are constantly engaged in a careful dance to advance their own interests without accidentally forfeiting access to each other’s resources, and in a world separated into clear and adversarial factions, resource control is a vital strategic asset for those who have it and a critical vulnerability for those who do not.

Strategic Dominance and the Mechanics of Arctic Acquisition

Unleashing the resources of the Arctic means that the careful, ongoing chess match of global resources might as well be abandoned. If the United States can come into possession of major reserves of rare-Earth metals and start exploiting them, then it is no longer vulnerable to what China did in December 2024, banning the export of several rare-Earth metals to the United States and kicking off a major escalation of the nations’ battle for technological supremacy. The same, of course, is true in inverse.

And across all of the territory north of the Arctic Circle, there is no single stretch more important than Greenland. When the land there eventually emerges from under its ice sheet, it will be far easier to mine and otherwise exploit than undersea resource deposits will ever be. Operations there can make use of permanent, stationary settlements, rather than relying on oil rigs or ships passing through dangerous seas.

Positioning military resources there, especially with high numbers of personnel and equipment, allows a nation to very quickly assert direct control or threaten military action in other areas. Exerting control of its long coasts on either side means a NATO-friendly nation will gain de-facto control of the waters between Greenland and Canada to the west, or NATO member Iceland to the east. This says nothing of the value such a nation could gain from stable control of new maritime trade routes opening up as sea ice disappears.

In the event that a nation can establish a large base of operations across Greenland’s north coast, they will be able to maintain a critical bridgehead to expand operations into the northernmost Arctic seas. While each Arctic nation is entitled to resources within 370 kilometers of their shorelines, in keeping with broader United Nations conventions on maritime law, much of the Arctic’s resources are outside those bounds. That means that there is not a clear claimant on those resources in a place where international bodies to decide control of the Arctic are weak and lack the means to enforce competing claims.

It is here that the attempts to secure Greenland unilaterally for the United States come into focus. Right now, eight nations claim Arctic territory: Canada, the United States, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Russia, and, via Greenland, the nation of Denmark. Although those eight nations have a very clear understanding of who controls what land, it is their attempts to claim and set up operations on seabeds that will define Arctic competition moving forward.

The sole possible exception to that is Greenland, where despite Denmark’s territorial claim, everything from Greenland’s autonomy to its vast un-utilized expanses to the difficulty of patrolling it lead more powerful or more capable nations to believe it is available for influence. Right now, between proximity, alliances, and military presence, the United States is best positioned to make a play for control—and if it were successful in doing so, it would gain a massive head start in the Arctic competition to come. Moving from the reasons behind Greenland’s importance to the logistics, assuming that Greenland really is so vital, how can the United States, Denmark, or potentially even other nations figure out what to do about it?

Two fundamental realities will govern any attempt to address the situation. Firstly, the expansion of resource extraction in and around Greenland will be a process of decades, not years. These are lands that will take a very long time to emerge from under their ice sheet, and will emerge gradually.

Secondly, an outright purchase of Greenland is a very unlikely outcome. The trouble with the idea of straightforward acquisition is in how the territory of Greenland itself is valued. Looking at it as it is right now, there are lands hosting roughly fifty-six thousand people, a portion that is habitable in a bare-bones way, and a large expanse of open, inhospitable wastes.

While all things in life have a price, for Denmark, the United States, or anyone else, Greenland is what is called a speculative investment—an asset that may not hold massive value right now, but that is expected to increase substantially in value relatively soon.

Speculative Value and the Future of Sovereign Resource Agreements

For that reason, it is difficult to put a price tag on Greenland that would make it worth a transaction for both sides. If Denmark gave serious consideration to selling Greenland to the United States, what exactly would they expect the United States to buy? Washington would be purchasing the potential of this territory—of all the oil and natural gas reserves, the mineral deposits, the fishing waters, and the other natural assets that the world believes are under and around that ice sheet.

But the potential value of those resources is extremely high, meaning that Denmark, rationally speaking, would set a price to match. After all, if the United States says no, Denmark can simply go about harvesting the value of that land through any number of ways. But if Denmark sets a valuation high enough to match the speculative value that is Greenland, then the United States would have to absorb all those costs up-front, with no guarantee that they would actually be recouped once extraction begins.

