The North remembers: Trump’s ambitions around Greenland could trigger a new battle for the Arctic

RU

At first glance, Donald Trump's talk about taking over Greenland sounds just as absurdly outdated as the dialog between New York teenagers in J.D. Salinger’s “Just Before the War With The Eskimos.” However, Trump's obsession goes way back: he already made a similar proposal at the end of his first presidency in August 2019, suggesting Denmark sell the island to the United States. The press, citing sources in the leader's entourage, offered a figure of $600 million. When the Danish Prime Minister refused to negotiate, the U.S. President canceled his visit to Copenhagen. Notably, more than seven decades before Trump took office for the first time, Harry Truman made the same offer to the Danes, setting the proposed price at $100 million. That offer, too, was rejected.

Trump seeks to put his name in the history books alongside that of Thomas Jefferson, who in 1803 paid France $15 million for a vast swathe of territory west of the Mississippi River, nearly doubling the size of the young United States. After all, Trump has already established a historical link to Andrew Johnson, who in 1867 paid Russia $7 million for Alaska before becoming the first Oval Office occupant to be impeached.

The purchase of Greenland and Canada — which Trump has proposed making the 51st state — would render the U.S. the world’s largest country when measured in landmass, but there are more important factors at play. A real estate developer turned geopolitical actor, Trump appears to be applying an old maxim to his new profession: location, location, location. Greenland enjoys a unique strategic placement halfway between Europe and North America, controlling shipping, fishing, and strategic communications in the North Atlantic. This is not to mention its mineral reserves — most notably rare earth elements and offshore oil deposits with a total projected volume exceeding 50 billion barrels.

As a businessman, Trump views the matter first of all in terms of price. The Economist estimates that a fair offer would be $50 billion — only one-twentieth of the U.S. military budget and even less than the insurance payouts for damage resulting from the fires raging in California. For Greenland, that would come out to around $1 million for each resident.

Following in Putin's footsteps

But it's not about the price, or even about Trump's love of a bargain. The most striking fact about the debate around Greenland is the reality that transferring territory and redrawing borders have become possible in the 21st century in the first place. It was not Trump who opened this Pandora's box, but Vladimir Putin — by annexing Crimea in March 2014.

The bluntness of that seizure, its instant approval by the Russian parliament, and the lukewarm global response — Russia suffered relatively minor sanctions and international isolation — only spurred the aggressor's appetite. After 2022, he partially seized four more regions of Ukraine and announced their full incorporation into the Russian Federation.

At present, Russia has occupied approximately 20% of Ukraine's internationally recognized territory, and the peace talks that are now in the works could freeze this status quo indefinitely. The ultimate outcome of the Russia-Ukraine war remains unknown, but by the end of its third year, Putin has achieved the main objective: he has undermined international law, wreaked havoc on the world order, and pushed the boundaries of the possible, ushering in an era of outright land grabs.

Analysts are now assessing the likelihood of a Chinese attack on Taiwan, an Indo-Pakistani conflict over Kashmir, a Turkish takeover of Syrian Kurdistan, and a Russian annexation of Belarus — while Israel is pushing forward its security zone in Lebanon’s Golan Heights and Venezuela is attempting to annex Guyana for the second year in a row.

These possible seizures of land will not necessarily take place — and even if they do, their broad recognition is impossible to imagine — but one thing is certain: the international system has entered a state in which borders are no longer sacrosanct and the might of the law is yielding to the law of might. It is on this field and on these expectations that Trump is playing.

Like Putin, Trump is betting on the destruction of the system — both domestically (by dismantling the so-called deep state) and internationally (by undermining international institutions, from the UN to NATO). Like Putin, Trump is peddling chaos by raising the stakes and capitalizing on risks. His Greenland proposal fits into the scheme of a “great redistribution” of the world, one that cares little for such trifles as laws and minority voices. Trump views his actions as a symbolic step designed to destroy the old liberal world order.

