There are two central reasons that the United States has increasingly threatened to assume control of Greenland, a Danish territory.
The first, and most important, is that the U.S. government is currently run by President Donald Trump. Trump’s hostility toward the constraints of international law — and even the constraints of valuable international alliances — is well established. In the wake of the U.S. operation in Venezuela, Trump’s rhetoric about America’s hemispheric dominance has shifted from theoretical to practical.
But Greenland might not be among Trump’s ambitions were it not for that second reason: climate change.
More than a decade ago, back when the Defense Department was still sufficiently conscious of perceptions that it called itself the Defense Department, Major General Francis G. Mahon of the U.S. Northern Command participated in a roundtable discussion about the security of the continent. Historically, the U.S. has been bounded by its western (Pacific) and eastern (Atlantic) coasts. But, Mahon said, a new region of interest was emerging.
“The Arctic is receding,” he noted. “The northern coast is about to become a real coast. Maybe not today, maybe not this year, but in a short time. We need to start thinking about that.”
Mahon predicted the Arctic would become the site of “more security concerns, [including] potential conflict over rights to resources there, such as fishing and mineral rights,” as a Defense Department summary of the event suggested.
This was in November 2012. The previous summer, satellite analysis of sea ice coverage of the Arctic Ocean hit a record low. The pattern since then has been consistent: Arctic sea ice coverage, which hits a low during the summer, was higher in the 1980s than in the 1990s, higher in the 1990s than in the 2000s, and so on to the present. The lowest Arctic sea ice extent on record during early January was recorded in 2025.
Source: National Snow and Ice Data Center
Already, reduced Arctic sea ice coverage has created new opportunities for transit and exploration in the Arctic. The more the ice recedes, the faster goods can be shipped and the less dependent the world becomes on the Panama Canal. The longer that regions of the ocean remain ice-free, the more feasible offshore exploration for oil and gas becomes. Traversing the fabled Northwest Passage is now a tourism opportunity.
The rate of warming from climate change has been much faster in the Arctic than elsewhere. That affects all ice in the region, including the massive ice sheets that cover Greenland.
Greenland’s brutal climate has long been an obstacle to habitation, much less resource extraction. The winters are long and cold. Most of the island — about 80% of it — is covered by a thick sheet of ice, impeding construction and resource exploration.
But that ice is melting. The pattern of melt largely mirrors that of Arctic sea ice, with more of the ice sheet melting each decade since the 1980s (and a peak occurring in 2012). An estimated 30 million tons of ice melt every hour.
Source: National Snow and Ice Data Center
What’s under all of that ice isn’t entirely clear. Ice itself, geography and weather have historically impeded exact determinations of Greenland’s material wealth. We know, though, that the country has large deposits of oil, gas and rare-earth metals, a crucial component in many aspects of modern technology.
“Greenland has deposits of coal, copper, gold, nickel, cobalt, rare-earth metals, and zinc,” Renee Cho wrote for the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in 2022. “As the melting ice uncovers land that has been inaccessible for thousands of years, prospectors are moving in.” Both The Washington Post and the BBC have reported over the past year that extracting those resources is particularly tricky in a region without extensive infrastructure. As temperatures warm and the ice sheet contracts, some of those roadblocks are likely to ease. And Trump’s comments in the wake of the recent U.S. strike on Venezuela underscore that the administration is more concerned about securing access to resources than it is about the challenges of extracting them. Trump has repeatedly framed his interest in Greenland as being about “national security.” Trump has repeatedly framed his interest in Greenland as being about “national security” — a term he has used to rationalize (extreme) actions his administration has taken on tariffs, immigration and the Venezuela strike itself. In a statement to the Associated Press this week, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt repeated that assertion. “President Trump has made it well known that acquiring Greenland is a national security priority of the United States,” she said. “And it’s vital to deter our adversaries in the Arctic region.” But that rationale doesn’t make much sense in the context of a territory that’s controlled by a NATO ally. (The prime minister of Denmark, Mette Frederiksen, warned on Monday that Trump’s desire for Greenland posed a threat to the NATO alliance, which is perhaps not entirely a drawback in Trump’s eyes.) The U.S. already has a military base in Greenland and, prior to Trump’s inauguration, there would have been no reason to believe Denmark wouldn’t work with the U.S. to implement any additional security features. In fact, an agreement signed in 1951 essentially offers America free rein on the island. Those valuable natural resources, meanwhile, are already the focus of an agreement between Greenland and the U.S.-allied European Union. Which, of course, is not the same as being under American control. Greenland, similar to Canada, which Trump has also talked of annexing, abuts a region of the world that is becoming increasingly accessible thanks to climate change. It has valuable resources that a government unconstrained by concerns about global warming or environmental impacts could leverage. As more of its terrain becomes hospitable to exploration and extraction, it’s likely that more such resources will be discovered. Trump likes to pretend climate change doesn’t exist. But his avaricious interest in Greenland is sharpened considerably by the warmth that has already occurred.
Philip Bump is a data journalist and MS NOW contributor. 
