Why Trump wants Greenland and whether the US could buy or seize it

US President Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed his interest in acquiring Greenland. The Trump administration has been weighing its options, either to use a military operation or to purchase it with money. The White House, in a statement, said that the US views the Arctic as key to national security to deter its adversaries in the region.

Why do the US want Greenland?

The arctic nation of Greenland is positioned between Russia and the United States, is of high strategic importance for the dominance of Arctic security. The US National Security Strategy 2025 reveals a "Trump Corollary" to the Monroe Doctrine, asserting that the Western Hemisphere should remain under US influence, free of any incursion from its adversaries like Russia and China.

Greenland has diverse natural resources, from large amounts of oil and gas to critical rare earth elements such as lithium, copper, and uranium, which are vital for technologies of the future, such as wind turbines, electric vehicles, energy storage technologies, and national security applications. Accessing Greenland will allow the US to decrease its dependence on China for rare earth elements.

Moreover, Greenland sits at the strategic "GIUK gap" (Greenland, Iceland and the United Kingdom). It's a key corridor to monitor Russian naval movement between the Arctic and Atlantic. The US already has a Cold War era base, Pituffik Space Base, critical to missile warning and could help in creating Trump's ambitious Golden Dome against ballistic missile threat.

The island nation becomes more important with global warming and the resulting melting ice creating a new shipping route that will drastically reduce travelling time compared to the Suez Canal. So control over Greenland will allow the US better strategic control over these emerging trade routes.

“A more recent and emerging threat or factor is the fact that Greenland straddles two potential shipping routes through the Arctic, the Northwest Passage and the Transpolar Sea Route," said Otto Svendsen, associate fellow with the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington-based think tank.

“Trump is a real estate guy,” Clayton Allen, head of practice at Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy, told CNBC “Greenland is sitting on some of the most valuable real estate in terms of economic advantage and strategic defence for the next three to five decades.”

Can the US acquire Greenland?

According to a report by the NYT, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the US wants to buy Greenland, and the recent rhetoric does not imply an imminent threat. “The president and his team are discussing a range of options to pursue this important foreign policy goal, and of course, utilising the US military is always an option at the commander-in-chief’s disposal,” said White House in a statement. But Denmark has repeatedly asserted that Greenland is not for sale, and said that any attack on a NATO country means the end of the alliance. This might just sit well with Russia, China and the Global South.