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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   33374 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.

Another thought:

Greenland is weird because it is very much a noncentral example of a country. It has a population density of just 0.028/km^2. (For comparison, Montana is 3/km^2, even Alaska is 0.5/km^2. A reasonably densely settled European state (e.g. Belgium) gets to ~400/km^2.)

It is halfway between a country and SpaceX placing a hundred colonists on the Moon who then incorporate as a state with all of the Moon as their territory.

In Europe, every square meter of usable land was fought over hundreds of times, most borders drawn in blood. With Greenland, it seems that most of the territorial claim is more "That icy wasteland which can not sustain human life? Well, nobody is contesting it, so I guess it is ours."

So if the US or China would build a time machine and establish undiscovered colonies in Greenland in 1900, they could likely get Denmark to cede a part of Greenland to them, because most sane people do not want to die for some icy wasteland far from their home country, and even the small population of Greenland will probably feel little patriotic urge to die to protect their inhospitable hinterlands.

That being said, "the international rule-based order results in a tiny population of some inhospitable part of the earth nobody cared enough for to even contest before the IRBO came into effect becoming filthy rich" is hardly without precedent. Some thinly populated areas in the Middle East made it big thanks to fossil fuels. Denmark, the US, Canada and Russia getting to keep their mostly unpopulated territories in the arctic seems like a small price to pay for keeping the IRBO.

Not that from a geographical point of view, the US has any good claim to Greenland in the first place. Ireland claiming Northern Ireland, Canada claiming Alaska, Italy claiming the Vatican, even Putin claiming Ukraine are all more plausible from geography.

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