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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   33333 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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USA really, seriously wants to own Greenland.

Trump has made this extremely clear ever since his first presidency when he first offered to buy the island from the Danish government. At the time, the Danes made it very clear that this was not possible. They could not legally sell the island, and if they could, it still would not be for sale. This presidency, he has been probing around, trying to find an effective strategy that can give the administration what they want. He made that clear in 2025 by essentially stating that no tactic is off the table. He has since attempted the following:

  1. Threaten a military takeover. He did this by stating that military intervention was not considered off the table.This was shut down by European leaders promising to retaliate.
  2. Convince the locals to declare independence. In reality, independence for Greenland means choosing a new master (thus creating an obvious opportunity for the US), as their current society cannot survive without subsidies from a wealthier nation. However, the administration failed to convince the Inuits. I suspect they might return to this strategy in the future though, if the current one does not work.
  3. Currently, the administration is attempting to use the situation in Venezuela as leverage. They are showing that the threats of invasion were not empty, using the implication to frighten the relevant parties into submission. Once again, European leaders have, through indicating support for Denmark, threatened retaliation if the US invades. I suspect this will be enough to deter the administration once more. Although if Europe had not been supportive and instead let Denmark stand alone, I do not doubt that America would be planning an invasion right now.

This begs the question though: Why does the US want Greenland so badly? It is a frozen rock in the middle of the ocean, with an entire population living off government subsidies. Why not just let Denmark pay the bill while the states keep their bases? I have some ideas below, ordered from what I think makes the least sense to the most:

  1. It is a hedge against global warming. As the earth grows hotter, Greenland will become increasingly habitable, making the island much more valuable as other landmasses are swallowed by the ocean.
  2. Real estate for data centers. The island is cold and remote, with a lot of empty space and rare earths in the ground. To my layman's knowledge though, construction of the necessary infrastructure would be ludicrously expensive, even though the land itself might be cheap. Still, I would not put it past the likes of Elon Musk to try something like this anyway.
  3. To secure the North Atlantic against military threats. This seems like the official reason, but I don't really buy it. America already has military bases on Greenland, and I do not see why the military could not simply send more equipment and personnel there if the government wanted a larger presence. No official ownership necessary. If this is wrong, then I invite any other commenter to correct me.
  4. To control the rare earths. Rare earths are a priority of the Trump administration, and even though extracting them is supposedly ridiculously expensive, the mere possibility of another country (China) gaining access to them might be enough to warrant official occupation. This way, the US government, not the Inuits, would be in control of who is allowed to mine there.
  5. It is in the American "Sphere of Influence". It is possible that the world order is turning towards one in which Great Powers (USA, Russia, China, and maybe the EU) hold influence over the smaller countries in their vicinity. The smaller countries remain sovereign and independent as long as they operate in the interest of their great power. In this scenario, the USA views all of the Americas as being under her sphere of influence, including Canada and Greenland. These countries will either bow to their leader or suffer her wrath.
  6. The purpose is to secure Trump's (and more broadly, the Republican's) legacy as president. Trump clearly cares a lot about his image, with the most recent example being how hard he has tried to win the Nobel Peace price. Successfully expanding the nation's territory with the world's largest island would go down in the history books, cementing this administration as potentially the greatest one since world war 2.

1. Cynical take.

I think we need to understand that leaders have biases which lead to not entirely rational decisions, and strongmen have little checks on their biases, enabling extreme (not in the normative sense but in the sense of sheer disruptive change) behavior. One can cook up a theory as to why the acquisition of Greenland is actually super important and worth fracturing NATO (or why the costs are overstated). Likely all your bullet points contribute. But so one can rationalize the Russian invasion of Ukraine (which seemed so dumb and negative-EV to me at the time I did not even consider it might happen) or Xi's Zero COVID. It's all not so complex. Putin is an arrogant murderous revanchist with poor awareness of Russia's real capabilities. Xi is a technocratic control freak with a can-do attitude who loves ham-fisted campaign-style governance. Trump is a petty upjumped merchant, a grabby narcissist who feels like a God when he takes something from someone. Money, prestige, land. He got hard for Ukrainian «rare earths», remember? (It was probably a translation error about «black soil» that Ukrainians with their agricultural legacy are so proud of, they don't have appreciable deposits and anyway rare earths are not rare in the Western bloc, the problem is overwhelmingly about refining infrastructure, IP and training). And he apparently believes Venezuelan oil is some goldmine (it's not). He projects this sensibility, too – he might really fear losing Greenland to non-NATO forces, but Russia and China have minimal naval force projection and very little interest in Greenland, relatively speaking, and negligible presence there at the time. Of course China would invest into development, they do that everywhere, but Denmark is a good and loyal ally. Below, @naraburns cites a Jan 8 2026 (wow things move fast) analysis from CSIS: “Already, Chinese rare earth company Shenghe Resources is the largest shareholder in the Kvanefjeld mine, with 12.5 percent ownership. Shenghe signed an MOU in 2018 to lead the processing and marketing of materials extracted from the site.”

