Why Anyone Would Want Greenland: The Island, the Superpower, and the Alliance It Nearly Broke

A few months ago the president of the United States stood up and said, in front of cameras and without any obvious embarrassment, that America needed to own Greenland. Not lease part of it. Not defend it. Own it. And when reporters asked whether he would rule out taking it by force, he would not. This is a place that legally belongs to Denmark, and Denmark is not some rival on the other side of the world. Denmark is a founding member of NATO, an ally the United States is bound by written treaty to defend if anyone ever attacks it. So the leader of the alliance was, in plain daylight, refusing to promise he would not invade one of its members.

It sounded unhinged, and plenty of people said so. But here is the uncomfortable thing. He did not think of it that morning. America has been quietly trying to get its hands on Greenland for more than a century and a half, under presidents nobody thinks of as reckless, and underneath the noise there is a real strategic case that serious military planners have made in dry, sober language for decades. The question worth asking is not whether he meant it. It is why Greenland, of all the frozen rocks on Earth, keeps doing this to grown adults in Washington. So let's walk through it.

America has wanted this rock since 1867

Start with the fact that this is old. In 1867 the US Secretary of State, William Seward, had just pulled off the purchase of Alaska from Russia, a deal everyone mocked at the time as "Seward's Folly" and everyone envied about thirty years later. Riding that high, Seward had his people look into buying Greenland and Iceland as well. It went nowhere, but the idea was written down, filed away, and never quite forgotten.

Then came the Second World War. When Denmark fell under occupation in 1940 and could no longer look after its own colony, the United States simply stepped in and took over Greenland's defence for the duration. American soldiers, American supply ships, American airstrips. And when the war ended, Washington did not really want to give it back. In 1946 President Truman made Denmark a genuine, straight-faced offer: $100 million in gold bars for the whole island. Denmark, to its credit and its own surprise, said no thank you. What Denmark did instead, in 1951, was sign a treaty letting America build a giant air base at Thule, in the far northwest, close enough to the top of the world that from there you can practically see over it.

So by the time a modern president started talking about "buying" Greenland, the US already had a base there, had had one for seventy years, and had wanted the whole thing since before the telephone was invented. This is not a new craving. It is a very old one that just got loud.

What Greenland actually is

Here is the part that makes the whole thing stranger, and sadder. For all the great-power drama, Greenland is home to about 56,000 people. That is not a typo. The largest island on the planet, three times the size of Texas, and its entire population would not fill a mid-sized football stadium. Most of them are Inuit, the Kalaallit, whose ancestors have lived on that coast for something like a thousand years, fishing and hunting along the edge of an ice sheet so heavy it has physically pressed the middle of the island below sea level.

Almost nobody lives in that interior, because you cannot. The ice sheet covers around four-fifths of the country and in places is nearly two miles thick. Everybody clings to the coast, in small painted towns like the one in the photo above, connected to each other mostly by boat, plane and helicopter, because there are barely any roads between settlements at all.

Politically, Greenland is part of the Kingdom of Denmark, but it runs most of its own affairs. It won home rule in 1979 and then, in 2009, a Self-Government Act that handed it control of its own mineral wealth and, crucially, a legal path to full independence any time it votes for one. What Denmark still handles is foreign policy and defence, and money. Copenhagen sends Greenland a block grant of about 4.45 billion Danish kroner a year, which works out to something like 80,000 kroner for every man, woman and child on the island. That grant covers a bit over half of Greenland's public budget. It is, put bluntly, most of what keeps the lights on. Hold onto that number, because it matters twice over: it is Greenland's lifeline, and it is also the leash a lot of Greenlanders would quietly like to slip.

Reason one: it is in exactly the wrong place at exactly the right time

Now to why anyone with a map and a security clearance cares. The simplest reason is geography, and it has not changed since the Cold War. If you want to fire a missile from the far side of the planet at North America, the shortest path is not across the Pacific or the Atlantic. It is over the top, across the Arctic and the North Pole. Draw that arc on a globe and it passes almost directly over Greenland.

That is exactly why the Thule base was built, and why it is still there, now renamed Pituffik Space Base. It carries the radar and sensors that would give the United States its earliest warning of a missile coming over the pole, plus a chunk of America's space-tracking network. In an age when the fastest threats fly highest and come the polar way, the single most valuable thing about Greenland is that it sits under the doormat everyone would have to cross. You do not need to own a whole country to run a radar station on it, and America already has the treaty that lets it. But if your entire worldview is about controlling the ground rather than renting it, Greenland stops looking like an ally's territory and starts looking like a gap in your own roof.

