In the midst of the Arctic winter, residents of Greenland are feeling the heat of global geopolitics.
United States officials have stepped up insistence on the “need” to take control of the mostly ice-covered island by force or by financial means. The declarations stress Greenland’s strategic location along Arctic sea routes – which both Russia and China are vying to use – as well as access to its estimated 1.5 million tons of rare earth mineral reserves.
What’s at stake “is not just about rare earths – it is about the very idea of sovereignty in an age of resource rivalry,” Phar Kim Beng, of the Institute of International and ASEAN Studies, wrote in the Malay Mail.
The U.S. logic is “rooted in energy security, future-proofing supply chains (especially minerals) and in the strategic denial of competitors,” geopolitics analyst and bestselling author Tim Marshall wrote in The Times of London.
In this view, the Danish territory is an asset to be owned rather than an ally with which to engage, an approach that runs counter to 80 years of global treaties and norms that have prioritized diplomacy over bellicosity.
With China’s current predominance in the extraction and processing of rare earth minerals, essential for the automotive, military, and tech industries, the U.S. is playing catch-up. And both countries are applying aspects of centuries-old mercantilism, which took a zero-sum view of resources as limited, thus requiring economic domination of other nations. An Australian think tank has identified a related notion of “frontierism,” which sees Earth’s polar regions as areas “to be conquered, developed or claimed rather than … shared as global commons.”
This trend prompted a conference last year in Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, to call for expanding “polar law” to address extraction and fair use of resources, as melting ice caps affect fish stocks and access to land-based resources.
Examples of multilateral approaches to such “global commons” are somewhat uncommon, but still instructive. A 2023 security pact among the U.S., South Korea, and Japan included cooperation on critical mineral supply-chain issues. Other examples include a 2001 United Nations Fish Stocks Agreement, the 2008 Great Lakes Agreement and Compact between the U.S. and Canada, and multiple water-sharing agreements in Central Asia.
Lisa Murkowski, a Republican senator from Alaska – whose Inuit population shares cultural traditions with Greenlanders – has urged the U.S. to shift away from talk of acquisition to alliance. “Let us choose respect, dialogue, cooperation, and partnership,” she said on January 8.
Those values have contributed to global economic progress since World War II. They are essential now as the international order is being transformed by new geopolitics.
“In an era of intense technological competition, perhaps the greatest rare earth of all is trust among nations,” as Malaysian analyst Dr. Phar observed. “If that melts away like Arctic ice, the world that emerges will be far more brittle than the minerals buried beneath Greenland’s frozen soil.”
