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Thematic Article
Greenland in world affairs: the limits of geopolitical perspectives on Arctic governance
Oran R. Young*†
oran.young@gmail.com
Abstract
The geopolitical premises underlying recent arguments about the role of Greenland in world affairs do not align well with Arctic realities; some of the specific assertions appearing frequently in popular accounts are simply at odds with the facts. This does not mean that the place of the Arctic in international society is not changing or that Greenland is unimportant in the overall Arctic picture. But it does suggest that popular accounts of the role of Greenland are not helpful to those seeking to understand current developments in the Arctic and to address specific issues pertaining to Greenland. What is needed going forward is an effort to collaborate with Greenlandic leaders seeking to promote liberal values, rather than the promotion of outdated imperialistic practices bent upon the annexation of lands and peoples regardless of their desires. This article is published in the Thematic Collection ‘On Greenland’, edited by Tim Ingold.
Keywords
Arctic CouncilArctic exceptionalismChinageopoliticsmilitarisationrare earth elementsRussiasecurityshippingTrump AdministrationWhat is the issue?
The recent flurry of public attention devoted to Greenland, triggered by President Trump’s aggressive campaign to wrest control of the island from the Kingdom of Denmark, centres on a set of claims regarding the importance of Greenland in terms of military security and valuable natural resources. These claims rest in turn on an increasingly popular geopolitical narrative about the role of the Arctic in international society. According to this account, the era often described as Arctic exceptionalism is over.1 The Arctic has instead emerged as a key arena of Great-Power politics featuring an increasingly intense competition for influence among China, Russia, and the United States. Although the region is peaceful today, tensions are rising; there is a growing prospect of armed clashes occurring in the Far North in the coming years. Given Greenland’s location, the argument goes, control of the island is of increasing importance to policymakers in the national capitals of the Great Powers as they contemplate the next moves in their great Arctic game.
Is this argument persuasive; is it even plausible? The answer depends on the credibility of the new geopolitical narrative regarding the role of the Arctic, as well as on more specific claims pertaining to military security and the natural resources located in Greenland. In this essay, I argue that popular accounts regarding the importance of Greenland are not persuasive. Their underlying geopolitical premises do not align well with Arctic realities, while some of their most commonly repeated assertions are simply at odds with the facts. This does not mean that the place of the Arctic in international society is not changing or that Greenland is unimportant to the overall Arctic picture. But it does suggest that popular accounts of the role of Greenland are not helpful to those seeking to understand current developments in the Arctic and to address specific issues pertaining to the country.
Is the new Arctic geopolitical narrative credible?
From the 1990s through the 2010s, the idea of Arctic exceptionalism dominated thinking about issues arising in the Far North (Young 2020). On this account, the Arctic was a somewhat peripheral region with policy agendas of its own. Arctic nations could cooperate in progressing these agendas without having to pay too much attention to broader global concerns. Their effectiveness in doing so could even offer a positive example, encouraging the adoption of a similarly cooperative approach for advancing policy agendas in other regions. One showpiece for this way of thinking was the establishment and operation of the Arctic Council, regarded as the pre-eminent forum for addressing Arctic issues of international scope.
In more recent years, and especially with the tensions arising from the Ukraine war and the transactional policies of the second Trump Administration, popular thinking about the Arctic has shifted dramatically. More and more, we are asked to treat the Arctic as a pivotal arena in the increasingly intense competition among the Great Powers (Rosen 2026). The Arctic is experiencing a military build-up. All three Great Powers are taking steps to strengthen their position in the Far North. Growing friction, especially in the Barents Sea and along the border between Russia and Finland (now a NATO member), may lead to the outbreak of armed clashes that could easily become unmanageable and escalate dangerously.
What should we make of this latest narrative shift? To be sure, Russia has strengthened its military forces in the Arctic, reopening installations abandoned following the collapse of the Soviet Union and adding more powerful weapons, including advanced submarines, to the arsenal of the Northern Fleet. China has declared itself a ‘near Arctic State’, and has taken steps to build its presence in the Arctic through the development of the Polar Silk Road—a northern extension of its Belt and Road Initiative. It has also established a sizeable programme of ship-based scientific research in the maritime Arctic. The aggressive initiatives of the Trump Administration regarding the control of Greenland are only the most dramatic indications of a growing concern on the part of American policymakers regarding issues of Arctic security.
