The claim that the world is “not secure” unless the United States has Greenland is sweeping, but it taps a real and growing geopolitical truth: the Arctic island has moved from remote afterthought to a front line of 21st-century power politics. The strategic drama—rekindled when former President Donald Trump floated the idea of acquiring Greenland—sits at the intersection of climate change, great-power competition, rare-earth minerals, and the security architecture that binds North America and Europe.
Greenland is not for sale. It is an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark, with its own parliament and government, and a strong sense of national identity and self-determination among its mostly Inuit population. Yet the underlying security logic that drew Washington’s eye to the world’s largest island is not a novelty. It is the same geography and physics that placed an American air base at Thule during the Cold War, and the same satellite and missile-warning networks that still rely on Greenland’s vantage point between the United States, Russia and the increasingly accessible Arctic Ocean.
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Why Greenland matters
On the map, Greenland is a gate. Its northwest flank faces the Arctic Ocean; its southeast edge opens into the North Atlantic. As sea ice retreats due to climate change, shipping routes are lengthening the navigable season across the Arctic and, in some years, enabling faster transpolar or coastal passages that shorten East–West transit times. That evolution, however uneven, alters naval logistics, search-and-rescue requirements and commercial flows. It also sharpens the value of Greenland’s ports, airfields and radar sites as nodes for surveillance and deterrence.
For the United States and Canada, Greenland sits squarely in the North American Aerospace Defense Command’s northern approaches. Thule Air Base, perched in the island’s far north, hosts early-warning radar systems that form a key layer in missile detection and space domain awareness. Those assets are not optional in an era of hypersonic glide vehicles, advanced cruise missiles and a brisk tempo of Russian and Chinese tests in the Arctic.
Great-power competition reaches the ice
Russia has poured resources into Arctic infrastructure over the past decade, refurbishing Soviet-era bases, fielding the world’s largest icebreaker fleet and bolstering air defense and coastal missile systems along its northern coast. Moscow treats the Northern Sea Route as both a commercial corridor and a military domain to be managed, taxed and defended. China, calling itself a “near-Arctic state,” has expanded polar research and shipping interests and pursued investments linked to mining and infrastructure in high-latitude regions, including Greenland. Beijing’s aborted bid to help build airports in Greenland several years ago underscored how commercial openings can carry strategic implications.
In that context, Washington’s renewed attention to Greenland—reopening a consulate in Nuuk, deepening economic cooperation and signaling longer-term security commitments—fits a broader NATO recalibration. The Alliance’s northern flank is no longer a quiet backwater. Surveillance, anti-submarine warfare, satellite communications, and the ability to project and sustain forces across cold, remote distances are back on the agenda. From the GIUK Gap (Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom) to the Barents Sea, geography that defined Cold War naval chess is relevant again, albeit in a warmer, more contested Arctic.
Minerals, markets and the energy transition
Greenland’s subsoil holds another source of strategic leverage: critical minerals. The island is thought to contain significant deposits of rare-earth elements, as well as zinc, nickel and other materials essential to defense systems, batteries, wind turbines and electronics. The global race to diversify away from concentrated supply chains—especially China’s dominance in rare-earth processing—gives Greenland bargaining power it has rarely enjoyed.
But geology is only part of the story. Mining on a pristine, sparsely populated island brings environmental, social and political tradeoffs. Greenlandic voters have already signaled they will not accept development at any cost, rejecting projects seen as threatening public health or traditional livelihoods. Any path to extraction will require transparency, rigorous safeguards and benefits that flow to Greenland’s communities. For Washington and its allies, partnerships that build local capacity—rather than extractive arrangements that ignore sovereignty—will determine whether resource cooperation is durable.
Sovereignty and the limits of power
The Trump-era notion of buying Greenland collided with political reality. Under the Self-Government Act of 2009, Greenland controls most domestic affairs while Denmark retains responsibility for foreign policy and defense, in close consultation with Nuuk. Status questions—whether greater autonomy or eventual independence—are for Greenlanders to decide. The idea of acquisition reduced a modern political community to a transaction, prompting a firm rebuke from Copenhagen and Nuuk alike.
That backlash held a lesson that outlasts any single news cycle: The United States can secure its interests in the Arctic only by respecting the agency of its partners. Practically, that means investing in the relationships that make the North Atlantic secure—Danish and Greenlandic authorities, indigenous communities, and NATO allies—rather than treating Greenland as a chess piece. Since 2020, Washington has shifted toward that approach, expanding diplomatic presence and targeted economic initiatives and working through the alliance structure that underpins Arctic security.
Climate change: the inescapable variable
The Arctic is warming at more than twice the global average, and Greenland is ground zero for that acceleration. Its ice sheet is melting at rates that influence global sea levels, weather patterns and coastal risk far from the Arctic Circle. Security in Greenland is therefore not only about bases and bombers. It is also about climate resilience, maritime safety, scientific cooperation and environmental stewardship. A safer Arctic demands better ice forecasting, communications, search-and-rescue, and spill response—as well as a commitment to cut emissions driving the melt.
What “security” should mean
To say the world is not secure unless the United States “has” Greenland misses the point. The United States needs a secure, cooperative Arctic where Greenland’s people prosper, the rules are predictable and transparent, and military forces deter aggression without tipping into escalation. That requires presence—diplomatic, economic and defensive—but not possession. It requires modernizing early-warning systems and infrastructure at Thule, but also investing in energy, telecoms and education that broaden opportunity in Greenlandic towns. It requires hardnosed realism about Russia and vigilance about strategic investments by China, alongside respect for Greenland’s right to chart its own course within the Danish realm or beyond it.
Security in the Arctic is a shared project, not an acquisition. The United States has compelling reasons to be deeply engaged in Greenland—its geography demands it, climate change reinforces it and great-power rivalry accelerates it. The way to meet that challenge is partnership: allied coordination through NATO, joint planning with Denmark and Greenland, and sustained, good-faith engagement with the communities whose future is at stake. In that model, the world is more secure not because America “has” Greenland, but because Greenland is a strong, sovereign partner in a stable North Atlantic.
By Abdiwahab Ahmed
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
