Donald Trump and his senior officials insist that Greenland must become part of the US. This is for national security purposes, they say, maintaining that Denmark, of which Greenland is a constituent part, is not investing enough in defending the strategically vital region beyond – as the US president put it – adding “one more dog sled”.
The 1951 defence agreement between Denmark and the US is likely to be the first casualty of any hostile American takeover, since article 2 of that agreement recognises explicit Danish sovereignty over Greenland.
Framing this dispute as an issue of security ignores the fact that for the past 70 years, the US military has largely had a free hand in how it uses its military facilities in the northwest of Greenland to conduct strategic space and hemispheric defence – without interference from Copenhagen.
But America’s 2025 national security strategy, released last November, speaks of establishing US dominance in the western hemisphere, including Greenland. It shifts attention away from great power competition to a world shaped decisively by the interests and wishes of “larger, richer and stronger nations”.
If spheres of influence and domination are back in vogue, then smaller economies including Denmark and even Canada come under direct threat. Whether faced with dismemberment or incorporation into the US, the prospects are deeply concerning.
But the current dramas affecting the Arctic region cannot be blamed entirely on Trump. Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, has played his part too. Approaching the fourth anniversary of his country’s invasion of Ukraine, it is not hard to discern how a costly conflict in one part of Europe has had direct implications for other northern European territories.
Soon after Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the intergovernmental Arctic Council was suspended because seven out out of the eight Arctic states (Canada, Denmark-Greenland, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and the US) decided they could no longer work with the largest Arctic state, Russia.
The Arctic Council was widely regarded as the centrepiece of what a circumpolar Arctic could achieve, working hard to construct key issues such as environmental protection, sustainable development and scientific collaboration. While the Arctic states could freely diverge from one another on non-Arctic matters, there was a superstructure of working groups and taskforces that generated notable scientific and technical reports, alongside the Arctic Economic Council.
Ukraine shattered all of that. Finland and Sweden joined Nato in 2023. Russia pivoted towards China and India, a shift that started after the first round of sanctions following its illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014.
The Arctic has fragmented into Russo-Asian and Euro-American segments. Western scientists are no longer able to access and work with Russian scientists, and circumpolar collaboration is suspended.
Some bilateral cooperation remains between countries such as Norway and Russia over areas of mutual interest, including managed fisheries in the Barents Sea and search and rescue.