‘Not a new, empty playground,’ Why Greenland has been thrust into the spotlight and why the U.S. may want to think twice

Greenland is the world’s largest island, but with a population of only around 57,000, it isn’t exactly prone to making global headlines—that is until recently. In the past few months the Arctic territory has been thrust into the spotlight due to U.S. President Donald Trump’s interest in acquiring it.

Geoff Dabelko, Ph.D. believes Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of Denmark, is central to the geopolitical and geoeconomic competition in many ways. Dabelko is an expert in environmental and security topics and a professor in Ohio University’s Environmental Studies Program at the Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Service. Dabelko recently told the Associated Press that the world’s largest island is where climate change, valuable resources, tense geopolitics and new trade patterns all intersect.

Greenland is coveted territory for several reasons. Geographically, the territory is situated between the United States, Russia and Europe. The strategic location has massive geopolitical implications including trade. Beyond that, Dabelko says the Arctic region is warming four times faster than the rest of the world and this increase in temperature is opening shipping routes.

“Its strategic location along a de facto new ocean transit route, made more accessible with the thinning and lesser extent of Arctic Sea ice, puts it squarely in the middle of new trade and shipping competition with particularly Russia and China,” Dabelko explained.

The warming temperatures are also making Greenland’s abundant natural resources, including fossil fuels, minerals and metals critical in industries such as communication, renewable energy, and military technologies, more accessible.

“I think one of the reasons there's great interest in Greenland is that the expected demand for [these resources in many countries] is increasing and is likely to continue to do so. Many are critical inputs to a wide variety of current technologies and that demand is anticipated to grow,” Dabelko said.

Some of those highly sought after resources are present and available in other parts of the world but they are not presently being mined. Many however are found, mined and processed in China, a nation the U.S. has historically competed with.

“Some of those critical minerals appear in the United States, but the extraction process is so ecologically damaging that we have opted not to do that kind of mining to date,” Dabelko explained. “This is where the competition of the geopolitical and the geoeconomic takes hold. There are all sorts of reasons why there is great interest in securing the resources and securing them from sources like China.”

The present situation in Greenland is complicated—there are many factors at play and many potential pathways forward, but the reality is that Greenland has already been impacted whether industry there expands or not.

Dabelko says with the amount of greenhouse gases humans are emitting, the geography of Greenland is being dramatically changed by warming temperatures and melting ice. These changes have the potential to shift weather patterns and reshape coastlines with global sea levels rising significantly if Greenland’s ice continues to melt at this rate.

If mining and related industrialization increase in Greenland the impact on the local climate and ecology would be even more extreme, but with its hostile environment, remote location and lack of extensive infrastructure Dabelko questions if ramped up resource extraction and shipping from Greenland would be as easy as it is commonly portrayed.

“I think there's a growing false sense that any of this would be easy or in any way cheap politically, economically and ecologically,” he explained. “There's strong economic interest, but large potential costs if you have accidents that would hold great implications for people and countries in the region—heavy implications for fisheries for coastal communities, certainly for the environment and the biological world as we've seen with the histories of oil spills in the Arctic.”

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The prospect of mining becomes even more complicated with the large amount of uranium that is present within Greenland alongside critical resources.

“Yes, you can mine those minerals, but you also risk irradiating your workers and the environment by generating mining waste product that’s now radioactive because uranium is also present,” said Dabelko. “That certainly changes calculations and is part of the reason why limitations on mining in Greenland have been there, because local folks do not want to poison themselves."

Greenlanders themselves have staunchly supported limiting mining and vying for greater independence. Greenland’s current Prime Minister Mute Egede won his candidacy on a platform of halting a rare metals mining project on environmental grounds. In a recent speech, Egede pushed for greater independence from Denmark building on the self-governing territory’s first draft constitution that was presented in 2023.

The U.S. has an existing military base on the Arctic island, but further forays have been shut down by Greenlanders and Danes. According to BBC, “Danish premiere Frederiksen said earlier this month that ‘Greenland belongs to the Greenlanders,’ and only the local population could determine its future.” Greenland's government has twice rejected offers by Trump to purchase the island, in 2019 and again last year.

Regardless of what the future holds, Dabelko believes U.S. relations with Denmark and Greenland are a focus and will inevitably evolve with the most likely outcome being trade agreements and a possible revisiting of U.S. military presence there. He says those existing relationships are an avenue for advancing conversations about the importance of Greenland rather than something more dramatic.

“The United States has a military base there already, and we have economic relations there already and we are longtime allies of Denmark, this is not a new empty playground that we are playing on,” Dabelko explained. “Stepping back and taking account of the many ways that we are already connected and looking at dynamics like climate change mean realities are changing both physically on the ground, and also with the demand for the resources. But there are existing ways to have those conversations.”