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Updated on: January 20, 2026 / 9:51 AM EST
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Why does the United States want control of Greenland? President Trump has made it clear that he thinks the U.S. needs to control the island to ensure the security of America and its NATO allies, a point those allies — and Greenland — vehemently disagree with.
But there’s more at play here, including a valuable shipping route and access to mineral resources.
Here’s what interests the U.S. about the semi-autonomous Danish territory:
“It’s so strategic right now”
Greenland spans about 836,000 square miles, much of it inside the Arctic Circle and covered by the Greenland Ice Sheet.
It’s home to only around 60,000 people and is a semi-autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark with its own elected government.
Getty/iStockphoto
Its location between the U.S., Russia and Europe makes it strategic for both economic and defense purposes — especially as melting sea ice has opened up new shipping routes through the Arctic.
It is also the location of the northernmost U.S. military base.
Trump’s claim of national security
Mr. Trump has repeatedly claimed the U.S. needs Greenland for national security purposes.
“It’s so strategic right now,” he told reporters on Jan. 4. “Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place … We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security, and Denmark is not going to be able to do it.”
“The Americans have a strong interest in overseeing the activities of foreign countries in Greenland because it’s such a big security asset for foreign states, and due to that, any investment or activity, from the American point of view, may be seen as a security threat,” Frank Sejersen, associate professor at the University of Copenhagen, told CBS News earlier this year.
The Danish government has, however, made it clear that the U.S. is welcome to expand its military presence in Greenland, and that protecting the island from any potential adversaries should be the joint responsibility of the NATO alliance.
Members of the U.S. Congress have openly questioned Mr. Trump’s claim of a Russian or Chinese security threat to Greenland, including Senate Intelligence Committee deputy chair Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, who dismissed it as fictitious and said Mr. Trump himself posed the only threat to the island’s security.
Former U.S. Ambassador to Denmark Rufus Gifford also told CBS News that there was no truth to Mr. Trump’s claim of a threat to the island from the U.S. adversaries.
Control over a new, valuable route for shipping
Melting sea ice around Greenland has created more opportunity to use northern sea passages that enable shippers to save millions of dollars in fuel by taking shorter routes between Europe and Asia that were long only passable in warmer months.
There are a couple primary routes through the Arctic becoming more viable. The Northern Sea Route (NSR), which follows Russia’s long northern border, doesn’t bring ships too close to Greenland, and Russia and China agreed to jointly develop that path and have been making greater use of it in recent years.
A Russian commercial vessel, aided by an icebreaker, first traversed the NSR in the winter in February 2021.
The other route, called the Northwest Passage, comes close to Greenland’s coastal waters and is more likely of concern to the Trump administration.
Before those two routes started becoming viable during the winter, the only way to move goods from ports in Russia or the manufacturing powerhouses of East Asia was to go south. But those paths are about 3,000 miles longer, and thus much more expensive.
Greenland’s underground resources
Greenland has reserves of oil, natural gas and highly sought after mineral resources.
Those mineral resources, which include rare earth elements, “have only been lightly explored and developed,” Jose W. Fernandez, the U.S. Department of State’s undersecretary for economic growth, energy and the environment, said at a Minerals Security Partnership event in Greenland in November 2024.
Greenland may have significant reserves of up to 31 different minerals, including lithium and graphite, according to a 2023 report assessing the island’s resources. Both minerals are needed to produce batteries for electric vehicles and a wide array of other technologies.
Currently, lithium production is dominated by Australia, Chile and China, while China produces about 65% of the world’s graphite, the report noted.
Greenland also has the potential to provide a significant amount of rare earth minerals such as Neodymium, which is used to make the magnets used in electric motors, the 2023 report said.
China produces about 70% of rare earth elements, and demand for rare earth minerals continues to grow with technological advances and the rapid spread of consumer devices that require the resources.
There are, however, significant hurdles to mining in Greenland, including environmental and cost issues.
Most Greenlanders don’t want to be American
Greenland’s Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen said Tuesday that his country wants good relations with the U.S. and did not “think that there might be a takeover of the country overnight, and that is why we are insisting that we want good cooperation.”
A poll conducted a year ago showed that 85% of Greenlanders did not want to be part of the United States.
“He can’t just take it like that,” Daniel Rosing, a trainee electrician who said he was proud of being a Greenlander, told CBS News ahead of a visit last year to the island by Vice President JD Vance and his wife.
Vice President JD Vance and second lady Usha Vance tour the U.S. military’s Pituffik Space Base in Greenland, March 28, 2025, with Col. Susannah Meyers, seen on the left.
Jim Watson/Pool/Getty
As Mr. Trump doubled down on his vows to take control of Greenland one way or another, and threatened eight of America’s closest allies with tariffs if they refuse to bow to his demand, thousands of residents of the island marched in its capital Nuuk to reject his rhetoric.
Greenland’s Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen said in a Facebook post that the tariff threats would not change the Greenlandic people’s views.
“We will not be pressured,” he said.
Could U.S. get what it wants without taking over Greenland?
Mikkel Olesen, a Danish foreign policy and diplomacy researcher, told CBS News that much of what Mr. Trump says the U.S. needs Greenland for could be achieved without the U.S. actually owning the island.
On the island’s natural resources, he said U.S. companies have long been dissuaded from investing in Greenland’s minerals not due to a lack of access, but because they believe the costs of mining on the vast, largely frozen island would outweigh the potential profits.
“With few exceptions, the main reason for why not much has happened has been that there hasn’t been a business case for American companies,” Olesen said, adding that “nothing has prevented U.S. companies from going in for a long time.”
As for U.S. defense interests, Danish lawmaker Lars Christian Brask, who vice-chairs the Parliament’s Foreign Policy Committee, told CBS News there have been few hurdles to expanding the existing American military footprint on the island in the past, and very few at present.
“You put up warning systems, missile systems, soldiers, etc., just by asking, you can,” he said, referring to the United States. “It’s not you running the country, but you have the options, the possibility of having troops, material … equipment in Greenland, you just have to ask.”
A brief history of Greenland
The Kingdom of Denmark began colonizing Greenland in the early 18th century, hundreds of years after Vikings from the same distant land first arrived to set up residency.
It was not until World War II that the U.S. established a presence on the island, when then-Danish Ambassador to the U.S., Henrik Kauffmann, refused to surrender to the rule of Denmark’s Nazi occupiers.
Denmark was liberated from Nazi occupation in 1945, and the European nation carried on as a colonial ruler of Greenland until 1953, when it fully laid out its relations with the island as a semi-autonomous territory.
The U.S. never left the Pituffik Space Base, which was established during WWII.
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