Why Greenland Has Become America’s Next Imperial Obsession – OpEd

Donald Trump’s renewed threat to annex Greenland is not an eccentric outburst but a crystallisation of U.S. imperial logic in an age of climate crisis and hegemonic erosion. Beneath the rhetoric of “national security” lies a deeper project: subordinating political autonomy, militarising the Arctic, and converting ecological breakdown into a new frontier of accumulation. Greenland exposes the contradictions of American power—and the fragility of the Atlantic order itself.

Empire Speaks Without Diplomacy

When Donald Trump declares that the United States needs Greenland “very badly,” and refuses to rule out the use of force to obtain it, he is not merely provoking allies. He is articulating, with unusual candour, the imperial unconscious of U.S. power. What liberal administrations once wrapped in the language of partnership, deterrence, and rules-based order is now stated as entitlement.

This is not a personal pathology. It is a structural moment. As U.S. global dominance confronts material limits—economic, ecological, and geopolitical—the imperial centre increasingly abandons procedural restraint. Greenland is not an exception to U.S. foreign policy; it is a condensation of its logic under stress.

Trump’s willingness to contemplate military coercion against a NATO ally signals a profound shift: alliance commitments, legal norms, and democratic consent are now negotiable when they obstruct strategic acquisition. In this sense, Greenland is not simply an island. It is a test of whether sovereignty still constrains empire.

Greenland’s Autonomy and the Afterlife of Colonial Rule

Greenland’s political status is often described as “self-governing,” but this formulation conceals a deeper asymmetry. Formally part of the Kingdom of Denmark, Greenland exercises extensive control over domestic affairs while foreign policy, defence, and monetary authority remain in Copenhagen’s hands. This arrangement is not accidental; it is the residue of colonial rule stretching back nearly three centuries.

The Inuit population of Greenland has borne the costs of this history: forced assimilation, social engineering, and state-sanctioned violations of bodily autonomy, most starkly exposed in the forced contraceptive programmes imposed on Greenlandic women and girls in the 1960s and 1970s. These are not historical footnotes. They shape contemporary demands for independence and dignity.

Support for sovereignty is now mainstream in Greenlandic politics. But crucially, independence is framed as decolonisation—not as a pivot toward Washington. Polls consistently show that while Greenlanders favour eventual independence from Denmark, they overwhelmingly reject incorporation into the United States. Trump’s proposal thus reproduces a colonial fantasy: that authority over Greenland is transferable between metropolitan powers, regardless of the will of its people.

The Strategic Obsession: Greenland as Military Infrastructure

From Washington’s vantage point, Greenland is a strategic asset of the highest order. Located between North America and Eurasia, it occupies the shortest missile trajectories linking the United States with Russia. The U.S. military base at Pituffik—formerly Thule—has long been integral to ballistic missile early-warning systems and space surveillance.

As great-power rivalry intensifies, the Arctic is being reimagined as a future theatre of conflict. Russia is expanding its northern military footprint; China describes itself as a “near-Arctic state” and invests in polar research and logistics. For U.S. strategists, Greenland represents not merely defence but positional dominance: control over airspace, sea lanes, and the technological infrastructure of Arctic warfare.

Yet this obsession reveals a deeper anxiety. The United States already enjoys extensive military access to Greenland through agreements with Denmark. Sovereignty adds little operational capacity. What it offers instead is certainty—imperial insurance against diplomatic friction and local resistance. Ownership, in this logic, is the ultimate guarantee.

Climate Crisis and the Political Economy of the Arctic

If militarisation explains the strategic interest in Greenland, climate change explains its urgency. Rapidly melting ice sheets are transforming the Arctic from a frozen margin into an accessible frontier. Greenland contains significant deposits of rare earth elements, uranium, and critical minerals essential for renewable energy technologies, advanced electronics, and modern weapons systems.

At the same time, thawing Arctic waters are opening new shipping routes that could radically shorten trade corridors between Europe and Asia. In a world of disrupted supply chains and intensifying competition over resources, these developments carry immense economic significance.

From a political-economic perspective, Greenland represents accumulation by dispossession in its contemporary form. Ecological destruction—driven overwhelmingly by industrial capitalism—creates the conditions for new rounds of extraction. The climate crisis is thus not a constraint on capital but a mechanism for its geographical reorganisation.