That's why the Kremlin is following Trump's Greenland adventure with great interest. On Jan. 9 Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the “opinion of the people of Greenland” should be taken into account — just as the “opinion of the people of Russia's four new regions” supposedly was. Moreover, as Bild writes, according to the Danish intelligence service PET, Trump's statement could have been inspired by Russian efforts.

PET believes that Russian agents fabricated a letter in 2019 on behalf of Greenland's Foreign Minister Ane Lone Bagger to U.S. Senator Tom Cotton, and that it was Cotton's discussion of the letter that planted in Trump’s mind the idea of buying Greenland. However, even if this potential chain of causation is not confirmed, Moscow's interest in lobbying the Greenland affair is obvious. It “puts in context” Russia's annexation of part of Ukraine and shifts the focus away from Moscow’s ongoing full-scale war in Ukraine. Simultaneously, it torpedoes NATO, undermines transatlantic solidarity, and weakens the EU as a global player.

A battle for the Arctic

Politically and geographically, the issue is also much broader. It is not about who will own Greenland, but about the fate of the Arctic — and, by and large, the underlying principles of the future system of international relations. Trump's Greenland bid has been motivated by economic and military interests: mining, commercial shipping, building airbases and civilian airports, establishing more military bases, and generally militarizing the Arctic. The wishlist of Putin's Russia is similar: more military bases, continental shelf development, and expansion of shipping along the Northern Sea Route.

Since 2001, Russia's application to extend the boundaries of its Arctic continental shelf has been pending before the UN Commission on the Law of the Sea. In 2015, Moscow submitted an expanded application to include the Mendeleev and Lomonosov underwater ridges, which it believes begin from Russia's shores. The total water area that Russia wants to see as its exclusive economic zone amounts to 1.2 million km², and in October 2024, the UN registered Russia's application (and is now waiting for competitors' applications).

Some of Russia's competitors in the Arctic may come as a surprise. For one, China does not like the current principle of sectoral division among the countries immediately adjacent to the Arctic region and could also join the race. Beijing expects to change the current order and is ready to use force, if it comes to that. In 2013, China joined the Arctic Council as a permanent observer, and in 2018, Beijing adopted its own declaration to develop transit shipping and participate in the region's decision-making on an equal footing with the Arctic states. While Trump has his mind set on Greenland, China is already cooperating with Iceland.

This agenda throws us back centuries — to a world of brute force, resource exploitation, and colonization of the Arctic, where indigenous peoples have been relegated to the role of extras in a game of great powers. This is the kind of world Donald Trump wants us to return to, denying liberal values, international institutions, environmental initiatives, and the voices of small nations. In this, he appears to be in agreement with Putin.

The global governance projects that have been proposed for the Arctic for decades are based on completely different principles. One such project was the Greenpeace Save the Arctic initiative launched in 2013. It proposes recognizing the Arctic as an international territory with a special protective status, closed to economic and military activities and open only for scientific research and tourism.

International law has had a similar precedent: the 1959 Antarctic Treaty and the 1982 Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR). According to these documents, Antarctica, due to its exceptional natural value for mankind, enjoys a special status and does not belong to any state. The deployment of military facilities and the entry of warships and armed vessels south of 60°S latitude are prohibited. Antarctica has also been declared a nuclear-free zone, which excludes the entry of nuclear-powered ships into its waters and the placement of nuclear power units on the mainland.

Greenpeace's call envisioned extending such a regime to the Arctic and its exceptionally fragile ecosystem, vulnerability to global warming, and enormous impact on the planet's climate — figuratively speaking, the Arctic is a “global refrigerator” and a “global air conditioner.” Applying the Antarctic model would mean a ban on military activities, commercial shipping, and mineral development in the Arctic, leaving traditional fishing and hunting of the indigenous population the only permissible forms of economic activity. Over the past decade, millions have joined the appeal, including celebrities from Paul McCartney to Richard Branson.

However, in an era of national selfishness, conservative revanchism, and war — when the fate of the world is decided by dictators and tyrants — such a project looks utopian. In its place, multiple governments have entered into competition for the region's resources and intend to build up their presence there, with Trump's brutal bid marking a new stake in the great Arctic game.