Polar stereographic map projection locating Greenland
Polar stereographic map projection locating Greenland
COPENHAGEN — “One way or the other,” President Donald Trump has said, the United States needs to “get” Greenland. Not only to defend the homeland, but the “freedom of the world.” Denmark, he says, isn’t doing nearly enough to protect it. He has named two potential adversaries: China and Russia.
Its location, way out there, in a hostile ocean between North America, Western Europe and Russia, made Greenland strategically vital during the Cold War. After the Soviet Union collapsed, not so much.
But now, as tensions rise across a melting, militarizing Arctic, the world’s largest island is back on the map.
STEP 1: Current sea ice conditions in the Arctic
Arctic sea ice typically reaches its greatest extent in March. It makes most of Greenland difficult to reach by ship.
By September, the ice contracts to its smallest extent, opening passages that can shorten shipping routes.
Greenland lies along what the old Cold Warriors dubbed the “GIUK Gap,” the pinch point between Greenland, Iceland and Britain that protects the North Atlantic from Russian ships and submarines.
The island is also a waypoint for communication cables that cross the Atlantic — the kinds of cables that European defense officials say Russian “ghost ships” have been attacking by dropping and dragging their anchors across the seafloor.
Vice President JD Vance has praised Greenland’s “incredible natural resources.” Like Ukraine, the island possesses the critical and rare metals needed for the modern world — for electric vehicles, smartphones, medical imaging equipment, computer chips and wind turbines. Though mining Greenland has so far proved notoriously difficult, its leaders say the territory is open for business to U.S. companies with the money and guts to explore.
But Trump’s comments have raised more questions than answers. What are the threats against Greenland, and the U.S.? How should they be met, by whom and with what level of force? Treaties? Dogsleds? F-35s? Nukes?
The president, who spoke of buying the territory from Denmark during his first term, revisited its strategic value hours after his inauguration. “You have Russian boats all over the place, you have China boats all over the place — warships.”
He suggested at one point that the U.S. itself could take Greenland by force. The White House and Pentagon hastened to explain that was not what he meant.
“We need Greenland for national security and even international security,” he told Congress this month. “And I think we’re going to get it one way or the other.” The chamber erupted in Republican applause and laughter — like, how might Greenland, population 57,751, stop us?
In an Oval Office meeting last week with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, Trump was asked again about “annexing” Greenland. “I think it will happen,” he said.
The new government elected by Greenlanders this month is expected to pursue a go-slow approach on independence from Denmark, and wariness about Trump’s pitch to make Greenland rich as a 51st state.
The joke among military planners over the past century was that any invasion of Greenland — by, say, Nazi Germany, or the Soviets — would quickly become a search-and-rescue mission. There’s little up there to sustain human life. No roads between settlements; skeletal infrastructure. It’s freezing and dark. It would be best if you brought your own food.
But now the joke is probably dated. The Arctic is warming; the ice is receding. And you don’t need to invade Greenland to control or threaten it.
The northern lights over Nuuk, Greenland’s capital. (Sebastien Van Malleghem/For The Washington Post))
About 80 percent of Greenland’s landmass is ice-covered, empty and wild — an island 10 times the size of Great Britain with a population equal to Galveston, Texas. Most inhabitants are Inuit, and everyone lives along the coast, not on the ice sheet. It’s also a welfare state: The economy is driven by fishing and subsidies from Denmark.
But Arctic seaways are becoming more navigable each year, and global powers are imagining a day when ships traveling between Asia, Europe and North America no longer need to head south to the Panama and Suez canals, or to round the capes, but can ply new polar routes.
Globe depicting shipping traffic in the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans
Ship traffic density
Low
High
ASIA
Northern Sea
Route
Northwest
Passage
NORTH
AMERICA
EUROPE
Suez
Canal
AFRICA
Panama
Canal
SOUTH
AMERICA
Source:
World Bank Group
Trump is pushing Denmark to bolster its defenses in Greenland, as U.S. military assets on the island have degraded and the Russians are refurbishing their own Arctic ports.
He has also ordered the construction of a “Golden Dome,” a “next-generation missile defense shield for the United States against ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks,” similar to Israel’s Iron Dome system. This would bolster the decades-old NORAD defense system operated by Canada and the U.S. It is unclear what role Greenland would play.
