We have come to you, the banner read: Twenty-three thousand tonnes of steel powered by two nuclear engines, the Arktika had cut its way through metres of ice in August 1977, becoming the first ship to reach latitude 90°N, the North Pole. The word ‘conquered’ had been considered for the banner, Soviet sailor Alexander Barinov later recorded, but then dropped. “Man has no power over nature,” Barinov explained, “and sometimes he is powerless before the elements. He can hide, wait, adapt, but he is unable to subjugate them.”
He was wrong.
Trump’s demand to purchase Greenland might seem crazed—but there’s meaning behind the apparent madness. Less than two and a half decades from now, geographer Mia Benett has written, the metres-thick sheets of ice that cover the Arctic will have been claimed by global warming. Ever since 2018, China has publicly pushed for what it calls a Polar Silk Road, linking its industrial centres to the Atlantic and Pacific. China also wants to invest in exploiting the Arctic’s massive energy and mineral resources.
And that makes Greenland one of the world’s most important regions—critical to the US’ strategic control not just in the Northeast and Northwest Passage, but also the Central Passage that will open up across the ice.
About 14 years after the end of the Second World War, a team of US military engineers built Camp Century, a miniature city eight metres under Greenland’s ice sheet, with a portable nuclear-powered generator providing light and heat for up to 200 soldiers. “Modern technology will make possible military operations in the Far North—under the ice, on the ice, over the ice—previously inconceivable,” a report by a military think-tank recorded. “Science will permit our use of Greenland as an Arctic sword and shield.”
Even though Denmark retained control of Greenland after the Treaty of Kiel in 1814, America had an early interest in the region. The naval explorer Charles Hall, allegedly murdered on his expedition to the Arctic in 1871, was the first to survey northwestern Greenland. The American explorer Robert Peary, who declared his expedition the first to reach the North Pole in 1909 after two decades of dangerous effort, laid claim to the islands’ north.
The US chose to withdraw its claims in 1917, in return for Denmark’s West Indies colonies—important to the defence of the Panama Canal.
In 1940, though, Nazi Germany occupied Denmark and set up weather stations in Greenland. The US, historian Dawn Berry records, responded by invading the islands, sending Coast Guard personnel disguised as volunteers. Among America’s major motivations were the island’s enormous reserves of cryolite, a mineral vital to the production of aluminium.
President Harry S. Truman wanted to buy Greenland after World War II, as part of a Cold War strategy for boxing out Soviet forces. The Danish government was less than delighted but made deep concessions to facilitate the presence of American forces.
The US began construction of Thule Air Base—today called Pittufik Space Base—which was the northernmost deployment of its military. The Army conducted studies to house up to 600 nuclear-capable missiles under Greenland’s ice. The island also housed a number of electronic intelligence gathering facilities and a radar, monitoring Soviet aircraft and missile tests, as well as ships passing through what is known as the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom ice gap.
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Even though the tunnels built to house Camp Century have been claimed by climate change, Greenland has new strategic significance. From July to September, months now often blocked by ice, the Arctic route would shrink the journey from Shanghai to Rotterdam from 11,500 nautical miles to some 6,500 nm. The journey would take 18 days, instead of 30. This would reduce costs, and insulate Chinese shipping from the volatile geopolitics of the Middle East. It would enable shorter, faster access to ports on the Atlantic seaboard.
The Chinese government, almost certainly, also hopes to make hydrocarbon discoveries in the Arctic, which will allow it to diversify its resource base and mitigate its energy dependence on the Middle East—where the US, again, has long enjoyed a strategic chokehold.
According to studies carried out by the United States Geological Survey, the Arctic holds a third of the world’s undiscovered gas and 13 per cent of its oil. Greenland and China are currently negotiating a free-trade agreement.
Labelling itself a near-Arctic state, although its northernmost tip is some 800 nm from the Arctic Circle, China is pushing for recognition as a stakeholder in the region. Even though it had no significant corpus of Arctic scientific research, it was granted observer status in the key regional intergovernmental organisation, the Arctic Council, in 2013.
The reason was simple: Norway and other European states feared that Beijing would otherwise simply set up its own Arctic club. The Arctic Council, though, also balanced China’s entry by allowing in several other states, including India, Japan, South Korea and Singapore.
For its part, scholar Rush Doshi writes, China views Great Power competition as entailing a “struggle over and control of global public spaces’ like the Arctic and Antarctic. Thus, the argument goes, China ‘cannot rule out the possibility of using force’ in this coming ‘scramble for new strategic spaces.’
This isn’t to suggest that the Arctic routes are ready to go. Commercial ship owners transiting the southeastern and northwestern passages, a report by the authoritative Congressional Research Service states, will need to use smaller vessels to transit the waters, or deploy icebreakers. Both options come with significant costs—at least until the ice melts even further.
For obvious reasons, the Donald Trump administration doesn’t want to risk a Beijing-controlled Greenland’s energy and mineral industries. In general, public opinion in Greenland—which has a high degree of federal independence of action from Denmark—has stood firmly on the American side. Like all other countries in a similar situation, though, Greenland likely wishes to secure all it can from its situation, without giving up its sovereignty.
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Like so much else to do with Trump, it’s hard to understand where impulse ends, and a well-crafted strategy begins: Everything the US seeks in Greenland and the Arctic it can, and will, be able to secure through diplomacy. The President-elect’s parallel call for US control over the Panama Canal suggests Trump is reviving the 1823 doctrine of President James Monroe, which declared that any European attempt to “extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.”
A maze of questions, though, lies between the words and the meaning of Trump’s Greenland plans. For one, the US already has a substantial military presence on the islands, and its government would be willing to grant more to defend against Russia and China. There is no particular reason to seek colonisation of Greenland, any more than the US has done in other parts of Europe.
For its part, China has set about asserting its claims to the Arctic with what can only be called theatrical performances. In 2022, artist-turned-sailor Zhai Mo completed the circumnavigation of the Arctic, as part of a larger government-managed programme to assert China’s claims on the region.
This one thing is clear, though: As geopolitical competition intensifies in the age of Trump, the incoming US President is determined to exercise more direct, physical control over America’s near neighbourhood. Even if he delivers on threats to dismantle NATO, and rain a hell of sanctions on America’s trading partners, Trump is also determined to wield absolute control over foreign powers arriving on US shores.
Little doubt exists Trump has subtler, and more effective tools at his disposal to secure that end. Whether he chooses diplomacy or coercion will have far reaching consequences for America’s relationship with the world
In 1778, the adventurer James Cook poetically described his journey through the Arctic, sailing “close to the edge of the ice, which was as compact as a wall, and seemed to be ten or twelve feet high.” Those sights will no longer exist for a new generation of sailors crossing the three passages. The sailors now heading into the sea will see just blue water—a grim reminder that nation-states competing for influence in the Arctic might be obsessed with the wrong problem.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)
