I’m an expert on the Arctic – there’s one thing Donald Trump doesn’t know about Greenland

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine upset the delicate and broadly depoliticised balance in the Arctic – and now Trump has taken a sledgehammer to it, argues Edward Jones

In August 2019, Donald Trump decided that he wanted to buy Greenland. It remains unclear exactly where he got the idea. The US had tried to acquire Greenland from Denmark in the aftermath of the Second World War, sensing an opportunity for strategic advantage. Perhaps he’d heard about that somewhere...

By 2021, Trump was out of office and the Greenland deal became the sort of bizarre foreign policy anecdote that was characteristic of that time.

Greenland, for its part, tried to make light of the unexpected attention. The then-prime minister Kim Kielsen made the case that Greenland was “not for sale” but instead “open for business“ and, for a while, that was that.

Now, Trump is once again looking north. His rhetoric has intensified, going so far as to describe control of Greenland as an “absolute necessity” – why?

One possibility is that we’re being had. Trump has a long history of making inflammatory political statements and announcing ambitions which appeal to his fans and keep the rest of us scratching our heads. (At the same Florida news conference in January this year, Trump also suggested renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.)

It is not hard to see why “buying” Greenland – a vast territory which is nonetheless distorted to look much vaster than it actually is on most world maps – might appeal to a man who was a property tycoon for much longer than he has been a politician. In 2019, Trump described the whole project as “essentially a large real estate deal”. But Trump himself paid little attention to the Arctic in his first term.

This leads us to a second possibility: that this time, Trump is playing a strategic game. After all, the importance of Greenland’s location has never been lost on the US military, which already maintains a sizable presence in northern Greenland.

Reporters tasked with making sense of Trump’s remarks have been keen to reiterate what Arctic experts have been telling us for years: that the Arctic is changing and becoming more important. It is undoubtedly true that Greenland occupies avital strategic position for detecting missiles and Russian and Chinese vessels, and that it is rich in critical minerals.

Greenland is gaining attention due to its strategic location (EPA)

Still, to be clear, I don’t think the president-elect will actually attempt to buy, let alone invade, Greenland. When he takes office, a swathe of foreign policy challenges will present themselves, which will keep Greenland in the background, and there is every possibility that we’ll hear no more about it.

But the other possibility – one that we should find all the more concerning – is that this is part of a pattern: that Trump and his advisers are turning their attention to the north. That, in turn, will dictate whether the region remains primarily a place of scientific and economic interest or a more highly politicised and militarised zone.

When I first became interested in the Arctic almost a decade ago, it wasn’t at all uncommon for people to talk about the region as “exceptional”. It almost felt as though it was immune to the winds of geopolitics. International organisations like the Arctic Council allowed for comprehensive scientific and technical cooperation between all of the Arctic states, including Russia and the US.

The Arctic Council stands outside the UN system and outside mainstream political discourse, and most Arctic policy and science elites are happy for it to remain that way.

The US, incidentally, does rather well out of this system. While most American lawmakers have little interest in the Arctic, in my own research, I’ve seen how a more specialist group of scientists and politicians, mostly from Alaska, have generated a great deal of goodwill from their peers across the region and beyond it.

By contrast, the previous Trump administration’s admonishments of both friendly and rival states in the Arctic (denying, for instance, Canada’s claims to the Northwest Passage, and tactlessly challenging China’s growing influence in the region) earned it little sympathy.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a nail in the coffin for “Arctic exceptionalism”: all of the Arctic Council member states aside from Russia temporarily withdrew from the Council in protest. It showed that the Arctic, perhaps, wasn’t so insulated.

If Trump’s expansionist rhetoric on Greenland is part of a pattern, the Arctic could become yet more militarised and securitised. This could mean the loss of vital scientific cooperation on climate change. It could pose challenges to the way that the Arctic is governed: to existing treaties, to the rights of self-governance for Indigenous people, and to organisations like the Arctic Council. And, most concerningly, it opens up avenues for conflict.

These are the real stakes, even if Greenland does not become the 51st state. The Arctic will undoubtedly be watching with bated breath.

Edward Jones is a social scientist who specialises in soft power and science diplomacy, with particular expertise in the Arctic and Japan