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Thematic Article
Dragged to the ballroom: Greenland and the American threat of annexation
Gérard Duhaime*†
,
Gerard.Duhaime@soc.ulaval.ca
Birger Poppel‡
, MarieKathrine Poppel§
, Louis-Jacques Dorais¶
Abstract
Beginning during the Second World War, the United States concluded a series of agreements with the Kingdom of Denmark that allowed the US considerable latitude to access Greenlandic territory for its own security. The claim of the current US Administration, that it requires control over Greenland for security reasons, is therefore specious. The US interest in annexing the country is more likely motivated by its substantial mineral reserves, especially of rare earth elements, in the face of competition not from China, as alleged, but from the European Union. Under the pretext that rare earths are needed for technologies to tackle the climate crisis, the drive for their extraction is part of a process of militarisation and digitisation set to concentrate shareholder value in unprecedented private fortunes. The annexation of Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) would amount to policide, reducing an Indigenous nation to an ethnic minority within the American melting pot. This article is published in the Thematic Collection ‘On Greenland’, edited by Tim Ingold.
Keywords
annexationdefencemineral reservesneo-colonialismpoliciderare earth elementssecurityUnited StatesThreat of policide
‘Policide’ refers to the forcible elimination of a group’s political authority and national identity (Stern 2004; Walzer 2015). This danger currently threatens the Kalaallit, the Indigenous people of Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), due to projects pursued by the United States Presidency, projects that have prompted the largest demonstrations ever held in Greenland (KNR 2026). Since 2019, the US President has repeatedly asserted a desire to gain control over Greenland by purchasing it from the Kingdom of Denmark, or by other means such as negotiation, economic sanctions, or the threat of military force. The central justification is for US ‘national security’: Greenland is deemed vital to the defence interests of North America, which Denmark alone would allegedly be unable to guarantee. Yet since the Second World War, the USA has concluded several agreements with Denmark on precisely this issue.
The Greenland agreements
Before the Second World War, the United States had no permanent military presence in Greenland. This changed significantly following the German occupation of Denmark in 1940. Owing to Greenland’s strategic location, its defence came to be regarded as essential to prevent ‘Greenland from being converted into a point of aggression against the nations of the American continent’, to monitor the North Atlantic, and to establish air routes to Europe. The Greenland Treaty was signed on 9 April 1941 by the Danish Ambassador in Washington and the US Secretary of State (Jensen et al. 2013). It was then agreed that the US Government had the right to construct military facilities. Several base-facilities were subsequently developed: nine in West Greenland, including the Narsarsuaq and Kangerlussuaq (Sondrestrom) airports; and five in East Greenland, including Kulusuk.
In 1951, the 1941 Greenland Treaty was replaced by the Defense Agreement. The Preamble states that both the US and the Kingdom of Denmark are parties to the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty and thus have responsibilities including the defence of the North Atlantic Treaty area. The Defense Agreement further lists the conditions under which the US can ‘assist the Government of the Kingdom of Denmark by establishing and/or operating such defense areas’ (Article II), including ‘the right of free access to and movement between the defense areas through Greenland’. The Thule Air Base was constructed on the terms of the 1951 Agreement. During the postwar years, the US abandoned most of its military installations in Greenland. According to the Kangerlussuaq Agreement, signed in 1991 as the Cold War came to an end, the Thule Air Base—recently renamed Pituffik Space Base—would remain as the only US military facility, the operation and support of Sondrestrom and Kulusuk having been transferred to Danish and Greenlandic authorities. However, the US retained use rights to these installations. In 2004, the Igaliku Agreement, co-signed by the Government of Greenland, stated that the Status of Forces Agreement (NATO SOFA) has applied in Greenland since 1955, and that its terms would apply to the establishment of any new defence areas.
Taken together, these agreements grant the United States Government considerable latitude in accessing Greenlandic territory. Today, US operations are subject only to the obligation set out in section 3 of the Igaliku Agreement: to ‘consult with and inform the Government of the Kingdom of Denmark, including the Home Rule Government of Greenland’, in cases where military aircraft are required to land outside designated airports, or prior to the implementation of any significant changes to US military operations or facilities in Greenland. Given the latitude enshrined in existing agreements, the claim of the current US Administration, that it requires control over Greenland for the purposes of national security, is entirely specious. There is a certain sophistry in invoking ‘national security’ as a screen behind which to conceal the covetous interest in Greenland’s resources and to legitimise their appropriation.
Natural resources
Greenland is rich in oil and minerals. The history of exploration and exploitation goes back several hundred years. The Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland estimates that Greenland holds roughly 36 million tons of Rare Earth Elements (REE) (Rosa et al. 2023). The US Geological Survey estimates that 1.5 million tons of this total might be mined economically and ranks Greenland among the ten countries in the world with the largest REE reserves (US Geological Survey 2025).
