
Yes, Trump’s Bold Greenland Plan Could Actually Work
Greenland coming closer to the United States has solid precedents in both international law and our own constitutional system
President-elect Donald Trump’s suggestion that the United States explore a closer relationship with Greenland — up to and including that immense territory, the largest island in the world, joining the Union — epitomizes his out-of-the-box thinking. President Trump deployed that sort of thinking to powerful effect in his first term in office. It’s how he tackled such seemingly insoluble problems as energy supply, immigration, and Middle East peace.
The president-elect’s Greenland suggestion has triggered predictable hyperventilation and pearl-clutching among editorial page writers and elites in Washington, D.C., and foreign capitals alike. However, the United States getting closer to Greenland has obvious geopolitical benefits — and less obvious but strong grounding in international law. Let’s unpack the geopolitics and then the international law.
Greenland holds a crucial position facing the Arctic Ocean, and the Arctic Ocean is a focal point of growing contestation over the vast natural resources that its seabed contains. Russia is maneuvering aggressively to dominate the Arctic, a challenge to the United States that Greenland would help meet.
Greenland itself contains important wealth, not least of all rare earth metals. China seeks to corner the market on rare earth metals because these are indispensable to a range of technologies critical to American national security. Greenland would help with rare earth metals.
Greenland’s long Atlantic coasts, east and west, are also strategically important, adjacent as they are to the transit routes from Europe to America. If global warming really happens, Greenland’s geopolitical importance will only grow, in part because Greenland commands the eastern entrance to the Northwest Passage — the Arctic route connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific that would become one of the world’s chief oceanic lines of communication if its waters turn less icy.