The battle for the Arctic runs through Greenland

Not a “Trumpian delusion”: Greenland is not a throwaway line from Trump. It is a signal – an old reflex of power that resurfaces whenever the world begins to change its skin. When crises turn cracks into fractures and the rules start to dissolve, great powers do what they have always done: seize space, lock down access, and move ahead of competitors.

Greenland is hardly the first case in which Washington has sought to expand its reach through diplomacy rather than force. American history is filled with territorial acquisitions formalized through checks, treaties, and negotiated transfers, alongside wars and conquests. U.S. expansion has never been only a matter of military strength; it has also – and often primarily – been a matter of diplomacy and financial calculation. As early as 1946, the United States formally proposed purchasing Greenland from Denmark, recognizing its strategic position as central to Arctic defense. That initiative fits squarely within a long-standing American tradition of negotiated expansion, from the Louisiana Purchase to the acquisition of Alaska and earlier territorial transfers in the Caribbean.

What has changed is the geography itself. Melting ice is turning the Arctic from a frozen periphery into a contested strategic space, gradually opening maritime routes, exposing critical resources, and expanding logistical corridors that until recently were marginal or inaccessible. In this context, water becomes more than a natural resource. As compute infrastructure expands, cooling and energy constraints turn into strategic variables, and water is part of that equation—especially for the data centers powering artificial intelligence – an area in which both the United States and China are investing heavily, and which demands ever larger amounts of energy and cooling capacity.

This is not, therefore, about a military option – highly unlikely, though taken seriously by some European observers, or dismissed by European media as yet another outburst from the “villain of the day.” It is about a negotiated expansion of American influence.

The objective is straightforward: to secure a strategically decisive space before other actors – Russia, but above all China – can establish themselves in it.

Contracts, investment proposals, infrastructure offers: a quiet form of penetration, no less ambitious for being understated. Beijing has been able to read Nuuk’s autonomist aspirations and present itself as a partner unburdened by Europe’s colonial legacy – willing, at least in appearance, to underwrite the island’s economic development. The rare earth and critical mineral deposits at Kvanefjeld – geological surveys suggest one of the world’s most significant concentrations – have drawn increasing global attention at precisely the moment when Western governments are debating how to diversify supply chains away from China’s dominance[i] in the materials essential to advanced technologies.

Behind the language of technical cooperation and local participation lies the logic of China’s Arctic Silk Road. It follows a model Beijing has refined in Africa and Latin America: offering tools, capital, and know-how in exchange for strategic positioning. Nothing overtly hostile – but nothing unconditional, either. And certainly nothing Washington can afford to ignore.

In China’s diplomatic lexicon, the notion of a “near-Arctic state” functions as a carefully calibrated semantic maneuver. It provides an elegant way to claim legitimacy in a region that is, formally, someone else’s – without asserting territorial sovereignty. Yet the formula is more than benign branding. It is a reassuring veneer designed for Nordic capitals and the broader international community. In practice, it reflects a systemic ambition to project influence rather than engage in neutral cooperation. Beneath the rhetoric of multilateral respect and shared scientific research lies a clear objective: to secure a durable role in shaping Arctic rules and institutions, exploiting any opening left by Washington and Copenhagen. Not a local power, but a power on the approach – ready to move in wherever Western attention wanes or control begins to recede.

From the Kremlin’s perspective, Greenland belongs to the Arctic theater – an arena Moscow continues to treat as a natural extension of Russian strategic space. For years, Russia has expanded ports, deployed icebreakers, invested in dual-use infrastructure, and consolidated a substantial military and naval presence across its northern frontier. These are not merely defensive instruments. They are capabilities designed for power projection, consistent with a worldview in which the High North is not a commons to be shared, but a domain to be secured and controlled.

Even if Russia’s external narrative presents itself as constructive and multilateral – aimed at “preserving the Arctic as a zone of peace and cooperation” – its underlying logic points in the opposite direction. Beneath the language of dialogue lies an exclusionary posture that treats the Arctic as an extension of Russian sovereignty, not as a neutral space to be governed collectively. In Moscow’s strategic imagination, the Arctic is closer to an internal frontier: something to be monitored, equipped, and militarized, rather than negotiated as a shared global commons.

