Image by Mads Schmidt Rasmussen.
Last week’s news seemed pretty bad for Donald Trump, at least regarding Greenland. He wasn’t going to steal the country from Denmark after all. Instead, the two countries settled on a straightforward military agreement that updates a 1951 pact.
In this iteration, the U.S. can build two additional military installations in Arsarsuaq and Mestersvig, expand the existing Pituffik Space Base, and integrate Greenland into the proposed Golden Dome missile defense network. Greenland wasn’t going to become the 51st state after all.
This, however, downplays the significance of Trump’s conquest of Greenland. By any measure, it was a huge success for the lunatics in the White House.
Under the agreement, Trump secured access to Greenland’s critical minerals for the US and Europe, effectively walling off China and Russia. The US now has veto power over all future mining projects in Greenland.
The agreement stipulates that any investments in sensitive sectors such as mining and infrastructure by non-NATO, non-EU, or non-NATO-partner entities must receive unanimous approval from Greenland, Denmark, and the US.
There’s a geopolitical battle brewing, as I extensively detail in Bad Energy, between the West and China over the world’s critical mineral resources (and the environmental and labor abuses that follow). China controls around 70% of these reserves, such as cobalt, copper, and lithium, and 90% of their refining. As a result, the US is gearing up to challenge that, and tensions are rising everywhere from Africa to South America.
This is where Greenland comes in. 
Greenland is loaded with critical minerals, including rare earth minerals, lithium, graphite, copper, nickel, zinc, and other materials used in green technologies. Some estimates suggest that Greenland has six million tons of graphite, 106 kilotons of copper, and 235 kilotons of lithium. It holds 25 of the 34 minerals on the European Union’s official list of critical raw materials, all of which occur along its rocky coastline and are generally accessible for mining operations.
In this geopolitical chess game, graphite might be the most valuable of all the precious minerals Greenland has to offer.
The Amitsoq graphite project in Greenland’s Nanortalik region could be the most significant prize of all. Considered pure, the “spherical” graphite deposit at the mine there may prove to be the most profitable in the world. London-based GreenRoc Mining is trying to fast-track work there. The mine could generate profits exceeding $2 billion. Currently, China is the only place spherical graphite is mined, and it’s the graphite of choice for anodes (a polarized electrical device) crucial to lithium-ion battery production.
Trump is no fan of renewables, but he understands that whoever controls the world’s resources controls the global economy. And critical minerals aren’t just vital to green tech; they’re also important for data centers and military tech.
Trump may not have seized Greenland outright, but he’s on track to seize its resources, which is essentially the same thing. It’s not the first time the West has exploited Greenland.
Greenland’s Indigenous Inuit people, the Kalaallit, make up 88% of the island’s 56,000 residents. They have endured vicious forms of colonization for centuries. In the 12th century, Norwegians first landed in Greenland and built early colonies that lasted 200 years before they retreated to Iceland. By the 1700s, they returned to take ownership of that vast island, a territory that would be transferred to Denmark in 1814.
In 1953, the Kalaallit were granted Danish citizenship, which involved a process of forced assimilation in which they were removed from their homes and sent to Denmark for reeducation. Recently uncovered documents show that, in the 1960s, Danish authorities forcibly inserted intrauterine devices (IUDs) in Kalaallit women, including children, which post-colonial scholars describe as a “silenced genocide.”
In other words, the colonization of Greenland, like that of the United States, was rooted in violence and still thrives today through ongoing systemic oppression. The Kalaallit want out. In 2016, 68% of Greenlanders supported independence from Denmark, and today, 85% oppose Trump’s neocolonial efforts to steal the island’s critical minerals.
As demand for metals like copper, lithium, cobalt, and graphite increases, we’re likely to see even more scuffles erupt over the world’s finite resources.
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