For decades, the slogan most used about the Arctic was “High North, Low Tension”. Then came Donald Trump.
The US president’s push to take over Greenland has not just shocked European leaders with what they see as a brutal assault on Denmark, a Nato ally. It has also upended decades of relative peace in the far north, and the traditional form of co-operation that has existed in the Arctic between smaller Nordic countries and larger ones such as Russia and the US.
“Greenland is ground zero for a new world order of great powers and their spheres of domination if we’re not careful,” said Klaus Dodds, co-author of Unfrozen: The Fight For The Future Of The Arctic. “What European states are recognising is that all of this is disastrous for smaller states.”
Trump has wrapped his pursuit of Greenland — and Venezuela — in the language of “hemispheric defence”, arguing that control of the entire American continent is necessary for the US, as laid out in its new national security strategy.
That provides a competing vision of the Arctic to the status quo, one framed less around co-operation than a Great Game-style confrontation, with superpowers facing off across the North Pole.
“Greenland is the front door for hemispheric defence,” said Thomas Dans, a Trump appointee who heads the US Arctic Research Commission, an advisory body.
He added: “It’s not just the ice melting but also the idea that you can rely on a small country on the other side of the world to provide security for the front door of America. There’s way too much risk for us.”
Dans, a US national, has pushed for closer American ties with Greenland for years. He was the driving force behind Donald Trump Jr’s visit to Nuuk a year ago that marked the start of the latest American interest in the vast Arctic island.
“It may sound like American chauvinism . . . and it is. We’re done apologising about that. There’s no other country that can provide safety for America that America can’t provide itself,” Dans said.
Diplomats in the remaining western Arctic states — Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden — are working out how to preserve the current order in the far north, amid worries that Trump’s territorial ambitions could trigger what he says he fears most: a stepped-up Russian and Chinese presence in the Arctic.
“The consequences for the international system would be dramatic,” said a senior official from a European Arctic state. “What kind of signal would this be to Beijing or Moscow? Just help yourselves. So what we’re doing right now is attempting diplomatic deterrence.”
One problem is that the forum that helped keep the region largely peaceful — the Arctic Council, which gives all eight Arctic countries a voice — is now largely dormant after co-operation with Russia was suspended following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
“It’s clearly a problem for our vision of a peaceful Arctic that the main instrument of that is not working properly at the moment. And we know there are concerns to discuss — Russia’s military build-up in the Arctic has been sizeable,” said a second diplomat from an Arctic state.
Dodds, a geopolitical analyst and dean at Middlesex University, said that much of the issue around Greenland was “about competing geographic imaginations”. Europe wants to talk about “Arctic security” while Trump prefers “hemispheric defence”, he said.
“Arctic security is much more inclusive. In much of the Arctic, security is about protecting local communities, local people. If you go for hemispheric defence, it’s much more hard security. How does one superpower assert dominance in an entire hemisphere? Whatever the smaller states offer is never going to be enough for the US,” he added.
Trump explained his own interest in Greenland in 2021.
“So I’m in real estate. I look at a corner, I say, ‘I gotta get that store for the building that I’m building’ etc. You know it’s not that different. I love maps. And I always said, ‘Look at the size of this, it’s massive, and that should be part of the United States’. It’s not different from a real estate deal. It’s just a little bit larger, to put it mildly,” he told US journalists Susan Glasser and Peter Baker.
Dodds added that Trump’s approach appeared as much about “ego-politics” as geopolitics so hemispheric defence could be the “scaffolding” meant to give meaning to the US president’s desires. But the concept still matters, not least because of the signals it sends to others.
“Where does the western hemisphere end? Greenland? Iceland? Svalbard? There are a lot of nervous people around,” said another senior Nordic official.
Dodds warned that a consequence of Trump taking control of Greenland could be Russia making a play for Svalbard, the Arctic Archipelago that is part of Norway but where there is a Russian settlement.
China would also try to exploit Russia’s current weakness to get more of a foothold in the Arctic, Dodds said, pointing out Beijing’s interest in the Northern Sea Route that could halve shipping times to Europe.
“We come to almost a Great Game-like accommodation of spheres of domination. The horrible logic is that Europe is caught in the middle of these spheres of accommodation,” Dodds added.
For now, Europe’s best hope appears to be persuading Washington that it takes Arctic security seriously — and that it is a better focus than hemispheric defence.
But an early effort to demonstrate this, by sending European troops to join Danish forces in an exercise on Greenland, seemed to backfire after Trump threatened to impose tariffs on participating countries, including the UK, France and Germany.
Still, European capitals remain committed to engaging Trump, by showing him they are valuable allies, especially in the Arctic. “There is intelligence sharing with the Americans. It is a two-way street,” said one senior Nordic diplomat.
Finland has emphasised its icebreaking prowess to Trump, underscoring Arctic expertise the US covets. Elina Valtonen, Finland’s foreign minister, told the FT in October that Russia posed a threat in the north as well as in the east.
“We are here to carry our own weight, also in the Arctic,” Valtonen said. “The Arctic is more contested than it has ever been. This will probably not end here. The US will need allies for that.”
Kristrún Frostadóttir, Iceland’s prime minister, also told the FT in October: “Nobody wants to shut off the US, everybody wants to work with the US. We just don’t want them to tell us what to do.”
In the middle of all this stands Greenland itself. Its 57,000 people are at the centre of a geopolitical maelstrom, bewildered and under intense pressure.
Sara Olsvig, a former Greenlandic minister and current chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, said of the US interest: “We have been through colonisation and we don’t need to go through it again.”
She added: “This great power rivalry that we are seeing now is not going to go away. The world is much more multi-polar than during the cold war. The big question is: are we going to hold together international order? It will be huge chaos if we cannot, and we will all be in trouble.”
Cartography by Steven Bernard