It is nevertheless easy to exaggerate the significance of these developments, drawing dramatic conclusions from events which, while noteworthy, do not provide persuasive evidence to support the new Arctic geopolitical narrative (Bennett & Dodds 2025). Not only are Russian aircraft based in the Arctic principally deployed to prosecute the Ukraine war, but also casualties sustained in the war have decimated the armed forces stationed in the Arctic. More generally, Russian policymakers are focused intensively on the pursuit of victory in Ukraine. China’s Polar Silk Road initiative has withered and receded from public view. Even in their investments in the Russian North, the Chinese have adopted a cautious approach. China certainly has an interest in developments unfolding in the North Pacific. But there is no indication that the pursuit of power in the Arctic is presently a major concern for Chinese policymakers. Moreover, throughout the period since the waning of the Cold War, the United States has been a reluctant participant in Arctic affairs. Today, there are voices in American policymaking circles calling for a renewed focus on the Arctic, especially when it comes to matters of national security. But as the protracted debate over constructing new icebreakers demonstrates, there is little indication that the United States is prepared to translate assertions about the growing importance of the Arctic into costly initiatives to upgrade the American presence in the region.
Does this mean that we can continue to pursue the ideal of Arctic exceptionalism under current conditions? Of course not. We have entered an era of increased international tension on a global scale, and some of this tension is bound to spill over into the treatment of Arctic issues. Nevertheless, it is important to bear in mind that no intractable conflicts are rooted in the Arctic itself. The Arctic Council still performs useful functions, despite the severe impact of the deepening conflict between Russia and other council members. Other organs of Arctic cooperation, charged with the oversight of specific assets (for example, the Central Arctic Ocean Fisheries Agreement 2018), continue to flourish even in these more unsettled times. In short, while we should acknowledge the impact of dramatic changes in the world order, it would be a mistake to conclude that the Arctic has suddenly become a key theatre for the pursuit of the interests of the Great Powers, or that this means we need to adopt a radically different way of thinking about international relations in the Far North.
What does this mean for Greenland?
What are the implications of this analysis for the current debate regarding the importance of Greenland? Buying into the geopolitical narrative about great power competition in the Arctic with a vengeance, President Trump and his advisors have asserted that the United States needs absolute control over the island, primarily as a matter of national security and secondarily in order to secure access to the large deposits of natural resources it is said to contain. The argument is that, if the United States does not take control of Greenland, then the Russians and perhaps the Chinese will take steps to increase their influence in the country, thus compromising the traditional American position of dominance in North America. But this argument does not stand up to careful scrutiny.
Despite appearances exaggerated by Mercator projections, Greenland is not central to the power dynamics of the Arctic. Chinese vessels seldom appear in Greenlandic waters; Russian vessels are infrequent visitors. Advanced Russian submarines can launch ballistic missiles capable of reaching any location in North America from stations in the high Arctic; they have every reason to remain in the waters of the Arctic Basin to take advantage of the protection afforded by sea ice. Unlike the US Navy, which regularly deploys forces globally including to the waters of the Barents Sea, the Russian Navy has largely concentrated on the waters of the Russian Arctic and the Barents Sea in deploying its Northern Fleet. While the US maintained numerous military bases in Greenland in the years following the end of the Second World War, lack of interest on the part of the American military has led to the dwindling of these facilities over the years to a single base on the northwest coast of the island. This facility, previously known as the Thule Airbase but now renamed the Pituffik Space Base, is an important component of the North Warning System. President Trump has asserted that it could play a role in implementing his vision of a Golden Dome protecting North America from incoming missiles. But there is little reason to believe that this vision will become a reality anytime soon. In the meantime, the number of American military personnel in Greenland has shrunk to less than two hundred.2
Nor is the economic case for Greenland’s importance persuasive. Even if shipping between Asia and Europe via the Northern Sea Route grows substantially—a somewhat doubtful proposition, at least in the near term—vessels plying this route would pass along the coast of Norway, far from Greenland. In the even more unlikely event that commercial shipping using the Northwest Passage becomes a reality, ships would transit the relatively tranquil waters of Baffin Bay between Canada and Greenland. They would have little reason to call at ports in Greenland itself. Under any realistic scenario, Greenland is not likely to become a centre of commercial shipping in the Arctic.