The alternative is that the estimates are wrong and Greenland is simply a barren expanse—despite currently being understood as an asset that Denmark could fairly price at a trillion dollars if they so desired. This is the situation for Greenland and Denmark, but it is also the situation all across the Arctic, where the nations of the high north are now having to consider just what it means to invest resources into their land, exploit their coastal waters, or potentially try to lay claim to sections of the Arctic seabed. The speculative value of that land, whether above or below the water’s surface, is tremendous, but it is very hard to know what is under there without extensive exploration.

Such exploration is highly difficult under current conditions, where ice is still thick and the Arctic Ocean is difficult to permeate. The trouble is, these decisions are being made now, in a process that might favor the overzealous, or might punish them ruthlessly, based on what they manage to extract in the next several decades. In the case of Greenland, the investment of resources needed to take a concrete measurement of what is under that ice sheet and where would be astronomically high.

Every nation that holds territory in the Arctic, or makes a claim to the seabed, is only incentivized to let that land change hands if the payment they receive can rival the speculative potential they are sitting on—and transactions of that massive scale are practically unthinkable. So, if a straightforward purchase attempt is not likely to be successful, it begs the question: How, then, could the United States, or Russia, or even non-Arctic nations get in on the game in Greenland? The reality at the heart of all this trouble is that Denmark cannot exploit Greenland’s natural resources all by itself; it has neither the funds nor the infrastructure.

It is here that international actors might be driving at arrangements to ensure their direct and unmitigated access to places like Greenland, even if Greenland does not become theirs outright. Unlike the battle to pry open the icy Arctic, resource extraction agreements are something that the nations of the world are well-accustomed to. Major multinational corporations are welcomed into countries all the time when they find surprise reserves of things like oil or natural gas.

Nations sign development agreements with each other, with richer and better-equipped nations sending their wealth, expertise, and physical materials to nations that cannot afford to extract their own resources or do not have the technical capacity. Major powers like China even set up mechanisms like the Belt and Road Initiative, investing in major infrastructure projects across the world that are then used to funnel resources back to China. All the while, the nation that actually possesses these natural resources stands to gain massively from the transaction.

They collect capital, take a portion of what is extracted, and often secure bonus arrangements like defense pacts or direct protection.

Implications of an Open Arctic and Non-Arctic Entanglements

Applying those same arrangements to Greenland makes it very easy to imagine a world where a technically Danish Greenland generates immense capital by granting other nations access, while those other nations mine and extract as they please. It is a difficult thing for a nation like Denmark to consider giving away control of so many potentially lucrative assets while settling for just a portion of the profits. But offers to take direct control of Greenland can make it much more appealing for Denmark to consider a scenario where they receive a share of the profit, versus one where they lose Greenland outright.

Once geopolitical pressure is applied, Denmark may suddenly find itself inclined to entertain compromises regarding access. Denmark has yet to actively start putting those sorts of agreements in writing, and the mostly-autonomous Greenland even banned all future oil and gas exploration and uranium extraction as of 2021. However, the pressure to take part in agreements, and to renege on bans relating to extraction, is going to rise for Denmark and Greenland sooner or later.

In that view of things, the United States striking first is a maneuver to get ahead of what may be an inevitability. In a world where Greenland’s territory and natural resources pass into American operational control or heavy influence, an emerging era of great-power competition looks very different. Depending on what the United States and its allies find, they may be able to drastically reduce their reliance on current or future adversaries in some areas, while increasing their adversaries’ reliance on them in others.

And in such a world, a few potentially fascinating outcomes deserve consideration. Greenland has battled with an ambition to declare independence for some time. While Greenland is deeply reliant on Danish support now for its survival, that would not necessarily be the case if an independent Greenland could scrape profits off the top of large-scale resource extraction on its territory.

With that come major questions about the future of Greenland as both a place that could grow very wealthy very quickly, and a place that could easily become beholden to, and outright exploited by, foreign interests that control its destiny. In a world in which Denmark or a sovereign Greenland opens the door for resource extraction from abroad, Arctic competition could very quickly move beyond the dominion of the eight nations that claim territory north of the Arctic Circle. If the United States can maintain and expand a controlling influence over Greenland’s territory, there is little to stop American allies and partners from establishing their own operational footprints.