Within this framework, Greenland takes on particular strategic sensitivity. In Moscow’s eyes, it is a forward platform of the Atlantic Alliance positioned deep inside the Arctic basin. The closer the island moves toward Washington, the more the Kremlin perceives a structural threat to its northern room for maneuver. The Pituffik base (formerly Thule) – now under direct U.S. Air Force command – functions as a hostile sentinel along the Northern Sea Route. Arctic traffic and access become far harder to manage when a rival power can deploy radar, surveillance systems, and military logistics on the western flank of the polar region.

Moscow has every incentive to preserve the Arctic’s institutional status quo – an area it views as a natural projection of Russian sovereignty – where cooperation, even with Beijing, remains in the Kremlin’s eyes a tactical arrangement: less a genuine partnership than an instrument for containing Western influence. It is not an alliance of friends, but a convergence of interests meant to last only as long as it remains useful.

In this context, the prospect of Nuuk emancipating itself from Copenhagen – with Washington’s backing – would disrupt Russia’s calculus. It would introduce a new political actor, more permeable to U.S. pressure and potentially willing to host advanced military infrastructure – or even, in an extreme scenario, nuclear assets – designed to counter both China and Russia. Such a possibility, inevitably, reflects the Kremlin’s deeper fear of losing its symbolic and operational primacy in the High North.

In this sense, Trump’s threats to use force should be read for what they are: negotiating pressure in the form of bluff. Not a plan of attack, but a signal directed at Copenhagen and, more broadly, at Europe’s allies. Washington wants room for maneuver and does not intend to obtain it “out of courtesy.” The threatened tariffs against Europe should be interpreted in the same register – not as an unavoidable economic measure, but as an instrument of leverage. The message, in essence, is simple: stay out of it; this is not a European game.

Trump’s problem is not so much the direction – which would have been largely the same, regardless of who sat in the White House, given the strategic weight of what is at stake – as the manner, blunt, rude, almost deliberately provocative. But that brutality also stems from a precise perception, that of having fallen behind. While China and Russia were moving quietly under the radar, the West underestimated the weight of the Arctic for years. Now it finds itself chasing, and when you are chasing you no longer have the luxury of elegance, you raise your voice, you force the timing, you try to regain ground.

The European response has been revealing. A few countries have dispatched token contingents to Greenland – an overall figure on the order of a few dozen troops, assembled from disparate national detachments. If this was meant to demonstrate “seriousness,” it reads instead as theater rather than posture. It is not deterrence; it is a family photograph, useful for public messaging, irrelevant in military terms.

Even the idea, taken to its logical extreme, that Greenland’s “defense” could be entrusted to F-35s exposes the naiveté of those who invoke it as proof of resolve. Software, updates, maintenance, spare parts, and the logistics chain all run through the United States. And if almost the entire European defense ecosystem remains dependent on Washington, then operational sovereignty, the real kind, not the proclaimed kind, remains structurally conditioned by American control.

To understand what is unfolding, it helps to think in terms of a fracture within the Western world itself. A MAGA-driven America is shifting priorities, language, and method, while the empire’s provinces remain mutually uncoordinated and anchored to the political and strategic grammar of the previous era, the era of a more liberal-internationalist American leadership. The transatlantic bloc no longer moves as a single organism, but as a system in which the center changes course and the periphery continues along the old track. It is as if Washington has updated its worldview and those who, by imperial logic, should align with it have not absorbed, or have refused to absorb, the new marching orders.

It’s essential to distinguish between scenarios and adjust the tools accordingly: what matters here isn’t firepower, but psychological pressure. That logic also frames the nature of Washington’s moves. The American “threats” are largely performative, less a prelude to imminent military action than a bargaining chip meant to shape negotiations and extract leverage.

And it is precisely here, on the frozen rim of the world, that the strategic geometries begin to overlap. Americans, Russians, and Chinese, long accustomed to competing on separate and distant fronts, are being drawn into the same theater. In such a space, cooperation is rarely more than temporary alignment. Apparent coordination tends to reveal itself as competition in disguise, and the Arctic, far from cooling ambitions, becomes a zone in which balances grow fragile and miscalculation becomes more costly. All that ice will do little to cool tempers.

Riccardo Ficicchia is a geopolitical analyst with the Istituto Analisi Relazioni Internazionali (IARI).

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