OK, let's see the source on this largest shareholder. The link is to 2019 piece from NPR: “Access to Greenland's resources could help break U.S. dependency on China for rare earths. But already a Chinese state-owned company has more than a 12% stake in the Kvanefjeld deposit. Kvanefjeld is owned by Greenland Minerals, an Australian company, and China's Shenghe Resources is its largest shareholder and strategic partner.”

https://ggg.gl/partner/ is defunct, because the name was changed in 2022:

Energy Transition Minerals Ltd (formerly Greenland Minerals Limited,[1] ASX Code: ETM) is an ASX-listed company focused on the exploration, development and financing of minerals, and rare earths. The company’s current projects include the Kvanefjeld, located in Greenland, Villasrubias, located in Spain, and two Lithium projects located in the James Bay region in Canada.

OCJ investments Pty Ltd in Australia hold a 17% share of the company, while a Chinese company, Shenghe Resources holds a 7% share. The rest of the shares are held by other institutions and private investors.[13]

I don't know how much Shenghe Resources held in GGG. Currently ETM Ltd. has two Chinese non-executive directors, of which one seems to represent Shenghe.

That's just a sudden discovery of just how low-quality this war propaganda has gotten in validating Trumpian urgent framing. That's CSIS, not a journalist on Fox or a random poster who's doing ChatGPT+search to validate a take. Americans think themselves free from propaganda but it's a fish and water situation.

You don't threaten your allies (and no Dean, this is absolutely a threat, given the context of their refusal) over something as trivial as “a Chinese company has a 7% stake in one of your mines, which product you can't refine without China because the West has skill issues anyway”. It's not a rational move under any normal calculus. Trump can get anything the US needs from Denmark and Greenland, including militarization and total exclusion of Russian/Chinese activity, without the transfer of sovereignty over the land.

So either it's irrational or the calculus is not “normal”.

2. More cynical take.

…But if I were to entertain the hypothesis of Trump expressing the will of some rational decisionmaker – under which circumstances is total sovereign control actually necessary? I think it's a regime where the US competes with Denmark for resources to be exploited, and thus wants 100% of them, and Denmark would feel threatened and block that if it were in a position to do so. It's not a defensive measure but preparation for a world where raw commodities matter more than any alliance, where

2 weeks ago I said:

[…] Both nations are large, decently situated and can, in theory, produce all goods in prolific abundance within their own borders more economically than imports would be; and China is entitled to a larger and more diverse internal market on account of population size. There are some hard natural endowments – Australia has more accessible mineral wealth, Atacama desert has excellent solar resource, I don't know – but commodities are cheap. Maybe they'll become less cheap? What remains scarce after labor and R&D are commodified? Land? Copper? Wombs? We need to think of how the world would operate when major nations are capable of industrial autarky, because modulo some Butlerian Jihad we will have to deal with it anyway.

In the limit of this trajectory, [China] will only need to export enough to cover the raw commodities imports necessary for their internal economic activity. That's not a lot, in dollar terms. The more interesting question is what else we all will be trading in 2038.

I believe that's the proper framework to rationalize Trumpian land grab ambitions and indifference to allies.

While I more or less agree with your assessment on Trump and how it is easy to overly rationalize things like this, I still believe it is a valuable discussion, beyond just training my analytical skills. Unlike Russia and China, the USA is not (yet) a dictatorship in which the leader has unchecked power. While Trump's tweets may simply be the erratic work of a narcissist, the overall foreign policy can only happen if supported by the larger state apparatus. Thus, it is clear at this point that the negotiation strategy of applying as much pressure as possible and using every piece of leverage available, including shattering the final vestiges of a world order that has existed since the end of the cold war, is a stance supported by the majority of the US government. If acquiring Greenland is such an important goal to the US that this is now official foreign policy, I think it makes sense to look for a semblance of rationality. Only if no satisfying answer can be found, should we conclude that this behavior is as psychotic as it seems on the surface.

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