In 2019 when the proposal for an American purchase of Greenland last (briefly) arose, the gambit, though quickly superseded by more pressing events including the calamitous global pandemic and forging peace after two decades of war in Afghanistan, yielded several immediate and consequential effects.
First, it annoyed the hell out of America’s small NATO ally, Denmark, and cracked open the façade of fraternal Danish-Greenland unity, revealing a raw, simmering and fitful process of decolonization sorely in need of a jump start. (Annoying NATO allies was then, and is now once again, a presidential prerogative, a reminder to allies to not only carry their own weight but to respect the superior power of their alliance leader and military guarantor – a major departure from the conscientious effort to foster unity and expand the alliance under the previous administration).
And second, it sent a clear “Private Property! No Trespassing! Keep Out!” signal to America’s principal great power rivals, foremost among them Beijing just a year after it had announced itself to the world as a Near-Arctic state with the release of its thoughtful and otherwise uncontroversial white paper and the northward extension of its global Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to the Arctic region via its Polar Silk Road – reminding Beijing that Arctic North America still fell under the American sphere of influence, as it had since the 19th century when the Monroe Doctrine was more pro-actively asserted, and New England whaling ships regularly cruised off Greenland’s shores. And to Moscow, in addition to warning Russia to stay out of Arctic North America, it also signalled that once again America embraced a vision for the world where great power expansion was no longer taboo, a vision that Russia under Putin had been embracing for the better part of a decade and which in 2022 it embraced with newfound (if not misplaced) vigour and which now presents common ground for renewed diplomatic engagement.
But America’s 2019 overture to purchase Greenland was at that time just a passing interest, one that quickly faded under the pressure of intensifying current events as described above. But this time around, it feels different. Less ephemeral. More enduring. Better thought out. Tied to a broader vision of hemispheric security and a recalibration of America’s national security priorities, where NATO (after a brief period of tiresome unity and (perhaps) overly confident expansion) found itself once again outside Trump 2.0’s perception of America’s core national security interests, which had retreated behind a hemispheric moat made possible by three oceans and whole lot of ice.
Russia, for a time the bogeyman of European insecurity that drove the long-neutral Finns and Swedes into the arms of a welcoming NATO alliance as Ukraine teetered on the edge of sovereign existence, has now been quickly rehabilitated as a fellow God-fearing, traditional-valued, and in many ways like-minded partner (long imagined in the West albeit under more democratic-universalistic terms but now taking on a more autarkic form), both governed by strongmen keen to assert national power and expand and/or restore their lost and/or imagined sovereign supremacy.
Greenland’s quick re-emergence at the centre of the strategic world continues to be mocked by mainstream members of the foreign policy “blob” responsible for squandering America’s Cold War victory and turning the post-9/11 global consensus to eradicate terror into an endless series of forever wars divorced from both strategic reality and American interests. But more and more, people are talking, reacting, and analyzing its new place in the emergent order, and what feels to be a restoration of America’s 19th century world view where Greenland was a vibrant contributor to the American economy through its role in the commercial whale trade centred in southern New England, where in the small town of Groton there can still be found the interred remains of members of the small Inuit community that made Connecticut their home, and which could be understood as one of the Greenland diplomatic community’s first overseas diplomatic representations (of which there are now several, from Beijing to Brussels to Washington).
Even after the short-lived 2019 courtship by Trump 1.0 of Greenland, there was a flurry of sustained diplomatic and strategic outreach to the island nation, culminating in the re-opening of America’s consulate in Nuuk for the first since the early Cold War to kick-start American investment in Greenland. Now, this renewed courtship will likely enjoy even more robust and more sustained efforts to strengthen the economic, diplomatic and strategic bonds that have long united Greenland and the United States, for as long as America has been an emergent polar power with economic interests spanning from the Bering Sea to Baffin Bay and from the Arctic Ocean to the Antarctic during the first wave of 19th century globalization when America’s polar presence was sustained and significant.
While far-flung Alaska was the first Arctic territory to become a target for America’s strategic expansion as engineered by Secretary of State William H. Seward, Greenland was on Seward’s strategic map for America’s polar expansion, but for a number of reasons including competing interests in expanding America’s presence in the Caribbean (which required some quid pro quo with the Danes), early interests in adding Greenland to the American constitutional family were deferred to future generations. So while the world was surprised by Trump 1.0’s initial 2019 interest in Greenland and mocked it mercilessly (as contemporaries did of Seward’s then-widely lampooned “folly”), and missed the long, simmering ambition dating back over 150 years for America to one day gain sovereign possession over the island sitting along the northeast flank of North America (a geographic position that was long recognized by other powers including the Germans when under the Nazis' violently expansionist rule), this time around, there is a greater appreciation of the economic logic and strategic wisdom of such a vision, even if it does feel very much an atavism of the 19th century.
With more momentum, and thus a higher likelihood of coming to fruition, it becomes more important than ever to understand some of the strategic nuances and asymmetries at work which may challenge the ease of an American expansion but which if better understood could help smooth the way forward to the 51st star on the American flag.
Barry Scott Zellen, PhD is a Research Scholar in the Department of Geography at the University of Connecticut, and a Senior Fellow (Arctic Security) at the Institute of the North. He is author, most recently, of Arctic Exceptionalism: Cooperation in a Contested World (Lynne Rienner Books, 2024). He lived in the North in the 1990s, residing in Inuvik (1990-93), Yellowknife (1994-1998) and Whitehorse (1989-90, 1998-2000).
