Throughout the Trump administration’s monthslong train in escalatory rhetoric surrounding the president’s ardent want for Greenland, a key throughline has emerged. Rather than a bid for the mineral wealth buried in the Arctic island, which is semi-sovereign and administered by Denmark, Trump and U.S. officers have framed the territory as crucial to entrenching the U.S.’s strategic seniority in the far north.
Trump’s envoy to Greenland, his press secretary and his vp have all not too long ago argued that this can be a foreign-policy play. “American supremacy in the Arctic is non-negotiable,” Jeff Landry, Louisiana governor, not too long ago wrote in the New York Times, whereas Karoline Leavitt known as Greenland “vital” for deterring America’s “adversaries in the Arctic.” JD Vance mentioned it in March: “We need to ensure that America is leading in the Arctic, because we know that if America does not, other nations will fill the gap where we fall behind.”
Kenneth Rosen, an skilled battle correspondent who has coated conflicts from the Middle East to Ukraine, has spent two years touring around the Arctic Circle, reporting from army bases, indigenous communities and ice-breaking, and he informed Fortune he thinks the U.S. has “neglected the north for a long time.” As he experiences for his new guide Polar War, he mentioned he sees “a big game of catch-up happening, and the U.S. is not doing what it needs to to catch up.”
The drawback, Rosen mentioned, is that the Arctic’s management energy vacuum has already been crammed, and for the U.S. to catch up now could be a monumental enterprise. And whereas Trump’s push for Greenland could also be an try and reverse that established order, the bellicose rhetoric could also be dealing much more hurt to the U.S.’s ambitions in the Arctic.
Polar War: Submarines, Spies, and the Struggle for Power in a Melting Arctic, was printed by Simon & Schuster in January. It concurrently reads as a geopolitical thriller, travelogue and environmental meditation, with Rosen describing the delicate state of affairs up north, the place increased temperatures and retreating sea ice have revealed new prospects for transpolar navigation and useful resource extraction.
The pole’s new actuality has set in movement an ideal energy wrestle between the U.S., Russia and China. Change is occurring at something however a glacial tempo in the Arctic, Rosen writes, and the U.S. is barely maintaining with its rivals.
Trump’s ice-covered jewel
On January 21, the world watched as U.S. President Donald Trump delivered a much-anticipated speech in Davos, Switzerland, in which he reiterated his want for management of Greenland, an ultimatum that has solid into doubt the phrases of Europe’s relationship with the U.S., the state of the NATO alliance, and whether or not the U.S.-led world order continues to be alive in any respect.
But American obsession with Greenland has lengthy predated Trump. In his guide, Rosen describes Greenland as America’s “ace-in-the-hole,” given the territory hosts the nation’s northernmost army base. Before Trump, the U.S. had tried to buy Greenland 3 times, and public intellectuals have lengthy thought-about the island underneath the purview of America’s safety blanket as outlined by the Monroe Doctrine, famously resuscitated by Trump in 2026.
The island is seen as a vital defend standing between Russia, China, and the U.S.’s East Coast, as properly as shut western European allies and maritime commerce in the Atlantic. In Trump’s speech at Davos, he described Greenland as “right smack in the middle” between the U.S. and its rivals. China in specific has tried inroads in Greenland in latest years, Rosen writes, together with efforts to assemble three airports on the island and to buy a former American naval base in the southwest nook of the island.
But in making an attempt to bully his approach into Arctic superpower standing, Trump could also be undermining America’s affect in the area, Rosen argued. By internet hosting U.S. army and aligning with American strategic pursuits, Greenland, “is already an American partner in all the ways that matter,” he writes, and the bombast of Trump’s latest rhetoric could also be self-defeating.
“Ever since the conversation turned to Greenland, there’s been this worry that what momentum we had in reengaging our confidence in the Arctic is now being lost,” Rosen informed Fortune. “As long as we continue to berate the European Union and Nordic and Scandinavian nations, we’re just going to push ourselves farther and farther away from a beneficial place in the Arctic.”
What makes issues worse, for the U.S. not less than, is that its presence in the Arctic is nearly fully based mostly on its capability to cooperate with European allies, Rosen mentioned. While Russia and China have devoted important sources to beefing up their very own safety place in the Arctic, America has fallen woefully behind.
America’s ‘sclerotic response’
Take icebreakers, a special-purpose ship designed to face up to and navigate ice-covered waters. Russia has greater than 50 of these vessels. China, which dubs itself a “near-Arctic state,” has not less than 4. The U.S. has two, one of which has endured a number of mechanical fires and canceled voyages in the previous few years.
Another hole is seen in army bases. Over the previous few a long time, Rosen writes, Russia has reopened and modernized greater than 50 Cold War-era installations scattered alongside its Arctic shoreline, together with radar stations, airforce bases and self-sufficient army outposts. The U.S. at the moment has 10 bases in Alaska and, for the second, one in Greenland.
In his guide, Rosen describes the U.S. technique as a “sclerotic response” to the actuality of the scenario in the Arctic. The cornerstone U.S. initiative to reassert its Arctic presence has been the Polar Security Cutter program, which plans to deploy a modernized fleet of three new ice-faring vessels. But the program is almost a decade not on time and around 60% over price range, the Congressional Budget Office reported in 2024. As one former diplomat informed Rosen: “A strategy without budget is hallucination.”
The proven fact that the U.S. is even speaking about an Arctic technique is a step ahead, Rosen mentioned, and efforts to modernize Alaska’s army bases and deepwater ports are essential. But Trump’s bombast over Greenland dangers distancing the U.S. from its NATO allies that present surveillance, cold-weather and ship-building experience, and kind a stronger collective deterrence towards Russia.
“The Trump administration has been really bad about using soft power, leveraging soft power to benefit national security,” Rosen mentioned.
In the meantime, Russia and its broad strategic partnership with China in the Arctic dangers leaving the U.S. behind. In some methods, the race may have already got been received. When requested whether or not he sees the Arctic as being on the cusp of battle, Rosen demurred considerably. The area won’t play host to a conventional battle, fought with weapons, infantry and mass casualties. Rosen says a “gray-zone” suite of covert techniques usually tend to be deployed in the Arctic. These can embody sabotaging infrastructure to foment unrest, subtly interfering with coaching workouts to undermine Arctic capabilities, and exploiting divisions in adversarial alliances.
Russia is probably going already doing all of these issues. NATO nations have repeatedly accused Russia of damaging undersea electrical cables and gasoline pipelines and jamming civilian and army air indicators. Rosen recounts a 2023 Russia-backed scheme to hurry its Finnish border with a number of waves of undocumented migrants from third nations, ostensibly to scramble its safety sources and ratchet up home debate over illicit immigration.
Rosen calls this technique one of “discombobulation,” a deliberate effort to maintain rivals in the darkish and continuously guessing. And for now, when it comes to the nice energy race in the Arctic, discombobulation seems to be profitable.
“Russia is basically saying, ‘We’ve already been here. We are here and you guys have no stake in it the way we have a stake in it. So you have to follow our lead.’”
