The Greenland connection – UK in a changing Europe

Klaus Dodds explains why US foreign policy under Donald Trump is so focused on Greenland and explores some of the possible outcomes.

Since taking presidential office for the second time in January 2025, Donald Trump has been determined to re-draw the map. His State of the Union address pulled together a vision of greatness aided and abetted by territorial acquisition and place-branding. He is, according to those who have worked with him, fond of maps.

Using a smorgasbord of executive orders, social media posts and direct actions, this has resulted in the Gulf of Mexico being renamed the Gulf of America (alongside restoring Mount McKinley in Alaska), near-neighbours being threatened with annexation and direct action of one form or another against Panama and, most dramatically, Venezuela.

There has been plenty of speculation about why all of this is happening now. Western hemispheric dominance looms large within the 2025 National Security Strategy and the domination of Canada, Greenland, Panama and Venezuela is complicit with that strategic vision. The Strategy is clear that the United States will prioritise the Indo-Pacific, western hemisphere and new strategic domains such as space and critical infrastructure.

President Trump’s obsession with Greenland started in 2019 when the offer was first made to acquire the world’s largest island. At the time, it was firmly rebuffed by the Danish and Greenlandic governments. A state visit to Denmark was rescinded. During the Biden administration, there was no such talk of the US acquiring Greenland. The US facility Thule was renamed the space station Pituffik in 2023, to reflect more explicitly the Greenlandic heritage of the island. The focus remains on satellite monitoring and hemispheric missile defence. After Trump’s second presidential victory in November 2024, the question of Greenland returned with a vengeance.

Tempting though it might be to link this interest to Trump’s real-estate background, the underpinning logic regarding the acquisition of Greenland is stark but understandable. Western hemispheric dominance, as understood by the administration, means that the territorial integrity of others is not inviolate. Greenland and Canada would be safer under American sovereignty, and in part this is justifiable because both countries have been accused by Trump of failing to spend sufficiently on defence-related matters. Beyond Canada and Denmark, Trump has warmed to this theme of European security free-riding and how that must be terminated. The administration is adamant that a weak Greenland is vulnerable to third party interference, with China being perceived as the most immediate threat.

In the recent past, Chinese companies have expressed an interest in Greenlandic minerals and infrastructure. Trump has also cited a concern about Russian and Chinese activities off Greenlandic waters, while Beijing and Moscow have organised aerial and maritime patrols off the Alaskan coastline. Trump’s concern is China’s growing role as a polar power, which has been aided and abetted by Russia’s decisive turn to China and India in a post-sanctions era. It has never just been about China purchasing discounted Russian oil. China wants to exert more and extract more, including securing its rights in the international waters of the Central Arctic Ocean.

Greenland’s mineral potential continues to attract a great deal of commentary, and much of it is infected with resource boosterism. There are two mines in Greenland and progress has been slow largely due to modest infrastructure, high operating costs, political and regulatory hurdles, labour force shortages and remoteness. But in combination with the direct action against Venezuela, there is recognition that oil and minerals whether copper or cobalt are all going to be needed to empower that ambition to make the US a world leader in AI and data centres. Acquiring Greenland appears then to be a long-term investment proposition.

The reaction in Denmark and Greenland to Trump’s acquisition plan has been understandable. The Kingdom of Denmark faces the spectre of dismemberment. Its territorial integrity and right to self-determine its own future questioned. For a small country that answered the US’s invocation of NATO Article 5 in 2001, this looks and feels like a betrayal of the highest magnitude. It also rides rough-shod over the 1951 Defence Agreement between Denmark and the US, which gave Washington DC considerable latitude to enhance and extend its military footprint on land, sea, air and space.

But that appears to be irrelevant in a self-sustaining US narrative of Danish defensive delinquency. Nothing will be quite good enough despite the commitment to spend billions more. And it comes at a time when Greenlandic autonomy is enabling the 57,000 residents to articulate more explicitly their future options – one of which might be independence at some point. No one in Copenhagen or Nuuk underestimates the importance of the block grant of some €500m a year.

What happens next depends in very large part on the US administration. Denmark and Greenland have been clear that this Trump overture is not welcome. They are open to discussing how to respond to American concerns about national security rather than western hemispheric dominance. European allies have expressed repeatedly their solidarity with the Kingdom of Denmark, and Germany and the UK offered to develop further European NATO security commitments. If the Trump administration is seeking to use Greenland to terminate the security umbrella, then it is succeeding. NATO unity is being imperilled in real time.

The Greenland connection has four possible endings.

The US backs down on complete acquisition but gets a new comprehensive defence-energy agreement.  A settlement in Ukraine might provide a working model of what might be possible. Denmark is forced to ramp up its defence spending as the price paid for holding onto the formal sovereignty of the island.

Another unpalatable option is that the US forces independence for Greenland and then pushes Nuuk into a “free association” compact. There are working models elsewhere involving the US and Pacific Island states but they are ones where indigenous/local autonomy is circumscribed.  Greenlanders will be only too aware of how contemptuous Trump has been of Puerto Rico.

The EU could offer membership to both Greenland and Faroe Islands, noting respectively that one elected to leave and another never joined. Greenland is already covered by the Article 5 guarantee but the problem at the heart of all of this is that the US cannot be considered a reliable security partner.

It would be easiest if all of this could be simply forgotten and all could agree it was the by-product of a feverish episode. That option has now gone. The harsh reality is that this looks part and parcel of a new world of expansionist authoritarian-monarchism rather than one grounded in agreements, frameworks, norms, rules and treaties.

By Klaus Dodds, Professor of Geopolitics and Interim Faculty Dean, Middlesex University and coauthor of Unfrozen: The Fight for the Future of the Arctic (with Mia Bennett and Yale University Press 2005).