A polarising president: Donald Trump wants to buy Greenland

VIEWED PURELY as a property investment, Donald Trump’s interest in buying Greenland, first reported by the Wall Street Journal on August 16th, makes a great deal of sense. The world’s largest island at 2.2m square kilometres, it is about a quarter bigger than Alaska and boasts promising mineral deposits, rich fisheries and wonderful views of Russian missile launches (via radar). True, 81% of it is covered in ice up to three kilometres thick, but climate scientists view this as a temporary condition. With a name like Greenland, it certainly sounds like it ought to have golf courses. Its cash value is hard to assess: unlike its glaciers, the market for Greenlands is not very liquid. But the last known offer, $100m ($1.3bn in today’s dollars) by President Harry Truman in 1946, was surely a low-ball bid.

The problem is that the property is not on the market. Greenland has been part of Denmark since 1814, and Danish reforms in 1979 and 2009 granted substantial autonomy to its 57,000 inhabitants, most of them native Inuits. In both places, the idea of a sale has been met with ridicule. Lars Lokke Rasmussen, a former Danish prime minister, tweeted that it must be a belated April Fool’s joke. Aaja Chemnitz Larsen, one of Greenland’s two MPs in the Danish parliament, admonished Mr Trump to show more respect: any proposals about the island “should have been discussed directly” with its elected officials and its people, she told Politiken, a Danish daily.

America’s interest in Greenland dates from the 19th century, when commercial acquisition of territory by states was common. The idea was first raised in a report commissioned by President Andrew Johnson, who bought Alaska from Russia in 1867. Denmark agreed to an American presence on Greenland in 1941. Since 1952 the United States has maintained Thule air base, America’s northernmost military facility, which hosts a vital early-warning radar that watches for Russian ballistic missiles and keeps track of America’s polar-orbiting satellites. Locked in by ice for nine months of the year, it is not a cushy posting for its 200 personnel. “It is the only air force base in the world to have polar-bear-proof doors,” notes an officer. “And they have scratches on them.”

Greenland’s strategic value goes beyond Thule. The island helps control a vital maritime choke-point. The corridor between Greenland, Iceland and Britain—known as the GIUK gap—was an important conduit for Russian submarines entering the Atlantic during the cold war, and is becoming so again. In recent years, Russia’s Northern Fleet has built up its strength and increased submarine patrols tenfold. Russia has also reoccupied seven former Soviet bases in the Arctic. In turn, America has doubled the number of its marines based in Norway and, in October, sent an aircraft-carrier into the Arctic circle for the first time in almost 30 years.

China, which now calls itself a “near-Arctic” power, is also arousing American concerns. In 2016 Denmark vetoed a Chinese company’s attempt to buy a former American base on Greenland, sending Danish sailors to live on the facility as a precaution. The following year the Pentagon expressed alarm at another Chinese effort to build three new airports there. Denmark stepped in with government-backed loans; the Americans offered cash, too.

That has not stopped China from gobbling up other assets. Chinese foreign direct investment accounted for over a tenth of Greenland’s GDP in 2017, according to a study by the Centre for Naval Analyses, a think-tank. “China is attempting to gain a role in the Arctic in ways that may undermine international rules and norms,” warned the Pentagon’s Arctic strategy, published in June.

But Mr Trump’s interest may have as much to do with minerals as with geopolitics. Investors in Greenland have requested permits to open rare-earth and uranium mines that would be among the largest in the world. Other resources include diamonds and gold, and possible oil and gas fields in the country’s forbidding north. As melting ice opens up new transport routes and access to resources, the big powers’ appetite for Arctic real estate is likely to grow.

The question is why America would need to control Greenland’s territory directly. As the deflection of Chinese interventions demonstrates, America has been able to protect its strategic interests by asking Denmark, its NATO ally, to step in. Although there may be profits in the long run, Greenland is not a money-maker today: over 90% of its exports are fish, and the isolated population requires large annual subsidies. Denmark pays between one- and two-thirds of the island’s budget. In 2017 the Danish contribution came to €610m.

In any case, it is unclear whether the locals would be interested in accepting American rule. As Ms Larsen points out, Danish citizenship has certain advantages over American, including free universal health insurance. Most locals do support ending Danish rule at some point in the future, but in favour of independence. Mr Trump’s way of thinking about the issue may have been appropriate in 1917, when the United States bought the Virgin Islands from Denmark and sovereignty over sparsely populated islands could still be a transaction between foreign powers. These days the future of Greenland is largely up to the Greenlanders.