Remote and long-isolated Greenland has taken center stage in global diplomacy with America’s renewed ambition for an Arctic territorial expansion assertively reiterated since the re-election of Donald J. Trump as President in January 2025.
After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, American Arctic policy focused on strengthening existing alliances and expanding NATO to include fellow Arctic Council members Finland and Sweden, while uniting against Russian aggression and military expansion, with concurrent efforts to collaboratively address and resolve the Arctic region’s environmental, economic, and climate-change related challenges amidst an East/West truncation and bifurcation of Arctic cooperation.
Since Trump’s re-election, NATO unity has faced new setbacks as America quickly pivoted to an emergent strategic partnership with Russia with a concurrent de-emphasis of European security amidst America’s revised conceptualization and prioritization of its national interests, as hemispheric security interests and natural resource access become its new focus.
While a positive turn for US-Russia Arctic cooperation, on ice since the US-led “pause” of the Arctic Council under Russia’s chair since its invasion of Ukraine, this has put new, external pressures on Greenland’s amicable evolution toward greater autonomy (and eventual independence) from Denmark through bilateral negotiations, providing Greenland with both an existential risk to its own sovereign aspirations, and paradoxically, a potential but risky new avenue for achieving its aspiration for greater autonomy.
Lessons of Alaska and Canada
What lessons can be applied from the historic re-empowerment of Arctic Indigenous Peoples under way across mainland Arctic North America since the land claims movement achieved the very first comprehensive settlement, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA), in 1971 and subsequently transformed the political geography of Arctic North America as Canada further developed the land claims model to better balance the interests of tribal peoples and the state?
There is a deep and persistent anti-nuclear sentiment across the Arctic.
How might these relatively new (just over half a century) and innovative (and largely subnational) structures for collaborative resource management and self-governance, developed in Alaska and the Canadian Arctic at the local, regional, and territorial level, inform the current conversation on Greenland’s constitutional future?
Can these collaborative systems, designed for local and regional decision-making, provide a pathway for Greenland to navigate toward greater autonomy amidst this new and tumultuous diplomatic upheaval precipitated by America’s reinvigorated and unsolicited overture to Greenland for a constitutional union and sovereign integration with the United States?
158 Years Later: America Ponders a New Arctic Expansion
Trump’s Greenland Gambit Reignites Historic Comparisons
Nearly six years ago, to the surprise of many, the Wall Street Journal published an article about President Trump’s initial interest in purchasing Greenland from Denmark, generating dramatic worldwide headlines comparable in their howling criticism to those that greeted Secretary of State William H. Seward when word leaked out of his 1867 secret treaty with Russia to purchase its ailing Alaskan colony, a move widely ridiculed as “Seward’s folly,” but which proved to be enormously prescient.
News of Trump’s “Sewardian” interest in Greenland generated an immediate critical reaction in both Greenland, where a movement for increased autonomy and a gradual, incremental evolution toward sovereign independence has had majority support for many years, and in Denmark, leading to a brief display of diplomatic sparks between Denmark and its American ally. As Greenland’s foreign minister at the time, Ane Lone Bagger then put it, “We are open for business, not for sale.”
Greenland’s leadership, while strongly opposed to the idea floated by Trump, nonetheless embraced the immediate (and sustained) rise in attention his proposal elicited, and in the months that followed, enjoyed multiple benefits associated with America’s rekindled interest in the world’s largest island, including fast-tracking the re-opening of a U.S. consulate in Nuuk for the first time since 1953.
From Political Wilderness to Renewed Geostrategic Vision
With President Biden’s electoral victory in 2020 exiling Trump to the political wilderness where he faced numerous legal challenges including criminal indictments for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, it came as a surprise to some that he rebuilt a broader and more diverse coalition to return to power in 2024, with solid electoral and popular victories.
In no time at all, President Trump has re-articulated his vision for an American expansion to Greenland, but this time his interest has been better integrated into a grand strategic vision for enhanced hemispheric security combined with a de-emphasis on trans-Atlantic security, NATO leadership or the containment of Russia that had dominated Biden foreign and defense policy in the preceding years.
At 2.13 million square kilometres, Greenland is equal in size to the combined areas of the world’s next three largest islands: New Guinea (785,753 square km), Borneo (748,168 square km) and Madagascar (587,041 square km), occupying a strategic location along the northeast flank of North America comparable to Alaska’s position in the far northwest with comparable geostrategic importance for hemispheric security, one recognized during World War II, again in the Cold War, and now once again as the polar thaw invites increased global interest in the Arctic.
While Greenland has long been a colony of Denmark, its formal governing status has evolved in recent years from outright colonial governance toward more collaborative Home-Rule governance in 1979 to, in the wake of its 2008 referendum on autonomy and independence that garnered overwhelming (75.54%) support of Greenland’s electorate, bona fide Self-Rule in 2009 – with a path toward peaceful secession mutually embraced by both Greenland and Denmark.
Moderating Arctic State Expansion with Indigenous Collaboration
Yearnings for a restoration of Indigenous sovereignty and self-governance are widespread across Arctic North America, shaped by the colonial histories under multiple foreign sovereigns including Russia’s Alaskan-American Company colony and Britain’s Hudson’s Bay Company’s proxy rule over Rupert’s Land as well as their successor states, the United States and Canada (which absorbed these chartered-company lands through negotiated purchase in the late 19th century).
