{"id":275526,"date":"2026-01-09T07:09:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-09T07:09:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/275526\/"},"modified":"2026-01-09T07:09:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-09T07:09:08","slug":"why-is-trump-interested-in-greenland-look-to-the-thawing-arctic-ice-gaby-hinsliff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/275526\/","title":{"rendered":"Why is Trump interested in Greenland? Look to the thawing Arctic ice | Gaby Hinsliff"},"content":{"rendered":"

Another week, another freak weather phenomenon you\u2019ve probably never heard of. If it\u2019s not the \u201cweather bomb<\/a>\u201d of extreme wind and snow that Britain is hunkering down for as I write, it\u2019s reports in the Guardian of reindeer in the Arctic struggling<\/a> with the opposite problem: unnaturally warm weather leading to more rain that freezes to create a type of snow that they can\u2019t easily dig through with their hooves to reach food. In a habitat as harsh as the Arctic, where survival relies on fine adaptation, even small shifts in weather patterns have endlessly rippling consequences \u2013 and not just for reindeer.<\/p>\n

For decades now, politicians have been warning of the coming climate wars \u2013 conflicts triggered by drought, flood, fire and storms forcing people on to the move, or pushing them into competition with neighbours for dwindling natural resources. For anyone who vaguely imagined this happening far from temperate Europe\u2019s doorstep, in drought-stricken deserts or on Pacific islands sinking slowly into the sea, this week\u2019s seemingly unhinged White House talk about taking ownership of Greenland<\/a> is a blunt wake-up call. As Britain\u2019s first sea lord, General Sir Gwyn Jenkins, has been telling anyone prepared to listen, the unfreezing of the north due to the climate crisis has triggered a ferocious contest<\/a> in the defrosting Arctic for some time over resources, territory and strategically critical access to the Atlantic. To understand how that threatens northern Europe, look down at the top of a globe rather than at a map.<\/p>\n

By the early 2040s, forecasts suggest<\/a> global heating could have rendered the frozen waters around the north pole \u2013 the ocean separating Russia from Canada and Greenland \u2013 almost ice-free in summer. That potentially opens a new shortcut from Asia to North America, not around the planet\u2019s middle but over the top, creating new routes for trading, shipping, fishing \u2013 and, more ominously, for attack.<\/p>\n

A new theatre of conflict is consequently emerging from under the melting ice, and China, Russia and the US are increasingly locked in a battle for dominance over it. Meanwhile as rising temperatures turn the high north into an autocrat\u2019s chessboard, territories unlucky enough to be in the way \u2013 from Greenland to Canada to the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, long coveted by Russia<\/a> \u2013 risk becoming pawns.<\/p>\n

Almost as dangerous for these countries as the threats exposed by a thawing pole are, in a way, the opportunities. Why on earth does the US think it needs to annex friendly Greenland in order to defend this critical Arctic frontier? After all, they\u2019ve had troops stationed on this autonomous Danish territory since the second world war<\/a>, and Denmark has obligingly made clear they\u2019re more than welcome<\/a> to bring more. The one benefit that does come uniquely with ownership, interestingly, is rights to the underground riches that could be unlocked as this frozen country heats up.<\/p>\n

Greenland is a rare untapped source not just of oil and gas but of the rare earth minerals<\/a> used to make everything from electric car batteries to datacentre processors \u2013 which are to US hopes of winning a technological race with China as rubber from Malaya or cotton from India were to the old colonial economies. Though it\u2019s often a mistake to read too much logical method into the apparent presidential madness, there is no shortage of ideologues and tech bros in Trump\u2019s orbit capable of putting all this together and selling it to him. And while mining the Arctic might not be economically viable for many years yet, Trump\u2019s grumbles this week<\/a> about Greenland being \u201cfull of Chinese and Russian ships everywhere\u201d suggests someone has convinced him that he can\u2019t let rivals beat him to a valuable potential development opportunity, a concept any former real estate mogul can grasp. After all, in <\/strong>Ukraine, Trump sought rights to mine rare earths<\/a> in exchange for security guarantees, and in Gaza he mused about building hotels<\/a> on its bombed-out ruins: why not seek to make a quick buck from environmental catastrophe?<\/p>\n

And while to Britons all this looks like a new age of empire, for the Maga faithful perhaps there\u2019s an echo of a much more American story, that of <\/strong>settlers making their fortune by joining the wagon trail west, pushing the nation\u2019s frontiers endlessly outwards, staking their claim to Indigenous people\u2019s lands and holding grimly on to them through a brutal mix of trade and violence. The aim isn\u2019t to invade Greenland, US secretary of state Marco Rubio explains<\/a>, but to buy it, or at least rent exclusive military access. It\u2019s a mark of how fast the relationship between the US and its former allies has collapsed \u2013 in just over a year \u2013 that this is meant to be reassuring: hey friends, we just want to exploit you, not kill you!<\/p>\n

Given the president\u2019s legendarily short attention span, it\u2019s difficult to know what fate awaits Greenland. Maybe he\u2019ll simply get bored and move on, especially once the midterms are over<\/a> and there is less need for drama abroad to distract from failures at home. Or maybe the White House will borrow instead from the Putin playbook, exploiting Greenlanders\u2019 yearning for independence from Denmark to foment the kind of domestic unrest that is so easily whipped up in the age of social media \u2013 before pitching the US as a benign saviour riding into town to keep them safe and make them rich.<\/p>\n

But either way, we had better get used to the idea this is the beginning, not the end, of the conflicts that may come as global heating redraws our maps, unpicks old alliances, and creates new deadly rivalries for land, water and natural resources.<\/p>\n

Of course it will be worse for those already living on the edge of sustainability, in deserts too parched for anything to grow or in coastal towns already struggling with rising sea levels, or in places too poor to protect themselves from increasingly violent storms, than it will for lucky old temperate Europe. And of course these risks could always be better managed by collaborative governments treating events like the unfreezing of the north as a collective challenge for humans to face together, rather than a deadly race for national advantage.<\/p>\n

But in the week Trump announced he would be pulling the US out of<\/a> a raft of international climate initiatives, that clearly isn\u2019t the world we live in. So if nothing else, let poor beleaguered Greenland be a reminder that the climate crisis will have geopolitical consequences we have barely yet begun to understand, and that whatever we can still do to cap the rising temperature or mitigate its effects still matters. Even, or maybe especially, if we can\u2019t yet undo the damage that has already been so wilfully done.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Another week, another freak weather phenomenon you\u2019ve probably never heard of. If it\u2019s not the \u201cweather bomb\u201d of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":275527,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[77],"tags":[18,19,17,133],"class_list":{"0":"post-275526","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-eire","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-science"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115863890445735488","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275526"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275526\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}