Reason two: the ice is melting, and there is treasure under it

The second reason is newer, and it is the one that turned a Cold War relic back into a live obsession. The ice is melting. As it pulls back, two things happen at once. Sea routes that were frozen shut for all of human history are starting to open in the summer, which means shipping lanes across the top of the world that could one day cut days off the journey between continents. And the ground that the ice is uncovering turns out to be stuffed with exactly the stuff the modern world runs on.

Greenland is thought to hold big untapped deposits of rare-earth elements. If that phrase sounds boring, it should not. Rare earths are the metals inside the thing you are reading this on, inside electric-car motors, wind turbines, fighter jets and guided missiles. Whoever controls them controls the supply chain of the entire green and digital economy, and also a fair slice of the modern weapons business. And right now that control sits overwhelmingly with a single Asian power that already mines most of the world's rare earths and refines the overwhelming majority of them, and has shown it is perfectly willing to turn that tap on and off for political reasons. For Washington, a mountain of rare earths sitting inside allied, Western-facing territory is not a mining opportunity. It is an insurance policy against being squeezed. That is a real argument, and it deserves to be treated as one, even when the person making it is also musing about tariffs and invasions.

And even the treasure is not the simple prize it looks like from a distance. In 2021 Greenlanders elected a government that had campaigned squarely against a huge rare-earth deposit in the south called Kvanefjeld, because digging out the rare earths there also meant digging out the uranium tangled up with them, right above a farming town. That government passed a law banning uranium mining, and the project died on the spot. The foreign company behind it is now chasing something like eleven billion dollars from the government in return. Fifty-six thousand people, holding one of the most valuable rocks on the planet, looked at the money and a decisive number of them said the land and the water mattered more. Worth remembering every time an outsider talks about Greenland's minerals as though they were already sitting on a ship.

Reason three: everyone else is scrambling for the Arctic too

The third reason is that America is not the only one who noticed. As the ice retreats, the Arctic has quietly become one of the most contested corners of the planet. Russia, which has by far the longest Arctic coastline, has spent years reopening Cold War bases and building new ones along its northern edge, and Washington points at that buildup constantly to explain its own nervousness. Meanwhile that same rare-earth-hungry Asian power has taken to calling itself a "near-Arctic state," a phrase that raises eyebrows given it is nowhere near the Arctic, and has gone looking for mining stakes and infrastructure deals in Greenland itself.

So from a chair in Washington the picture looks like this: a strategically vital island, three flying hours from North America, sitting on a fortune in critical minerals, with rival powers already circling and a caretaker, Denmark, that spends comparatively little on defending it. You can think the American response was reckless and still see why the island keeps them up at night. Both things can be true. Usually, in this story, they are.

So why the shouting, when you already have the base?

Here is the part that does not add up on strategy alone. The United States already has the base. It already has the treaty. It already has, by any normal reading, everything it actually needs from Greenland. So why start openly musing about buying the place, taxing your own allies to force the sale, and refusing to rule out sending in troops?

Part of the answer is just how this particular president does business. Threats are the opening bid. Say the outrageous thing first, watch everyone panic, see what shakes loose. Part of it is theatre, the pleasure of announcing a grand American land-grab to an audience back home that enjoys that sort of talk. And part of it is a genuine belief that owning a thing outright always beats sharing it, even with a friend, even when sharing already gets the job done. None of that is a strategy so much as an instinct. And when you point that instinct at a friendly country's territory, the strategy underneath it stops mattering, because of what the threat itself breaks.

The bit that nearly broke NATO

This is the heart of it. NATO, the military alliance the United States built and has led since 1949, rests on one deceptively simple promise, written into Article 5: an attack on one member is treated as an attack on all. Denmark was there at the founding. The entire point of the club is that members do not have to fear each other, so they can face outward together. Take that promise seriously for two seconds and the problem becomes obvious. You cannot simultaneously swear to defend Denmark from attack and refuse to rule out attacking Denmark yourself. The two sentences cannot live in the same treaty.

That is why this went so far beyond the usual bluster. Allies who instinctively back the United States on almost everything found they could not back this, because backing it meant agreeing that the strongest member could bully territory out of a weaker one, which is the exact behaviour the alliance exists to prevent. It put people in genuinely impossible spots. When the US vice-president turned up at the American base in Greenland uninvited and lectured Denmark about failing the island, the base's own commander sent a note to her staff saying the president's threats were "not reflective of Pituffik Space Base." She was reportedly relieved of command shortly after. That is what it looks like when the politics at the top collides with the people actually doing the job.

In the end, the confrontation peaked in early 2026 with a threat to pile tariffs rising toward 25 percent onto European states unless Denmark simply handed the island over, and then, almost as suddenly, it deflated. At Davos in January 2026, after a sit-down with NATO's secretary general, the president backed off, ruled out using force, dropped the tariff threat, and started talking instead about "a future deal." The climbdown was real. Whether the appetite behind it has gone anywhere is another question entirely.