The increasing desire of the Western world to secure value chains for such minerals that are less dependent on China represents an opportunity for Greenland. Since 2010 Greenland’s government has presented the country’s mineral potentials to investors at international mining fora. In order to attract investment, legislation on Large Scale Projects (construction budgets greater than 5 billion DKK) was passed in 2012/13, which includes special incentives for foreign investors, such as possibilities to hire foreign labour under working conditions not matching those generally agreed upon in the Greenlandic labour market. Today, Greenland’s Government is actively promoting the image of ‘an underexplored, mineral-rich country with a competitive licensing framework, a stable political environment, low investment risk, and a pro-mining population and government’.1
In short, Greenland abounds in highly sought-after resources; its government is actively seeking to develop the sector; and the United States already enjoys privileged relations there. Why, then, should the US seek to place the country under tutelage?
Political status and resources
A Danish colony until 1953, Greenland was then granted the status of a Danish country with representation in the Parliament in Copenhagen. In 1979, an elected Greenlandic political authority was established through the creation of the Greenland Home Rule Government (Kingdom of Denmark 1978a). The Act on Greenland Self-Government came into force in 2009, confirming the full powers of the Greenlandic Parliament over public affairs, with the exception of foreign policy, defence, and monetary policy (Kingdom of Denmark 2009). Ownership and control of the Greenlandic subsurface has historically been a key political issue, not least in the negotiations in the Greenland-Danish committees developing the legal acts on Home Rule Government and Greenland Self-Government. After decades during which responsibilities were unevenly distributed, Greenlanders assumed full authority in this area from 2010 (Kingdom of Denmark 1978a,b, 2009).
There is no privately owned land in Greenland: all rights to the use of land are administered by the Government of Greenland. Acknowledgement of the Greenlandic people’s right to the mineral resources, and the government’s control of all aspects of mining activities, created hopes that the wealth generated by such activities might contribute to increased economic diversification and self-reliance, easing the path to complete independence. At the same time, concerns to protect Greenland’s environment and natural resources have remained at the heart of political debate. A uranium mining ban, introduced during the Cold War, was reinforced in 1988, revoked by the Greenlandic Parliament in 2013, and—based on a vision of sustainable economic development—reinstated in 2021. The same political priorities led the Greenland Government, in the same year, to impose a moratorium on new oil and gas exploration.
Greenlandic caution, legitimately grounded in concerns over the deleterious impacts of mining, undoubtedly frustrated American enthusiasm. This may help to explain US interests in annexation. These interests may have less to do with the so-called ‘Chinese threat’—another spectre invoked by the presidency—than with the strategic partnership concluded in 2023 between the Greenland authorities and the European Union to develop sustainable value chains for mineral resources (European Commission 2023).
Growth regime
The USA’s longstanding interest in Greenland’s mineral reserves can be traced back to the months preceding its entry into the Second World War. Owing to the significance of the mineral cryolite for the production of aluminium used in fighter aircraft, access to the cryolite mine at Ivittuut in southern Greenland was of immense strategic importance. It was this that motivated the Greenland Treaty of 1941. Had today’s justificatory hyperbole surrounding rare earth elements been applied to the mid-20th-century context, cryolite would undoubtedly have been classed as a ‘critical mineral’.
Everything points to the conclusion that resource access is the primary consideration behind the USA’s current desire to control Greenland, a country paradoxically threatened by the very actor claiming the right to defend itself. From the period of the first Trump Administration, the US deployed its resources to influence Greenlandic Government policies deemed incompatible with the promotion of economic deregulation (Lauder 2025). In 2019, the US concluded a new Memorandum of Understanding with Greenland aimed at developing its mineral potential. One objective of this agreement, as explained by Frank Fannon, US Assistant Secretary of State for Energy Resources, was ‘to help Greenland, armed with the data, to develop a regulatory structure to exploit mineral finds and market future tenders’ (Reuters 2019; US Department of State 2019). In short, the US leveraged its influence to establish a framework favourable to its own interests.
This stance, adopted by the US Presidency, is clearly aligned with its positions on Ukraine and Gaza, and its repeated threats to annex Canada. For example, in Nunavik, in eastern Arctic Canada, the Strange Lake Project, advanced by the Canadian company Torngat Metals, presents itself as ‘one of the world’s premier rare earth developments’ (Torngat Metals 2026). Major investors include a firm operating within Donald Trump’s orbit. The Chair of Torngat Metals’ Board of Directors, Thomas F. Gilman, stepped down from his position on 28 October 2025, only a few days after Radio-Canada, CBC French services, published revelations highlighting his political ties to Trump—he had served in the first Trump administration and was a generous donor (Normandin & Chicoine-McKenzie 2025). Gilman also authored Chapter 21 of the 2025 Project, in which he advocates the dismantling of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), described as having become ‘one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, …harmful to future U.S. prosperity’ (Gilman 2025: 675). Yet Torngat Metals presents itself as aspiring to become ‘a leading supplier of …rare earth elements, which are essential to the energy transition and the fight against climate change’ (Torngat Metals 2026). The hypocrisy of this aspiration is only magnified by the prospect that the company’s output would be directed, in the first place, towards the US military armaments sector (Andersen et al. 2026).
