Invading Greenland Won’t Protect Us From the Climate Crisis
It is of course possible that further melting will lead to increased tensions in which Arctic territory becomes an especially valued possession. But other threats are far more urgent, including the one causing the melting.
Greenland does not, on the face of it, seem to be the kind of place that a superpower like the United States would regard as a vital component of its security. With fewer than 60,000 inhabitants in an area roughly one-quarter the size of the contiguous United States, it is the least densely populated nation on Earth. Its only industries of note are fishing and, to some extent, tourism, and its northernmost point is as close to the North Pole as Los Angeles is to Denver.
Yet President Donald Trump insists the United States needs Greenland “very badly,” to the extent that he won’t “rule out” using force to attain it.
Such covetousness almost certainly owes at least something to the prospect of access to the mineral resources, including lithium, that Greenland is believed to harbor. But Trump himself has suggested a different motivation, musing in an interview about “Russian boats and… Chinese boats, gunships all over the place… going up and down the coast of Greenland.”
A world that has warmed enough for the Arctic Ocean to be truly ice-free is a world that will be experiencing even more droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, and other extreme weather events, at the potential cost of millions upon millions of dollars in damage and extensive loss of life.
Trump’s obsession with annexing Greenland is a confounding solution to a problem that doesn’t even exist.
Moscow and Beijing undeniably have an increasing number of vessels operating year-round in Arctic waters. In Russia’s case, that’s hardly surprising: Russia accounts for 53% of the region’s coastline. But its interests, and indeed those of China’s, have little to do with Greenland and a lot to do with its own Arctic waters, specifically the seaway along its north coast that Russia refers to as the Northern Sea Route (NSR). As sea ice decreases in thickness and extent as a result of climate change, the NSR is slowly opening up. As a result, Moscow sees this passageway as a potential source of riches and national pride and even a way to reorder international trade.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has declared that the NSR will ultimately “replace the Suez Canal” as the favored transit route between Atlantic and Pacific. It is presently a long way short of that: Just under 40 million tons of goods shipped through the NSR in 2024, almost exclusively on Russian and Chinese vessels, compared to 525 million tons that transited Suez. But it is far more than the 7 million tons that traveled the passage in 1987.
The Northwest Passage—the frequently narrow, shallow, and twisting pathway through the islands of Canada’s High Arctic—tells a similar story on a smaller scale. From the 16th through the 19th centuries, multiple expeditions perished in the ice of the Northwest Passage; after it was finally navigated for the first time in 1906, there were just 67 further transits over the course of the 20th century. Thanks to melting sea ice, there were 41 transits of the Northwest Passage in 2023 alone.
While both the Northwest Passage and NSR are more navigable than in the past, both are still challenging to sail through during all but the very warmest weeks of the year. Even as the Arctic heats up four times faster than the rest of the globe, its seas are unlikely to be consistently ice-free during summer before mid-century at the earliest. The anticipation of such an eventuality, however, has led to a jockeying for position and influence, and a rumbling discord among Arctic powers.
Canada and Russia regard the Northwest Passage and NSR respectively as their national waters, and they intend to dictate who can use them and when. Moscow requires any vessel that wants to transit the NSR to apply for permission up to four months in advance and mandates icebreaker escorts for most ships—often at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars.
The United States chafes at such restrictions, arguing that both waterways are international straits, open to vessels from all nations.
“We’re concerned about Russia’s claims to the international waters of the Northern Sea Route,” said then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in 2019, adding with a swipe at Canada that “we recognize Russia is not the only nation making illegitimate claims.”
Interestingly, China is broadly in accord with the U.S. position; but, as is its wont, the country is playing the long game. Notwithstanding Trump’s talk of Chinese gunships off Greenland, Beijing’s interest in the Arctic thus far appears to be entirely mercantilist. Particularly since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China is the only country whose commercial vessels transit the NSR with some regularity. In 2012 the Chinese icebreaker Xue Long even explored the feasibility of crossing from Atlantic to Pacific across the Arctic Ocean via the North Pole.
It is of course possible that further melting will lead to increased tensions in which Arctic territory becomes an especially valued possession. But other threats are far more urgent. While the rest of the world is not heating up as rapidly as the Arctic, it is still warming. And a world that has warmed enough for the Arctic Ocean to be truly ice-free is a world that will be experiencing even more droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, and other extreme weather events, at the potential cost of millions upon millions of dollars in damage and extensive loss of life.
It is, to put it mildly, unfortunate that Donald Trump continues to insist that climate change is a “hoax.” Because reducing emissions rapidly is a far better way to protect Americans than idle threats to invade an ice-covered island.
