Greenland, the world’s largest island, has found itself at the centre of global geopolitics as the Arctic ice cap continues to shrink. The largely autonomous Danish territory, sparsely populated but strategically vast, sits between North America, Europe and Russia – and as the Arctic ice melts, its importance is growing rapidly.
Climate change is exposing valuable mineral resources beneath Greenland’s retreating ice sheet, while opening up new sea routes that were once the preserve of icebreakers. What was once seen as a frozen backwater is now being viewed increasingly as a strategic prize, helping to explain why US President Donald Trump’s previously outlandish-sounding threats to acquire the island are being taken far more seriously in Europe’s capitals.
Our Nordic correspondent, Miranda Bryant, has just returned from Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, where families are quietly wondering whether they will have to flee as politicians find themselves in the sights of a superpower. Trump’s rhetoric has forced a brutal reprioritisation in Greenland – security first, sovereignty later.
Greenland’s political fault lines have been exposed, with the main parties supporting eventual independence from Denmark, but divided on how to respond to Trump’s threats in the short term. The premier of Greenland, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, has stated unequivocally that “Greenland does not want to be part of the US”, but the second-biggest party, Naleraq, believes Greenland should negotiate directly with the US, without Denmark.
This is not an abstract power game. In Nuuk, families are now tracking military flights on their phones and talking to their children about what it would mean to become American. The difference is not just Trump’s words, but the sense that they might now be acted upon, with the situation in Venezuela making the threat feel more real.
Europe finds itself in an impossible dilemma. Denmark can offer more troops, more bases and more cooperation, but it cannot easily confront a nuclear-armed partner that is openly talking about conquest. That leaves Copenhagen, Brussels and Nuuk trying to defend a principle that suddenly looks fragile: that borders cannot be changed by force, even when the ice around them is melting.
One woman Miranda met recently panicked after seeing a US Hercules aircraft leave the American base at Pituffik on a flight-tracking app, thinking it was coming to Nuuk to invade. “That’s the level of anxiety now – people watching the skies and the seas themselves because they don’t know what else to do,” she says.
As the Arctic ice continues to retreat, Greenland’s strategic importance is only set to grow. The question is whether its people will be able to determine their own future, or whether they will be caught in the crosshairs of a geopolitical battle between superpowers.