Why is US President Donald Trump hyperventilating about Greenland? He spends not a single week without reasserting that its annexation by the US is inevitable, despite the fact that such a move would defy every rule of sovereignty known to humankind. “I think it will happen,” he repeated as recently as March 13, forcing the chairman of the Danish parliament’s defence committee to remark, “It would mean war between two NATO countries.”
Trump is focussing on appropriating both Greenland and Ukraine, alienating the European Union, since both are continental countries. His reasons for usurpation are the same: ego, impunity, minerals, legacy. He doesn’t care whom he estranges.
Trump’s harping on Greenland being essential for “national security” takes its inspiration from a United States Geological Survey text (‘What is a critical mineral?’): “The Energy Act of 2020 defined critical minerals as those that are essential to the economic or national security of the United States…”According to the USGS’s 2022 list of 50 critical minerals/elements, more than a dozen of these are nestled untouched by human hands in Greenland. And many of them are abundant in Ukraine.
Greenland’s critical mineral and energy assets are estimated at $4.4 trillion, of which $1.7 trillion are oil and gas. The value of minerals is, therefore, roughly $2.7 trillion. More important is that Greenland’s resource fortune and strategic location, both untapped, is potentially worth hundreds of billions – perhaps trillions – of dollars in the medium-term, especially with Arctic shipping routes opening up and climate change making resource extraction possible there.
But if there is one thing that the future resists with all its caprice and might, it is being reliably priced. In 2016, it was estimated that 35,000 sq km in Greenland (1.6 percent of its land area) were under mining and mineral exploration. Then, in 2021, Greenland stopped issuing licences for oil and gas because of concerns about climate change and drilling costs, and the exploration area shrank.
It isn’t as if Greenland always kept the US out of the picture. (Until recently, before Donald Trump threatened to forcibly annex the island, Greenlanders viewed the US positively – despite having turned down the US’s proposal 79 years ago to buy Greenland for a paltry $100 million in gold bullion, equivalent to $1.3 billion today.) In fact, BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Eni, Equinor and Shell were granted exploration/exploitation licences for Northeast Greenland in 2013. In the early 2000s, Cairn Energy blew more than $1 billion drilling dud wells in offshore Greenland.
But the dalliance with the US didn’t last. Four exploration licences are currently active in Greenland, none of them given to an American company: one field in the western Davis Strait is held by the UK’s Panoceanic Energy and the partly-Danish national oil company(NOC) Nunaoil, and three more land-based fields are held by the UK-based Greenland Gas & Oil. These four blocks expire in 2027 and 2028. Greenland’s goal is 100 percent dependence on clean energy by 2030.
That’s five years from now. Trump will remit office, never to return, in four years’ time, in January 2029. For him, time is running out. An act of imperialist regency, eight decades in the waiting, would be his legacy.
Barely 11 years ago, Brookings had wildly misread the winds by predicting that “because of the slowdown in investments in new mining activities, it is less certain that Greenland will be able to get major mining projects off the ground”. Greenland didn’t, because of its environmental concerns – the country currently has only two functioning mines – but, in the intervening decade, China manoeuvred itself into controlling 75 percent of the rare earth deposits in the world, according to the Ukrainian Geological Investment Group (GIG).
The GIG might hesitate about estimating Ukraine’s reserves, but according to Kyiv, about 5 percent of the world’s “critical raw materials” are in Ukraine. The World Economic Forum says only about 15 percent of Ukraine’s 20,000 mineral deposits covering 116 sites were being mined when Russia attacked in 2022.
This is why Europe wants to defend Ukraine against Russia. It doesn’t want the minerals to leave Europe. Ukraine is home to a third of the continent’s lithium deposits. It also has about 19 million tonnes of graphite, used to make EV batteries.
Ukraine also has other critical minerals such as titanium sponge, uranium, and ilmenite. According to a 2023 study by Forbes Ukraine, the country’s rare earth and other critical minerals could be worth as much as $14.8 trillion.
Neither Greenland nor Ukraine is exploiting its reserves, for reasons ranging from war in Ukraine and climate-change concerns in Greenland, and nor are they immediately exploitable. But they exist, tauntingly easy pickings. The US wishes to secure resources for its continued growth in a global future it views as both fossil-fuelled and battery-driven. An act of warlike but not boots-on-the-ground neo-imperialist suzerainty over both countries is a small price to pay for a continuing economic status of first among equals.
(Views are personal)
(kajalrbasu@gmail.com)
Kajal Basu | Veteran journalist