On the 7th of January, President elect Donald J. Trump was asked by Journalists whether he would use “military or economic coercion” to take over the autonomous (Self-governing since 1979) Danish territory of Greenland. Trump's response was one that has kept everyone on their toes “No, I can't assure you. You're talking about Panama and Greenland. No, I can't assure you of either of those two. But I can say this, we need them for economic security.” To get behind the meaning of these comments, we will need to first learn more about Greenland.
However, this is not the first time America has tried to buy Greenland. In 1946, the Truman government offered $1 million ($1 billion in today's money, however the deal fell through). In 2017, Donald Trump had proposed purchasing Greenland, much to the confusion and anger of the Danish and the government of Greenland, which sparked a minor diplomatic fallout. In 2019 Trump's advisors would confirm that yes indeed, they had discussed buying the Island. The Danish prime minister would call the idea “absurd” and reiterated that the island was not for sale.
Greenland, for those unfamiliar to plague inc, is a huge sparsely populated Island roughly the size of India located in the arctic ocean known for its natural beauty but Harsh terrain. The island however holds significant reserves of oil, uranium and other precious metals that are vital for technology such as computer chips. The USA has been put in a complicated situation after the Chinese government’s embargo on the sale of Gallium and Germanium, crippling the USAs ability to make components such as semiconductors domestically as China mines 91% of all the world's Germanium. However, in the extensive Greenland Ice caps, raw materials such as Germanium can be found, potentially giving the US a way to solve the problem China created.
Gallium is an important metal in the production of LEDs and semiconductors, and one that in the last 50 years has rose in importance massively. The USA has no domestic Gallium production, and is held in a chokehold by China, who controls 98% of the export market. China's trade tightening has caused huge ripple effects in the world's markets causing the prices of the metal to rise significantly. The government of Greenland has been opposed to this kind of mining, with the Prime minister Mute Bourup Egede having halted previous mining projects on ‘environmental grounds’.
According to Jorge Valverde Carbonell, a PHD fellow at the United Nations University “China has overwhelmed market power over supply, because it is the source of 98% of primary gallium and 91% of primary germanium.” Furthermore, according to Carbonell in the same article “In October 2024, the US Geological Survey estimated that a total ban on the export of gallium and germanium could result in a US$3.4 billion loss to US GDP.” This major economic loss may lead to the USA trying to secure the resources themselves.
Another factor to be considered is America's most loved possessions, black gold. There is an untapped potential of 31 billion barrels of oil (With a value of $2.12 trillion or £1.7 Trillion) and other naturally occurring hydrocarbons to be harvested in east Greenland. Previous attempts to tap into these reserves have failed to ‘strike oil’ but it is there for whoever can find it and use it. A Lot of countries from the USA and the UK to as far as Japan have had oil companies stake a claim to the arctic, with the ice melting and a new layer ready to be mined.