The U.S. National Security Implications of an Independent Greenland

It’s not every day that a large mass of ice divides continents. Greenland has surfaced as no longer a peripheral issue discussed on the sidelines of NATO summits. It is now front and center of the future of the transatlantic alliance and has even led to a fellow NATO member, Denmark, to send troops in a dramatic show of force to safeguard Greenland (which it has administered for over 300 years) from any move by the U.S. military. Such a sequence of actions would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

Yet this is the new reality. President Trump recently predicted that the U.S. will control Greenland by 2029. That may or may not be a bluff. But what goes unsaid among security officials on both sides of the Atlantic is a likely scenario that could reshape the future of NATO, to say nothing of the world’s largest island: What if Greenland votes for outright independence?

An independent Greenland is not some far-fetched black swan event. Recent polls reveal that a majority of Greenland’s 57,000 residents support independence from Denmark but also vehemently oppose U.S. control. The prospect of greater riches lying deep beneath its ice, and the fear of allowing outside powers to pillage its riches and profit from them could compel its politicians to hasten a referendum. Perhaps more worrisome, an independent Greenland holds the potential to tear up existing basing agreements with both Washington and Copenhagen, something that keeps Trump administration officials up at night. It could also prompt Greenland to forge closer ties with Moscow or Beijing.

A high-level working group was convened to take up revising an agreement from 1951 that will determine the future of U.S. forces in Greenland. The United States should spell out in clearer language that maintains and even expands its broad access beyond the current base it operates at Pituffik and curtails adversaries from expanding their reach and influence on the island, yet do so in language that enshrines the right of Greenlanders to shape their own future while. As strategic competition intensifies in the High North, as well as the White House’s ambitions to build a Golden Dome missile defense project, Greenland’s importance will only grow.