President-elect Donald J. Trump’s attention returned Tuesday to an idea that has fascinated him for years: acquiring Greenland for the United States. In a news conference on Tuesday, he refused to rule out using military or economic force to take the territory from Denmark, a U.S. ally.
“We need Greenland for national security purposes,” he said, arguing that Denmark should give it up to “protect the free world.” He threatened to impose tariffs on Denmark if it did not.
Earlier in the day, Mr. Trump wrote on social media that the potential American acquisition of the Arctic territory “is a deal that must happen” and uploaded photos of his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., who was visiting Greenland.
“MAKE GREENLAND GREAT AGAIN,” the president-elect added.
After the news conference, Denmark sharply rebuked the proposal, saying that the world’s largest island is not for sale.
During his first term, Mr. Trump urged his aides to explore ways to purchase Greenland, a semiautonomous territory known for its natural resources and strategical location for new shipping routes that can open up as the Arctic ice melts. A few weeks ago, Mr. Trump reignited the conversation through social media, asserting that “the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.”
Greenland’s vast ice sheets and glaciers are quickly retreating as the Earth warms through accelerating climate change. That melting of ice could allow drilling for oil and mining for minerals such as copper, lithium, nickel and cobalt. Those mineral resources are essential to rapidly growing industries that make wind turbines, transmission lines, batteries and electric vehicles.
Because of higher temperatures, an estimated 11,000 square miles of Greenland’s ice sheets and glaciers have already melted in the past three decades, an area roughly the size of Massachusetts.
In 2023, the Danish government published a report that detailed Greenland’s potential as a rich deposit of valuable minerals. The Arctic island has “favorable conditions for the formations of ore deposition, including many of the critical raw minerals.”
The melting ice in the Arctic is also opening up a new strategic asset in geopolitics: shorter and more efficient shipping routes. Navigating through the Arctic Sea from Western Europe to East Asia, for example, is about 40 percent shorter compared to sailing through the Suez Canal. Ship traffic in the Arctic has already surged 37 percent over the past decade, according to a recent Arctic Council report.
China has shown significant interest in a new route through the Arctic, and in November, China and Russia agreed to work together to develop Arctic shipping routes.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly called climate change a “hoax.” But one of his former national security advisers, Robert C. O’Brien, suggested that its consequences are one of the reasons that Mr. Trump is interested in making Greenland a U.S. territory.
“Greenland is a highway from the Arctic all the way to North America, to the United States,” he told Fox News. “It’s strategically very important to the Arctic, which is going to be the critical battleground of the future because as the climate gets warmer, the Arctic is going to be a pathway that maybe cuts down on the usage of the Panama Canal.”