In more contemporary times, as the modern state took root in the Far North, new pressures have arisen to catalyse movements to restore and protect Indigenous rights, values and lands. Indeed, from Alaska in the west to Greenland in the east there has emerged in recent decades a dynamic and ongoing dialectic between pro-development “modernists” and pro-subsistence/sustainability “traditionalists” within each community and across each region as each generation confronts the challenges and/or embraces the opportunities of Arctic of modernity and globalization.
This dialectic has oscillated with a rhythmic pendularity across the generations. Sometimes it has brought Arctic megaprojects to a stop — such as Alaska’s Project Chariot, which aimed to blast a deep-water port with atomic weapons along its northwest Arctic coast at Point Hope, and Project Rampart, which proposed damming the Yukon River at Rampart Canyon to harvest its vast hydroelectric energy potential. Both projects were proposed in the early Cold War years of the 1950s.
Sometimes it has greenlighted megaprojects in exchange for concessions — such as the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS) project in the 1970s, and the Northwest Territories diamond mines in the 1990s.
And sometimes it has done both. For example, Canada’s Mackenzie Valley Pipeline (MVP) and Mackenzie Gas Pipeline (MGP) projects were first rejected in the 1970s for their lack of Indigenous consultation or consent. They were later approved in the 2000s, with the Aboriginal Pipeline Group holding a 33% equity stake as a project partner with Big Oil, and with extensive community consultations — though the projects have since remained undeveloped.
Similarly, the vast rare earth- and uranium-rich Kvanefjeld (Kuannersuit) mineral deposit in south Greenland was first approved by the more development-oriented Siumut party when it held power but later rejected by the more sustainability-oriented Inuit Ataqatigiit (IA) party, which came to power in 2021 on a platform largely opposed to such resource-extractive projects.
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The endurance of deep unpopularity of resource extraction megaprojects within at least one sector of the Arctic Indigenous community, whether associated with minerals mining, petroleum, or uranium projects, reflects the ubiquity – albeit not the universality, owing to the persistence of support among other sector of the Arctic populace for resource development – of pro-sustainability and pro-subsistence sentiments that are felt strongly and widely across the circumpolar world.
Resource extraction remains an underlying catalyst for the current geopolitical storm over Greenland.
There is also a deep and persistent anti-nuclear sentiment across the Arctic. This can be seen in places such as Point Hope, Alaska, ever since Project Chariot planned to blast a deep water port out of Alaska’s coast with atomic bombs — a project so dangerous to Alaska’s environment that it helped unite environmental activists and Native rights activists, who more often than not had found themselves at loggerheads, particularly with regard to whaling and sealing.
It is also evident in Deline, in the Northwest Territories, where mining during World War II at the Eldorado Mine at Port Radium left its deadly legacy of elevated cancer deaths.
And in Narsaq, Greenland, where Niels Bohr imagined Denmark’s nuclear future — a future that was ultimately rejected, but which gave much impetus to uranium exploration in Greenland, despite misgivings by much of its populace.
This results in a pendular ebb and flow in resource extractive policies across the Arctic and a broader ambivalence toward industrial sectors like mining from Alaska to Greenland. As Rauna Kuokkanen describes:
“While most Greenlanders welcome economic development and see mining in particular as inevitable, there is a substantial degree of unease with regard to the environmental, cultural and social changes that would follow large-scale resource extraction projects.” Kuokkanen adds the “dilemma for nearly everyone is the challenge of finding the balance between the pressing need for new revenue sources … while meeting high environmental and social standards so that the Inuit hunting and fishing culture (which is dependent on healthy natural resources) is not jeopardized.”
Resource extraction remains an underlying catalyst for the current geopolitical storm over Greenland, adding lustre to America’s renewed interest in gaining sovereign possession of the island, and according to some observers the principal motivator for President Trump’s seemingly unlikely preoccupation with Greenland. Ironically, it also reflects a maturation of the Trump administration’s views on climate change.
A Trumpian Recognition of Climate Change
Indeed, Trump’s strategic interest in Greenland reflects his strengthening recognition of the profound climatic transformation under way, most notably in the Arctic, as a result of climate change. This irony has not been overlooked. As The Guardian has reported, “Donald Trump’s desire to seize control of Greenland and the Panama Canal is being shaped in part by a force that he has sought to deny even exists – the climate crisis.”
The Guardian cites former Obama administration climate adviser Alice Hill, who observes: “It’s ironic that we are getting a president who famously called climate change a hoax but is now expressing interest in taking over areas gaining greater importance because of climate change.”
The second Trump administration thus appears to welcome the opportunities of a warming planet. It seeks to position America to benefit from the many emergent and potentially lucrative energy and mineral opportunities that result from climate change, as well as the geopolitical benefits it perceives to flow from an expanded sovereign presence in the region. This is manifested in renewed articulations of a desire to “get,” “control,” or even “annex” the island – rhetoric that has caused significant concern in Greenland, Denmark, and among many of their NATO allies.