Denmark is not the good guy here either

It would be easy, listening to all this, to cast Denmark as the kindly guardian and America as the bully hammering on the door. The truth is messier, and Greenlanders know it far better than anyone in Washington or Copenhagen. When the American vice-president stood on that base and accused Denmark of failing the island, the jab landed harder than it had any right to, because there is a real and raw history sitting behind it.

The worst of that history only came fully into the daylight recently. Starting in the 1960s, Danish health authorities fitted thousands of Greenlandic women and girls, some of them as young as twelve, with contraceptive coils, very often without their knowledge and without anything that could honestly be called consent, in a deliberate effort to hold down the Inuit birth rate. Some of them only learned, decades on, why they had never been able to have children. An independent investigation is still grinding through the cases, and hundreds of women have come forward to tell their stories. And that sits on top of an older, quieter policy of taking Greenlandic children out of their homes to be raised and taught in Danish, which stripped a whole generation of the language its grandparents spoke.

So when Greenlanders say they do not want to become American, do not mistake it for a love letter to Copenhagen. Plenty of them want out of that arrangement too, in their own time and on their own terms. What they are actually refusing is the thing both the offended Dane and the acquisitive American quietly share: the assumption that Greenland is a possession to be managed by somebody else, and that the only open question is which grown-up in which distant capital gets to hold the keys. That assumption is the single thread running through the whole 150 years of this.

The 56,000 people nobody kept asking

Through all of this, notice who almost never got a turn at the microphone. The people who actually live in Greenland. And when they were finally asked, the answer was not close. A poll taken in January 2025 found that 85 percent of Greenlanders did not want their island to become part of the United States. Six percent did. That is not a divided public. That is a wall.

It would be a mistake, though, to read that as love for the current setup. A lot of Greenlanders do not particularly want to stay tied to Denmark forever either. There is a long, real, homegrown independence movement, and it carries the memory of things like 1953, when Denmark forcibly moved an entire Inughuit community off their land to make room for the growing American base, the same base now being fought over. When Greenlanders voted in March 2025, the party that came out on top was Demokraatit, which wants independence but the slow, careful, build-the-economy-first kind, not a lurch from one big power's arms into another's. Their leader, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, put the whole affair about as flatly as anyone could: "nobody else than Greenland and the Kingdom of Denmark have the mandate to make deals," and Greenland has "no wish to become part of the US." Denmark's prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, kept repeating the same short sentence throughout: Greenland is not for sale.

You can hear, underneath all of it, a very old frustration. For more than 150 years, Greenland has been something other people wanted, argued over, offered gold for, built bases on, and drew up plans around, usually in rooms thousands of miles away, in languages most Greenlanders do not speak. Seward wanted it. Truman wanted it. This president wanted it. The one group whose wishes kept getting treated as a formality is the one group whose home it actually is.

So the real question was never whether Greenland is worth having. Of course it is. It sits under the missiles, over the shipping lanes, and on top of the minerals, and it will only get more valuable as the ice keeps going. The real question is whether the 56,000 people who live on that coast ever get to be the ones who decide what happens to it, or whether they spend another century and a half being the most strategically important people on Earth that nobody bothers to ask.

Sources

• Wikipedia, "Greenland crisis" (the 2024-2026 timeline, the tariff threats, the "absolute necessity" and Davos statements, and the base commander's removal).
• CNN, "Trump renews threat of military force to annex Greenland" (his refusal to rule out force).
• Council on Foreign Relations, "The Trump Administration's Push for Greenland: What to Know" (the strategic case, Pituffik, minerals and NATO implications).
• CBS News, "85% of Greenlanders don't want their island to become part of the U.S., poll finds" (the January 2025 Verian poll).
• Verian, "Opinion poll in Greenland, January 2025" (the 85% / 6% / 9% breakdown and methodology).
• NPR, "Opposition party wins the most votes in Greenland election amid Trump takeover talk" (the March 2025 Demokraatit victory and Nielsen).
• Reuters / BBC coverage of the 2019 episode via Wikipedia, "Donald Trump and the proposed purchase of Greenland" (Seward 1867, the 1946 Truman gold offer, the 1951 Thule treaty, and the 2019 "absurd" exchange).
• Statista, "Greenland's Economy Depends on Fishing and Danish Subsidies" (the block grant's share of Greenland's budget).
• PBS News, "Hundreds of Greenlandic women and girls were forcibly given contraception between 1960 and 1991, report says" (the forced-contraception "spiral case" and the independent investigation).
• Mining Technology, "Greenland passes bill to ban uranium exploration and mining" (the 2021 ban that halted the Kvanefjeld rare-earth project).