This leaves the issue of natural resources. Initial exploration for oil and gas along the coast of Greenland produced disappointing results. Only one mine is operational in Greenland today: the White Mountain mine on the west coast, producing anorthosite used in glue and paints. Greenland does have large untapped deposits of various minerals, including iron ore, cooper, and zinc. Of greatest interest in today’s political climate are the deposits of rare earth elements located in southern Greenland. But these deposits are estimated to contain only 2 per cent of the world’s known reserves of rare earths, compared with over 20 per cent located in Brazil (Economist 2026). Plans to extract rare earth elements in Greenland have also provoked intense political opposition within the country, due to the risk that uranium released during extraction might harm local residents and the surrounding environment.
Popular accounts have made much of the proposition that consequences of climate change, such as receding sea ice, will make the Arctic’s natural resources more accessible. But this has little relevance to the case of Greenland. The rare earths, for example, are located in the ice-free south. Far more important in the Greenlandic context are the high costs of extracting natural resources under Arctic conditions and of moving them to southern markets, along with complications arising from domestic opposition due to concerns about impacts on the environment and public health.
Most policymakers in Greenland have a strong interest in supporting economic development that would help offset the loss of the block grant from Denmark consequent upon the achievement of some form of independence for the country. But the economics and politics of resource development in Greenland are complex. Even in the case of rare earth elements—the focus of the most intense outside interest in Greenland’s natural resources today—the obstacles to development are difficult to overcome. The image of Greenland as a vast storehouse of natural resources waiting to be developed by outside corporations bears little resemblance to reality.
Where do we go from here?
Without doubt, conditions prevailing in the Arctic today differ in important ways from those prevailing during the 1990s and 2000s. But the new geopolitical narrative regarding the role of the Arctic in global affairs does not align well with reality. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the distorted arguments of President Trump and his associates to the effect that America needs ‘total, unfettered access’ to Greenland (Landry 2026). Greenland is important not least because it has developed a flourishing democracy and because its leaders are ready to join other Western leaders in defending liberal values. What is needed now is a policy of collaborating with Greenland’s leaders to address common concerns about security and economic development, rather than of engaging in outdated imperialistic practices bent upon the annexation of lands and peoples regardless of their desires.
Declaration of conflict of interest
The author declares no potential conflict of interest.
Funding
The author received no financial support for research and authorship of this article.
AI disclosure
The author declares that no AI was used in the preparation of this work.
References
BennettM. & DoddsK. (2025), Unfrozen: The Fight for the Future of the Arctic (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press). https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.37105695
Central Arctic Ocean Fisheries Agreement (2018), Agreement to Prevent Unregulated High Seas Fisheries in the Central Arctic Ocean. https://vlab.noaa.gov/documents/22926311/0/AGREEMENT+TO+PREVENT+UNREGULATED+HIGH+SEAS+FISHERIES+IN+THE+CENTRAL+ARCTIC+OCEAN.pdf/b33ec030-17f1-20d5-7c73-a50f84cf6712?t=1685588546248
Economist (2026), ‘China’s rare-earth chokehold terrifies the West, but Brazil benefits’, The Economist, 29 January 2026. https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2026/01/29/chinas-rare-earth-chokehold-terrifies-the-west-but-brazil-benefits
LandryJ. (2026), ‘Trump’s Greenland envoy: “We need total, unfettered access”’, New York Times, . 29 January 2026, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/29/opinion/trump-greenland-arctic-framework-deal.html
RosenK. (2026), Polar War: Submarines, Spies, and the Struggle for Power in a Melting Arctic (New York, NY, Simon and Schuster).
YoungO. (2020), ‘Shifting ground: competing policy narratives and the future of the Arctic’, in
SpohrK. & HamiltonD.S. (eds), The Arctic and World Order (Baltimore, MD, Johns Hopkins University Press), 47–62.
1
The phrase ‘Arctic exceptionalism’ refers to a narrative suggesting that international cooperation regarding Arctic issues is possible, regardless of developments occurring in other regions like East Asia, Europe, or the Middle East (Young 2020).
2
Recent statements emanating from Washington indicate an interest in initiating military operations in several more locations in Greenland, although there is no clear rationale for such measures.
Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/014.a33
Published on: 25 September 2026
Volume: 14
Issue: Issue 3
Article view count: 7
Article download count: 0
Copyright statement
© The author(s) 2026. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Young, O. R. (2026), ‘Greenland in world affairs: the limits of geopolitical perspectives on Arctic governance’, Journal of the British Academy, 14(3): a33 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/014.a33Crossref
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Received
October 2022
Accepted
May 2023
Published
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