Why Greenland is important to Trump
Why Greenland is important to Trump
The United States President-elect, who is awaiting the inauguration ceremony on January 20th to take power in America, continued his controversial remarks from past weeks by emphasizing that he does not rule out the use of military force to annex Greenland.
Trump’s insistence on acquiring Greenland has raised the question for many as to why he emphasizes taking over this region. According to Sharq, this ice-covered territory belonging to Denmark, known as the world’s largest island, has long been of interest to strategists in Washington and elsewhere due to its location on vital shipping routes and its possession of key mineral resources that are rarely found elsewhere.
A source close to Donald Trump, in response to a question from the New York Post about the U.S. President-elect’s intentions with these statements, pointed to several reasons and explained that Trump’s remarks are in a way sending a strong and calculated message to Beijing.
It’s not just talk; it’s action.
It’s about bringing ambition back to America. The source emphasized that the U.S. President-elect, with his remarks over the past weeks, is outlining the initial framework of the Trump Doctrine.
According to a report from the Wilson Center, a foreign policy-focused think tank in Washington, the United States is currently engaged in a trilateral competition with China and Russia over the natural resources of the Arctic region, including lithium, cobalt, and graphite.
Alex Plitsas, an expert from the Atlantic Council, told the New York Post that there are two main reasons for the annexation of Greenland. The first is the presence of large reserves of rare elements essential for defense and electronic industries, and the second is that Greenland legally covers a vast area of the Arctic, which could strengthen the U.S.’s position in the increasing competition for access to the navigation routes and resources of that region.
For years, the United States has had a quiet competition with China and Russia over access to the Arctic and has sent its military icebreaker ships on missions aimed at exploring the rich resources of this region.
According to experts, Washington has long been overly dependent on Beijing for rare mineral supplies, materials that, in addition to Asia, are also found in the Arctic and are used in everything from mobile phones to weapons of mass destruction.
Therefore, Alex Plitsas believes that this dependency on Beijing cannot be sustainable given the current geopolitical realities, and it seems that Donald Trump is seeking alternative ways.
He emphasized that there are significant other reserves of these materials in regions like Afghanistan, which for various reasons cannot be exploited, and Greenland seems to be the simplest way.
The Wilson Center in 2023 mentioned in a report that the increasing demand for electric vehicles, renewable energy-based systems, and advanced technologies has made the United States highly dependent on critical materials to be able to innovate more and maintain its position in this global competition.
Rare minerals are used in most forms of national defense technologies, missiles, tanks, satellites, warships, and fighter jets. Consequently, securing these items has become a national security necessity.
According to Plitsas, this is while synthetic elements created in laboratories do not perform as well as natural minerals, making the United States vulnerable in the defense production sector, especially as tensions with China have increased in recent years.
Competition over the Arctic has intensified in recent years due to climate change, as these changes have led to the melting of polar ice, making it possible to access resources that were previously almost impossible to reach.
In fact, global warming has led to more freedom of movement for sailors to navigate the Arctic, but the U.S. competes with its other rivals to exploit the Arctic resources while having the problem of a low number of icebreaker ships.
This problem has long worried some Republicans, including Mike Waltz, Trump’s National Security Advisor. In 2017, he wrote in a post on the social network X, formerly Twitter, that in the Arctic, where we will compete for natural resources, the Coast Guard needs more than one icebreaker; Russia has dozens of icebreakers.
The U.S. Coast Guard now has only two vital icebreaker ships, but Waltz recently promised in response to a post on X, which called for a dozen more icebreakers, to work in the next Congress to increase the number of these ships.
On December 24th, he promised that this is the plan, now that the United States is building rare mineral processing plants and trying to reduce its reliance on China, having more icebreaker ships and purchasing Greenland seem to be attractive prospects, as the United States holds only 13% of the rare earth minerals while China’s reserves are estimated at 70%.
However, Trump’s ambition has not been welcomed in Denmark, and the country’s Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, reiterated on Tuesday, in response to the visit of Trump’s eldest son to Greenland, that this land is not for sale.
The United States has long been interested in acquiring Greenland and even intended to propose buying this North Atlantic island when it purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867.
Nearly eight decades later, after World War II, the United States offered $100 million in gold bars for Greenland, which Denmark rejected.
However, that offer led to the signing of a defense treaty that granted the United States access to the Thule Air Base, now known as the Pituffik Space Base, the northernmost U.S. military point, which gained critical importance during the Cold War due to its proximity to Russia. Trump also raised the issue of buying Greenland during his first term and publicly mentioned this idea in 2019, but the leaders of Greenland and Denmark strongly rejected it.