Here again, the professed virtue of the project scarcely conceals its underlying purpose. The exploitation of REEs cannot sustain the promise of an exit from the climate crisis—a promise that serves merely as a virtuous alibi behind which actors pursue other ends (Crawford 2021; Fraser 2023). The unspoken promise is that of accelerated growth, a defining feature of our time (Romano 2024). This acceleration is fuelled, inter alia, by the militarisation and the digitisation of the world, leading to the capture of rent in indecent proportions derived from monopolistic control, as evidenced by the dominance of the GAFAM2 corporations at the top of global market-capitalisation rankings (Durand 2023; Izoard 2024). Within this ‘value chain’, the strategic role assigned to extractive industry is not to resolve the climate crisis, but to generate shareholder value in the form of unprecedentedly vast private fortunes.
Policide and neocolonialism
In February 2026, a demonstration of cross-border solidarity saw the Inuit of Nunavik in Canada support the Kalaallit (Stefanovich 2026). They are witnessing situations akin to the events in Greenland. The Canadian Critical Minerals Strategy (Natural Resources Canada 2022) offers justification for numerous legislative and fiscal measures designed to promote mineral exploration and extraction (Parliament of Canada 2025), at the risk of undermining the constitutional rights of Indigenous Peoples (Assembly of First Nations 2025; Naskapi Nation 2025; Makivvik Corporation 2026). These measures make it possible, for instance, to grant financial support amounting to CAD 165–175 million to the aforementioned company, Torngat Metals (Andersen et al. 2026). Mining projects and their potential environmental impacts are jeopardising the vital customary activities of the Indigenous Peoples of the region. The threat to the Kalaallit is a threat to the Inuit as well, as together they seek the right both to their own culture and to self-determination (Hervé 2017).
For Greenland and the Kalaallit, the stakes of this new gold rush are existential. The Act on Greenland Self-Government recognises that the Kalaallit constitute a distinct people under international law, specifying in section 21(1) that ‘any decision regarding Greenland’s independence shall be taken by the population of Greenland’ (Kingdom of Denmark 2009). In 2024, 88 per cent of the country’s approximately 56,700 inhabitants were Kalaallit (Statistics Greenland 2024). This makes Kalaallit Nunaat the only almost fully sovereign political entity in the Americas governed by an Indigenous people.
Any attempt by the US to take control of Kalaallit Nunaat—whether through purchase, force, or other means—would result in the destruction of a political entity. Under American domination, the Kalaallit would be reduced from the status of an Indigenous nation entitled to choose independence if and when it so wishes, to that of a coloured ethnic minority within the American melting pot. Such an outcome would amount to policide. American extractivism generates a form of neocolonialism that seeks to neutralise the resurgence of Indigenous Peoples, their nations and communities. The alibi of technological solutionism behind which the military–industrial–technological complex pretends to address the ills of our time is coupled with only thinly veiled threats of force.
It is the defining attitude of contemporary US imperialism that, by dragging its minions into the ballroom, its celebration may continue. And for Greenland and the Kalaallit, that the current US President appears driven more by the glorification of his legacy in the ballroom than by the economic and political motives built into the power structures to which his administration is subservient, only aggravates the situation.
Acknowledgements
The authors express their gratitude to Dr Gail Fondahl, Professor Emerita at the University of Northern British Columbia, who kindly agreed to review the first draft of this essay.
Declaration of conflict of interest
The authors declare no potential conflict of interest.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research and authorship of this article.
AI disclosure
The authors declare that no AI was used in the preparation of this work.
Agreements Cited
Government of the United States of America and Government of the Kingdom of Denmark. (1941), Agreement between the United States of America and Denmark respecting the defense of Greenland. Signed 9 April 1941. Washington, DC/Copenhagen. (Greenland Treaty).
Government of the United States of America and Government of the Kingdom of Denmark. (1951), Defense of Greenland: Agreement between the United States and the Kingdom of Denmark. Signed 27 April 1951. Washington, DC/Copenhagen. (Defense Agreement).
Government of the Kingdom of Denmark and Government of the United States of America. (1991), Memorandum of Understanding concerning use of Sondrestrom Aviation Facility, Kulusuk Airfield and other matters related to United States military activities in Greenland. Signed 13 March 1991. Copenhagen/Washington, DC. (Kangerlussuaq Agreement).
Government of the United States of America and Government of the Kingdom of Denmark (including the Home Rule Government of Greenland). (2004), Agreement to amend and supplement the Agreement of 27 April 1951 pursuant to the North Atlantic Treaty concerning the defense of Greenland (Defense Agreement), including relevant subsequent agreements. Signed 6 August 2004. Washington, DC/Copenhagen. (Igaliku Agreement).
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1
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2
GAFAM refers to the five dominant US technology giants: Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft.
Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/014.a31
Published on: 29 September 2026
Volume: 14
Issue: Issue 3
Article view count: 8
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© The author(s) 2026. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Duhaime, G., Poppel, B., Poppel M. and Dorais, L-J. (2026), ‘Dragged to the ballroom: Greenland and the American threat of annexation’, Journal of the British Academy, 14(3): a31 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/014.a31Crossref
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July 2023
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