Of all manifestations of power, restraint impresses humanity the most. It, unfortunately, is in short supply—especially among the leaders of the world’s most powerful nations.
Russian President Vladimir Putin sent his forces to invade Ukraine in February 2022 without any obvious provocation. Xi Jinping habitually talks about absorbing Taiwan within China’s embrace. Now, Donald Trump is rather cavalierly talking about making Canada the 51st American state, annexing the Panama Canal, turning the Gaza Strip into a riviera after expelling all its residents, and usurping Greenland, an autonomous territory under the kingdom of Denmark, a sovereign state.
However, it is Trump’s obsession with Greenland that stands out. Soon after he took over as president, Trump sent his son and then his vice president there. Both were greeted with disdain, if not outright hostility, by the Greenlanders. Behind his muscle-flexing lies a history of Greenland’s maritime significance, given the geographical placement of this island, the largest in the world.
With an area of 2.166 million sq km and a population of only 57,000 people, Greenland has been a part of Denmark for over 600 years. Close to 80 percent of its landmass is ice-covered, barren and uninhabited. A bulk of the inhabitants are Inuit, and an overwhelming majority of people live along the coast, not on the ice sheet. Based on social welfarism, its economy is sustained by fishing and subsidies from Denmark. Why, then, is this snow-covered mass of land so coveted by Trump? The reason can be enumerated in two phrases—global warming and strategic location.
Its location way out in a forbidding ocean, between North America, Western Europe and Russia, made Greenland strategically important even during the two world wars and the subsequent Cold War. Across the 20th century, it has shaped naval strategy by acting as a bulwark protecting Allied supply lines and serving as a forward defence sentinel in the Cold War anti-submarine warfare calculus.
Only five nations can assert an entitlement to an extended continental shelf into the Arctic—Canada, Russia, Norway, Denmark via Greenland, and the US via Alaska. Securing Greenland would provide the US with an appreciably bigger claim over the Arctic. Greenland lies along what grizzled Cold War veterans labelled the ‘GIUK gap’, an acronym derived from Greenland, Iceland and the UK. The GIUK gap is a choke point between Greenland, Iceland and Britain that can protect the North Atlantic from intruding Russian warships and submarines during periods of hostility between the West and Russia.
Dominance over the GUIK gap dictates strategic advantage in the North Atlantic Ocean, impelling both power projection and transatlantic defence. The scramble over the Arctic is once again making it a maritime chokepoint of strategic note.
Were the US to occupy Greenland by force, purchase or a treaty arrangement—given that it already runs an extensive surveillance base out of Thule, now rechristened Pituffik Space Base to cater to Greenlandic sensitivities—it would give the US an unprecedented strategic advantage, not only qua Russia but also Western Europe, especially given Trump and J D Vance’s scorching rhetoric on NATO.
In addition its strategic location, Greenland holds rich deposits of various natural resources, including priceless rare earth minerals, an imperative for telecommunications, uranium, billions of barrels worth of unexploited crude oil, and vast reserves of natural gas previously inaccessible that can now be extracted, thanks to global warming. Many of these minerals are currently supplied by China to a substantial extent. Therefore, the US wants to exploit them closer to home.
However the greatest prize above all is the possibility of new sea routes opening up for commercial purposes. Arctic Sea ice typically reaches its farthest point by March. It makes most of Greenland inaccessible by sea. However, come September, the ice starts diminishing to its minimum, opening up channels that can substantially truncate shipping routes.
Given that Arctic Sea routes are becoming more navigable each year because of global warming, the possibility of ships travelling between Asia, Europe and North America without traversing the Panama and Suez canals, or to round the southern capes, but by plying new polar routes is no longer limited to the realm of imagination.
The most delectable is the Northern Sea Route (NSR), a seafaring track in the Arctic Ocean that connects the Pacific and Atlantic oceans through the Arctic. It creates a preponderance of probabilities that can shorten the travel time between Asia and Europe by 10-14 days, compared to the Suez Canal way. The defrosting of Arctic ice can make these transits increasingly feasible.
The core part of the NSR stretches along the Russian Arctic seaboard from Murmansk to the Bering Strait. Transit traffic is cargo between Europe and Asia that passes both ends of this stretch.
The NSR could be a shortcut for the transference of goods between Europe and Asia, thus offering significant cost savings for shipping companies. Conceptually, curtailment of distances by traversing through the NSR could be as much as 50 percent in comparison to the concurrently used sea lanes of communications via the Suez or Panama canals respectively.
Currently, a passage from Japan to Europe can take an estimated 29 days via the Cape of Good Hope and 22 days via the Suez Canal. In comparison, it takes a mere 10 days across the Arctic Ocean. The tangible nautical distance between Yokohama in Japan to Rotterdam in the Netherlands is approximately 20,0000 km, through the Suez Canal, but less than 9,000 km via the NSR.
Since the start of the Ukraine war, the NSR logged a record volume of transit cargo as shipments from the Baltic Sea to the Asian continent were rerouted through it. Over 2.1 million tonnes that transited across the glacial northern sea’s 1.5 million tonnes were crude oil from the Baltic Sea.
If Trump manages to wrest control of Greenland, much to the chagrin of the Greenlanders, Danes and Europeans, what he would have succeeded in future-proofing the US qua Russia, China, Europe and other claimants to the Arctic sweepstakes.
It would, however, represent the largest expropriation of territory since the Second World War, allegorically throwing the present world order literally and metaphorically into the icy polar wastelands.
Manesh Tewari | Lawyer, third-term MP and former Union Minister of Information and Broadcasting
(Views are personal)
(manishtewari01@gmail.com)