Greenland is just the tip of the iceberg.
Competition to rule the wider Arctic and its vast mineral resources and key waterways has ramped up, culminating this week in U.S. President-elect Donald Trump floating military action to capture Greenland from Denmark.
A senior aide to Trump confirmed that the Greenland gambit is about broader geopolitical dynamics, as the U.S. eyes an increasingly belligerent Russia as a rival for Arctic supremacy.
“This is not just about Greenland. This is about the Arctic. You have Russia that is trying to become king … It’s oil and gas. It’s our national security. It’s critical minerals,” said Mike Waltz, Trump’s pick to be national security adviser, on Fox News on Wednesday.
Other Arctic countries are watching warily, such as Norway with its Svalbard islands in the freezing far north, which could attract the imperialist eye of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre on Thursday dismissed any concerns about the archipelago’s potential vulnerability. “Svalbard is Norway, and Svalbard is safe,” Støre said on Norwegian broadcasting service NRK.
But Svalbard — home to more polar bears than inhabitants — lies along a sea route that Russia’s Northern Fleet must pass to reach the Atlantic Ocean, rendering it strategically important for Moscow even though it already owns more Arctic territory than any other country.
Several settlements on Svalbard, where around 2,500 people live, are populated by Russians, dating back to the Soviet era, who mostly live in the second-largest town of Barentsburg. The island is also home to Pyramiden, an abandoned coal-mining town where a Lenin statue overlooks the central square.
The Svalbard Treaty, signed in 1920, grants Norway sovereignty over the archipelago but allows all other signatories to exploit its natural resources, which currently includes 48 parties, including the U.S., Russia and Japan. Only Russia and Norway, however, make use of this right today. Svalbard is also a demilitarized and visa-free zone thanks to the treaty, while mainly attracting researchers and tourists. Most of the inhabitants work in the mining industry.
Tensions on the ice, however, have been bubbling.
In 2022, when Norway started blocking Russian ships bound for Barentsburg to comply with economic sanctions aimed at Moscow, the Kremlin freaked out and accused Norway of human rights violations.
In 2024, Russia provocatively installed Soviet flags in the Russian-settled towns of Barentsburg and Pyramiden, and announced it would open a new scientific center for polar research.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov on Thursday said that Moscow is watching the Greenland developments with interest.
“The Arctic is a zone of our national interests, our strategic interests,” Peskov said during a briefing. “We are interested in preserving the atmosphere of peace and stability in the Arctic zone.”
Unintended consequences
The biggest danger with Trump’s fixation on taking over Greenland is the potential inspiration it could give to rival powers to start acting in the same imperialist vein, Arctic watchers have warned.
Andreas Østhagen, a researcher at Norway’s Fridtjof Nansen Institute in Oslo, told POLITICO that statements like Trump’s could provoke other actors, Russia or China in particular, to see “the use of military force against another country to pursue their national interests as a legitimate means of operations in international affairs.” (For China, that is currently more likely to involve aggression against Taiwan, than in the Arctic.)
“Which of course, is what the U.S. and the Western-led order has been trying to argue against for the last seven or eight decades,” Østhagen added.
“Greenland is quite far away from Russia. I would be more worried about other targets like the Finnish border, the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, or even the maritime boundary between the U.S. and Russia. I think those are more vulnerable […] than Greenland per se,” he said.
While Østhagen said Beijing may not have militaristic ambitions, in October last year two U.S. congressmen, one Democrat and one Republican, suggested that Norway does not have sufficient control over Chinese researchers on Svalbard at Yellow River Station where scientific studies take place.
Norway, frankly, should be rethinking its security policy regarding Svalbard and the Arctic, said Tore Wig from the department of political science at the University of Oslo.
“We should be worried that Svalbard may be used as a bargaining chip in dealmaking relating to Arctic security,” Wig said about the prospect for Washington and Moscow attempting to carve up the Arctic. “When the United States does not respect international treaties — which Trump shows in his comments re. Greenland — this puts everything into play.”
While reiterating that Svalbard is safe, Gahr Støre said in relation to Trump’s comments on Greenland that “it is not right to suggest that one will take over land under the sovereignty of others.”Despite the Trump camp’s increasingly heated Arctic rhetoric, it’s still possible to turn down the temperature on Greenland, according to one American transatlantic expert.
“I think to fix it, it’s really up to the Danes and Greenlanders to go to Trump and say, ‘What is the problem that you have?’ And let’s work together on fixing it,” said Jim Townsend, the former top Pentagon official for NATO and Europe. “Buying it isn’t the right fix here.”
“At a minimum, find out what the specifics are, because Trump hasn’t said what he’s concerned about,” Townsend added.
Jack Detsch contributed to this report.
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