For more than 160 years, the United States has treated Greenland as a strategic priority. That continuity spans administrations, parties, and eras of war and peace, yet most Americans have never heard this history. Media coverage rarely provides the context needed to understand why Greenland matters, not as a curiosity, but as a cornerstone of American security.
This absence of context reflects a deeper problem: the United States has lost control of its own narrative. In that vacuum, rival powers have become more fluent in American history than many American institutions. That’s not just embarrassing; it’s dangerous.
American policymakers first explored acquiring Greenland in 1867. The idea resurfaced in 1910, again in 1946, and again in the 1950s. During World War II, the United States occupied Greenland to prevent Nazi control and built Arctic infrastructure that still anchors North American defense. Greenland sits beneath the shortest missile routes between Russia and the United States, anchors the GIUK Gap for submarine tracking, hosts radar systems feeding U.S. missile-warning networks, and, as Arctic ice melts, becomes central to emerging global shipping routes.
Mainstream coverage tends to focus on personalities rather than patterns. It dramatizes diplomatic flare-ups but rarely explains the strategic logic beneath them. When it touches on policy, it often treats tariffs and export restrictions as political theater rather than what they are: historically ineffective tools that offer short-term relief and long-term harm.
The pattern is familiar. Voluntary export restraints on Japanese automobiles in the 1980s gave Detroit a brief reprieve but accelerated its decline. Agricultural tariffs have repeatedly triggered retaliation that harms American farmers more than foreign competitors. These are not isolated mistakes; they are predictable outcomes of a tool that has failed for decades. Yet the public rarely hears this context. The media reports the conflict but not the pattern, the event but not the structure, the noise but not the signal.
Meanwhile, nations the United States labels adversaries study American history with forensic precision. They analyze economic cycles, political rhythms, and strategic habits. They know when the United States reaches for tariffs, fractures with allies, externalizes internal insecurity, or retreats into domestic conflict. They know the patterns because the patterns repeat. When others can predict your behavior, they gain the power to shape it and when a nation cannot tell its own story, it leaves its destiny to be narrated by others.
The current tensions over Greenland are not new. They are the latest chapter in a 160-year pattern of American strategic behavior. But because the public has not been taught this history, the moment is misread as novelty rather than continuity.
Greenland is not just a strategic asset. It is one of the few places on Earth with the geographic insulation, low population density, and natural barriers that make survival in a cataclysmic conflict more plausible than in most of the world. During the Cold War, the United States built deep ice facilities there precisely because of its survivability. That logic has not changed.
To misunderstand Greenland is to misunderstand American defense itself. America’s strength rests on responsiveness: the ability to detect threats early, mobilize quickly, and act decisively. Responsiveness requires historical literacy, strategic coherence, clarity of purpose, and a public that understands the stakes.
When the media fails to provide the meta-view, when policymakers recycle failed economic tools, and when adversaries understand American history better than Americans do, the nation becomes reactive rather than responsive, and a reactive superpower is a vulnerable one.
The question is not whether the United States should or should not pursue influence in Greenland. The question is whether Americans understand why Greenland matters, and what is at stake if strategic constants continue to be treated as political curiosities.
A nation that knows its history can shape its future. A nation that forgets its history will have its future shaped for it. Greenland is not a distraction. It is a test of whether the United States still recognizes the architecture of its own power.
Carol L. Harris is a consultant and development strategist whose work focuses on regenerative systems, strengthening commerce and uplifting communities.