South Korea could fuel its rapidly expanding arms industry with Greenland’s critical metals reserves. Saudi Arabia could take its proven expertise in oil harvesting to a new location. The nations of Europe could eliminate energy reliance on Russia for good, while rising powers amenable to cooperation with the United States, like its major defense partner India or its major non-NATO ally Brazil, could massively boost their fortunes by leveraging what the Arctic can offer.

Such a move would naturally invite Arctic participation by non-Arctic nations like China, but nations likely to be allied with Russia by that time will have more than enough work ahead of them extracting resources from the entirety of Russia’s own frozen north. All the while, personnel and hardware will pour into Greenland, allowing the United States and its allies to grow their military footprint. The resource wealth of northern Scandinavia, northern Canada, and a fully exploitable Greenland could rival the incredible bounties of Arctic Russia, shifting the global balance of resources to become evenly matched—or possibly biased in favor of the United States and its allies.

The discourse around acquiring Greenland is not just a geopolitical whim. Whether a purchase of Greenland is likely or not, it drives at something far deeper than a simple land grab. On its current course, the twenty-first century looks as if it will be defined by two things: a great-power competition led by China on one side and the United States on the other, and a vast series of changes to the Earth’s climate.

The place where those two great forces most powerfully intersect is in the Arctic, and when it comes to the Arctic, the empty, frozen territory of Greenland serves as the master key to that future. Every major nation on Earth is already paying very close attention.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why does the United States want to acquire Greenland?

The US interest in Greenland combines longstanding national-security concerns with an emerging competition for Arctic resources. Greenland sits between the North Atlantic and the Arctic Ocean, provides a forward military perimeter, and hosts the Pituffik Space Base with missile warning, space surveillance, and satellite control systems. Beyond defense, the island sits atop massive untapped deposits of rare Earth metals, oil, and natural gas that Washington wants to keep out of Chinese or Russian hands as great-power competition intensifies.

What natural resources make Greenland strategically valuable?

According to US Geological Survey estimates, the Arctic holds up to 90 billion barrels of oil, 669 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, and 44 billion barrels of natural gas liquids. As glaciers retreat, Greenland’s exposed land is expected to yield rare Earth metals, gold, platinum, diamonds, nickel, zinc, and copper. These minerals are critical for electric vehicles, renewable energy, and advanced batteries, and controlling them would reduce Western dependence on China, which currently dominates roughly 70 percent of the global rare Earth metals market.

Why is an outright purchase of Greenland considered unlikely?

Greenland’s value is speculative — it rests on resources that have not yet been fully mapped and land that is still largely covered in ice. For Denmark to sell, it would need a price reflecting that enormous future potential, making the upfront cost to the United States potentially in the trillions of dollars with no guarantee that extraction costs would ever be recouped. Greenland itself banned future oil, gas, and uranium extraction as of 2021, adding another political obstacle. Most analysts expect resource extraction agreements, rather than an outright sale, to be the more likely outcome.

How has the United States already established influence in Greenland?

Since the Cold War, the US has maintained the Pituffik Space Base, formerly Thule Air Base, 1,200 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle, where it operates missile warning, space surveillance, and satellite control systems alongside a network of radar stations and outposts. One Danish scholar described his country’s Cold War claim to dominion over the island as a fiction, given how large the American military presence had grown. Greenland has progressively expanded its own self-rule since the late 1970s, but the US footprint there remains substantial.

What does Greenland’s position mean for the broader Arctic competition?

Whoever controls Greenland effectively controls access to the Arctic, according to experts like Walter Berbrick of the Naval War College. Greenland’s long coasts flank the waters between it and Canada to the west, and NATO member Iceland to the east. With eight nations — Canada, the United States, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Russia, and Denmark via Greenland — all claiming Arctic territory, and China and Russia increasingly collaborating in the high north, Greenland is the single most strategically positioned piece of land in an Arctic competition that analysts say has already begun in earnest.

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