Toward a More Prudent US Greenland Policy

Proponents of annexing Greenland offer three main US interests in the Arctic, but none of them require annexing Greenland. First, due to global warming, the Arctic is growing into an important trade and military route, and Washington should not allow rival great powers to establish a security cordon around those routes. Second, in an era of consolidation of high-tech supply chains, the United States needs a steady supply of rare earth elements and, more generally, critical minerals, especially during times of crisis. Finally, the United States needs jobs and investment opportunities.

In terms of security, Greenland is important, though not critical, for preventing an adversary from dominating the Arctic. There is growing Chinese and Russian interest (albeit not translated into capability) in dominating Arctic trade routes and building a larger military presence there. To deter that, multiple options are available, including rapidly expanding the capability and operations of the existing US base at Pitufik, and moving American troops out of mainland Europe and basing what is necessary for the Arctic in our own hemisphere in Greenland.

But the US Navy currently has an unrivaled presence in the Arctic and the North Sea, and nothing suggests that dynamic will change anytime soon. Should it look likely to change, NATO is already uniquely positioned to defend the North Atlantic, practically an American lake, against any emergent great-power threat.

The idea that China can sustain an imperial presence in the Arctic defies military logic. Chinese sea lines of communication from its existing bases to the Arctic would be indefensible. During the last era of great-power war in the region, the United States quickly established a presence in Greenland to counter Nazi Germany. This went uncontested due to Greenland’s proximity to the US coastline and the multiple fronts on which Germany was fighting throughout the war. That dynamic hasn’t changed.

When it comes to rare earth elements and critical minerals in general, there is almost certainly less in Greenland than meets the eye. A few genuinely scarce elements, like terbium, yttrium, and others, have been lumped in with far more common ones like copper to make Greenland look like El Dorado. The rare earth deposits in Greenland are still largely unproven and inordinately expensive to extract from the ground, though with more time and technological advancement, they could be extracted.

As one analyst put it, there are “so many rare-earth projects that if you were to rank them in terms of doable down to not doable, Greenland’s project would be in the bottom quartile.” The chokepoint on rare earths is mostly in processing, not extraction. If the United States is worried about rare earths, it should devote its attention to building or acquiring processing capacity that insulates US consumers, including the US military, from the caprice of Chinese policymakers.

Investment and jobs are the only other serious considerations, but the market can do a better job of identifying investment prospects and industries than the government can. If the government incentivizes companies to invest in Greenland, that subsidy will spur more investment than the fundamentals alone would. Given the shortcomings of the argument about Greenland’s strategic importance, the government should, at most, encourage private firms to look at investing in Greenland rather than spending money the government doesn’t have to produce such investment itself.

The current US approach toward Greenland is implausible, unsustainable, and counterproductive for three reasons. The prospect of the United States using force to seize Greenland in an imperial fashion would lack both congressional authorization and immediate threat, would exceed the political and temporal capacity of any administration, and would face overwhelming domestic opposition and lawsuits. A territorial conflict with a treaty ally would be politically untenable.

In an interview with The New York Times last week, President Donald Trump explained his view that annexing Greenland is “what I feel is psychologically needed for success. I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do, whether you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document.” What those “things” and “elements” are, or what type of success the psychology of conquest confers, is left unspecified.

There is, however, a more constructive path that would move away from rhetoric regarding territorial acquisition, grounding future policy in patience, prudence, and respect for existing sovereignty arrangements, while participating in what America historically does best: dollar diplomacy. It would also make it more likely that the current administration’s approach would be regarded as farsighted from the lens of history.

The US government could form a bipartisan committee to explore interest among Americans in investing in Greenland, including stakeholders from the corporate sector willing to invest in fishing, hospitality, tourism, and mining. Such a committee should also consider the views of stakeholders on questions of security, critical minerals, and investment, and present its findings publicly. The committee could identify potential investments that would dwarf any competing investment from either the EU or China and, in turn, change Greenland’s economic and subsequent political climate without risking a single bullet or the life of an American or a Dane.

Annexing Greenland is a costly policy built on whim. There is little reason to think US security, now or in the future, turns on “owning” the island. Accordingly, the administration should slow down and anchor its policy in realism, rather than in amorphous desires for territorial expansion or a Rushmore syndrome.