Trump’s shifting justifications—from “real estate deal” to “economic security” to “national security”—are not inconsistent. They trace the fusion of military and economic imperatives at the heart of imperial expansion. Security discourse clears the terrain; capital stands ready to exploit it.

“National Security” as Ideological Weapon

Few phrases carry as much coercive power as “national security.” It suspends legal scrutiny, marginalises democratic claims, and recasts aggression as necessity. In the Greenland case, it functions precisely in this way.

The security of Greenlanders themselves—who face housing shortages, public health challenges, and the social legacies of colonial governance—is absent from U.S. calculations. So too is the security of Arctic ecosystems already approaching irreversible tipping points. What is prioritised instead is U.S. primacy: the capacity to deny rivals access to strategic space and resources.

Security here is not about collective safety. It is about hierarchy. It is the ideological language through which empire normalises subordination.

A Century-Long Imperial Desire

Trump’s interest in Greenland has deep historical roots. After purchasing Alaska in 1867, U.S. Secretary of State William Seward explored acquiring Greenland as part of a broader Arctic expansion. In 1946, Washington offered Denmark $100 million to buy the island, citing Cold War defence imperatives. During the Second World War, the United States occupied Greenland when Denmark fell under Nazi control and retained its military presence thereafter.

What distinguishes the present moment is not ambition but tone. Earlier administrations relied on treaties, leases, and alliances to achieve functional control. Trump revives the language of acquisition itself. He speaks not of access but of possession. This shift signals an empire less confident in its ability to manage consent—and therefore more willing to dispense with it.

NATO, International Law, and the Crisis of the Atlantic Order

Trump’s refusal to rule out force against Greenland places the United States in open contradiction with the principles underpinning NATO and the post-1945 international legal order. The UN Charter prohibits the acquisition of territory by force and affirms the right of peoples to self-determination. Greenland is not terra nullius. It is a political community with recognised rights.

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s warning that a U.S. attack on a NATO ally would spell the end of the alliance exposes a structural contradiction long obscured by American dominance. NATO presents itself as a defensive pact of equals, yet it remains dependent on a power increasingly willing to violate the very norms it claims to defend.

For much of the Global South, this hypocrisy is familiar. Greenland simply reveals it within the core of the Atlantic world.

Greenlandic Resistance and the Politics of Unity

Trump’s threats have had an unintended consequence: political consolidation within Greenland. In response to external pressure, the island formed a broad coalition government explicitly affirming that “Greenland belongs to us.” Even the most pro-U.S. party now finds itself isolated.

Greenlandic leaders have rejected annexation unequivocally. Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen has dismissed Trump’s rhetoric as unacceptable between allies, insisting that Greenland’s future will be decided democratically, not imposed by force.

This resistance matters beyond Greenland. It asserts political subjectivity against a global system that routinely treats small societies as strategic objects. It insists that autonomy is not a bargaining chip in great-power rivalry.

Empire in the Age of Ecological Breakdown

The scramble for Greenland illuminates a broader transformation of global capitalism. As ecological limits tighten and geopolitical competition intensifies, powerful states are racing to secure control over strategic spaces, resources, and infrastructures. The Arctic becomes a laboratory for a new imperial configuration: militarised, extractive, and increasingly contemptuous of legal restraint.

Trump’s Greenland gambit is therefore not a deviation but a harbinger. It reveals how the United States responds to relative decline—not through cooperative global governance, but through coercive acquisition and the revival of territorial ambition.

Autonomy Against Possession

Greenland stands at the intersection of three crises: colonial afterlives, climate catastrophe, and imperial overstretch. Trump’s call to seize it forces a confrontation with uncomfortable truths about American power.

To oppose annexation is not merely to criticise one president’s excesses. It is to defend a principle under sustained assault: that peoples are not property, territory is not a commodity, and security cannot be built on subordination.

When Trump says, “We need Greenland,” he articulates a worldview in which everything is ultimately ownable. When Greenlanders reply, “Greenland belongs to us,” they articulate a counter-principle with global significance.

For intellectuals, policymakers, and movements alike, the choice is stark. Either accept a world where ecological crisis accelerates imperial seizure—or insist that self-determination, law, and democratic accountability still matter, even when empire finds them inconvenient.

Greenland, frozen and distant, has become a mirror. What it reflects is the future struggling to be decided.