On the campaign trail leading up to his election in 2024, Donald Trump made a plenty of bizarre promises that have fallen by the wayside. Arguably the strangest one he’s still harping about? Greenland — a massive island in the Arctic Ocean, currently a territory of Denmark, that he desperately wants to seize.
Geopolitical analysts and pundits have spilled plenty of ink over the past year trying to come up with some rational explanation for Trump’s obsession with the idea. One of the simplest, the New York Times suggests — yet somehow the most cynical — has to do with the scientific certainty that Greenland’s ice will soon melt away.
From September 2024 to September 2025, Greenland lost a staggering 105 billion metric tons of ice, according to researchers at the Danish Meteorological Institute. Between 1985 and 2022, Greenland’s ice sheet has shrunk by some 2,000 square miles. These trends are sure to continue in the years to come.
Beneath all that ice and permafrost is a veritable treasure trove of minerals like graphite, zinc, and rare earths. Basically, as the climate warms and Greenland’s ice melts, more and more of those minerals will become available for extraction.
In a nakedly empire-building type of way, in other words, Greenland makes perfect sense. The only problem? Publicly, Trump disparages the very notion of climate change — meaning that if really does understand the wealth of resources that the phenomenon is opening up in colder parts of the world, he’s fibbing to his base for jaded political reasons.
“His fixation on Greenland is an admission that climate change is real,” John Conger, an advisor to the Center for Climate and Security told the NYT.
If Trump or his advisors really are intrigued by Greenland because they’re anticipating a thawing world, that puts them in good company with Trump’s longstanding allies in Russia, where the ruling oligarchy is said to be banking on a similar strategy for the country’s immense frozen expanses.
If it sounds convoluted, it’s only because other explanations for Trump’s North Atlantic fixation just don’t add up.
As economic historian and analyst Adam Tooze explains, the US has a long-standing Cold War treaty with Denmark giving the US military carte blanche to do whatever it wants on Greenland’s territory. As such, there’s no national security justification for why the US needs to own Denmark outright.
“If Greenland isn’t currently adequately defended, it might be to do with the fact that America has completely run down multiple military bases it used to maintain on Greenland during the Cold War,” Tooze said on a recent episode of his podcast Ones and Tooze.
Oil — the classic raison d’être for US intervention on foreign soil — also doesn’t apply here. (Nor Venezuela, for that matter.)
In 2021, the governing body of Greenland stopped granting oil exploration licenses, the NYT notes, due to “climate considerations, environmental considerations and economic common sense.” That news came after 50 years of unsuccessful attempts to strike black gold in the icy waters off the island’s coast, meaning oil is a very unlikely motivation.
At the end of the day, we probably won’tknow the administration’s true motivations for Greenland unless they actually pull the trigger — though if Venezuela is any indication, a straight answer is far from guaranteed.
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