“Frankly, Denmark, which controls Greenland — it’s not doing its job, and it’s not being a good ally,” Vance recently told Fox News.
The remark shocked the Danes. Denmark was one of a handful of countries to send troops to fight with the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan — and suffered comparable casualties as a percentage of forces deployed.
A skier crosses the sea ice in Qaanaaq, Greenland, in May 2023. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)
“We have fought side by side with the Americans for many, many decades,” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said. “We are one of the United States’ most important and best allies and that’s why I don’t want Denmark to be labeled a bad ally.”
Greenland once hosted dozens of U.S. military bases, outposts and depots. Today, there is just one. Pituffik Space Base, formerly Thule Air Base, operates a global network of early-warning radars, satellites and sensors to detect incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles. A U.S. force that once numbered 10,000 troops is now down to about 200.
They’re tended by Greenlanders and tech workers. Neither Greenland nor Denmark have ever charged the U.S., a NATO ally, rent for Pituffik.
Danish officials concede that they’ve been slow to replace assets to defend Greenland, mostly because they had other things to do with the money and they didn’t see a threat. Then tensions between China, Russia and the U.S. spilled into the Arctic.
Now the Danes, too, are concerned. The Danish Defense Intelligence Service has concluded that the high north is “a priority for Russia, and it will demonstrate its power through aggressive and threatening behaviour, which will carry along with it a greater risk of escalation than ever before in the Arctic.”
“We have not invested enough in the Arctic for many years,” Danish Defense Minister Troels Lund Poulsen has said. “Now we are planning a stronger presence.”
A Danish frigate is stationed in Nuuk’s harbor in January. (Sebastien Van Malleghem/For The Washington Post)
Whether or not Trump deserves the credit, the Danes have announced a new defense spending package, large for such a small country. They’re replacing aging “inspection vessels” with three modern warships, buying two long-range drones, and promising to deploy satellites and other surveillance assets. They’re also upgrading Kangerlussuaq Airport, a former U.S. air base, to handle F-35 hypersonic fighters.
They have committed $2 billion. With other spending, Denmark’s NATO contribution is now more than 3 percent of GDP, one of the highest in Europe.
But building ships will take years.
The Danish Defense Ministry also plans to fund two more dogsled teams to protect the 375,000-square-mile Northeast Greenland National Park, the largest in the world. These would be the hardcore Sirius patrols, viewed by the Danes as the Navy SEALs of the Arctic, which began operations during World War II.
This, Trump mocked. “They put two dogsleds there two weeks ago. They thought that was protection,” he said.
Danish officials are uncertain what level of protection would make Trump happy and are struggling to understand what the Pentagon really wants.
Russian vessels, observed and not, operate freely in the North Atlantic. Russia’s Northern Fleet and its main submarine base are headquartered on the Barents Sea near Murmansk. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union battled for control of the GIUK Gap.
A Danish official said Chinese assets have not been present around Greenland. But as a self-described “near-Arctic” power — in fact, Beijing is closer to the Equator than the North Pole — China has made clear its intention to be present at the top of the world. Last year, two Russian border service and two Chinese coast guard vessels were spotted in a joint exercise in the Bering Sea off Alaska. Russia and China also staged a patrol with bombers over international waters near the Alaska coast.
Under Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which holds that an attack on one is an attack on all, the U.S. is bound to protect Greenland. A 1951 treaty between Denmark and the United States gives the U.S. military pretty much a free hand to locate bases in Greenland and protect itself against attack.
“The United States can basically do what it wants in Greenland,” said Kristian Soby Kristensen, head of the department for strategy and war studies at the Royal Danish Defense College in Copenhagen. “I don’t know of a U.S. demand that hasn’t been met. When President Trump says the U.S. needs military control — well, in a sense it already has it.”
A statue of Hans Egede, the Danish-Norwegian Lutheran missionary who founded Nuuk, overlooks the city. (Sebastien Van Malleghem/For The Washington Post)
About this story
Minimum sea ice concentration data via the Institute of Environmental Physics at the University of Bremen. Arctic military bases via The Simons Foundation Canada. Subsea cable data via TeleGeography. Shipping traffic density via the World Bank Group.