The United States, President Trump has declared, must seize control of Greenland from Denmark because Denmark cannot defend the territory from an invasion by Russia or China. The obvious problem with this argument is that Denmark is a member of NATO, and Article 5 of the NATO treaty obliges every other NATO power—the United States included—to defend Greenland if it is attacked. But let us set aside this fact and examine the practicalities of Russia or China invading Greenland in the first place.

An old saying in military academies holds that amateurs think strategy, while professionals think logistics—and an invasion of Greenland would be a logistical nightmare. Unlike Ukraine, Greenland is an island and therefore inaccessible by cross-border roads or railways. It is also remote, freezing cold, barely inhabited, and large—about four times the size of France and three times the size of Texas. About eighty percent of the territory sits under ice between one and three kilometres thick. On the island itself, only about 383 kilometres (238 miles) of local roads exist in a handful of scattered settlements, most of which are just villages. There are no roads connecting one settlement to another. You either fly from village to village, or you sail.

If the Russians are to take Greenland, they are going to have to invade by sea or air. The sea to the north and east of Greenland is icebound and white, not blue as it appears on the map, and while the Russians have nuclear icebreakers at their disposal, these are usually limited to ice three metres deep or thereabouts. A lot of the “multi-year” ice (as distinct from seasonal ice) is thicker than that and cannot be broken by icebreakers at all. The Russians could resort to snowmobiles, but ice is not always conveniently flat and putting an entire army on snowmobiles for journeys of hundreds of kilometres would be absurd. And there are no service stations on the sea ice either.

So the Russians would have to sail past Iceland to get to Nuuk, on the western side of Greenland’s tip, where the port is ice-free for most of the year. The distance from Murmansk, on Russia’s northwestern coast, to Nuuk is about 3,500 kilometres (2,200 miles)—a five or six day voyage for modern ships. Chinese invaders, on the other hand, will have to sail through the Bering Strait (between Russia’s eastern tip and Alaska) and Canadian waters to get to Greenland via the North West Passage in the Canadian archipelago, assuming it is open. Or they would have to go the long way around via the Panama Canal. At a pinch, they could take the really long way round via Cape Horn (at the southernmost tip of South America) or the Cape of Good Hope (at the southernmost tip of Africa). 

If either Russia or China invades Greenland, they face major challenges in preventing long maritime supply lines from being cut. At present, the Russian navy is struggling to survive attacks by Ukrainian boat drones. A few submarines and planes could make life very difficult for Russian or Chinese supply convoys. Besides the US, several NATO powers have submarines, and the British and the French both have nuclear-powered attack submarines armed with nuclear missiles, which could sink a supply convoy. The Dutch, the Norwegians, the Swedes, the Spanish, the Germans, the Greeks, and the Turks all have conventional submarines. The Danes do not, but they do have F-35s. So do the United Kingdom, Norway, the Netherlands, Italy, and Poland. Even Belgium has F-35s. The British and French have three aircraft carriers between them. In total, non-US NATO has around 180 destroyers and frigates, some seventy submarines, and around 1,300 aircraft with anti-ship capabilities. So there is plenty of non-US air and naval power to resist a Russian or Chinese attempt to take Greenland by force.

These sobering naval obstacles make an air invasion more attractive, at least at first blush. In theory, the Russians could simply fly 2,200 miles over the Arctic ice and drop airborne units into Nuuk, and into Pituffik on the island’s northwest coast, where the United States maintains a Space Force base. In practice, it is vanishingly unlikely that the Russians are going to attempt to take a US base anywhere—particularly a base with an early-warning system intended to identify Russian missiles travelling across the Arctic. The US would intercept Russian planes long before they got anywhere near Pituffik. And even if the Russians were able to capture a US base in Greenland (there is only one), they would certainly not be able to hold it.

Neither the Russians nor the Chinese are going to fly an airborne division to take Greenland because it would be too easy for a hostile power to intercept the long-haul supply flights or sink the supply convoys. And without supplies, an airborne division would soon be starved into surrender, much like the German 6th Army was starved into surrender at Stalingrad in 1943. Russia has failed to achieve air superiority in Ukraine. There is no way it can establish air superiority over Greenland against NATO armed forces with F-35s, even without US support. 

In the early years of the Cold War, the US had a lot more bases in Greenland. But these were shut down because they became obsolete in the satellite era. If an American administration wished to reopen them, that would be fine under the terms of the 1951 treaty the US signed with Denmark. America would just need a sound military reason. 

But there is no sound military reason, because there is no evidence of a credible threat to Greenland from Russia or China, nor that either country is even contemplating the suicidal scenarios assessed above. Besides the prohibitive logistics, both countries have other priorities. The Russians are now mired in the fourth year of a three-day “special military operation” to conquer Ukraine, and the Chinese are preoccupied with plans to seize Taiwan. The only credible threat to Greenland comes from the current occupant of the Oval Office.

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I don’t doubt that the United States could conquer Greenland in a day and hold it, but at what cost? NATO would cease to exist and the invasion would unite the rest of the West against America. Most importantly, America would acquire the kind of international infamy attached to Japan after Pearl Harbor. If America starts behaving like an Axis power, it will become a rogue state and a global pariah. And for what? Some economic fantasy about booming trade in the High Arctic and some wild optimism about rare-earth elements?

There is much chatter about the potential for trade across the Arctic as global warming continues. However, at present, these discussions are visionary and aspirational not practical, and this kind of trade will not scale in any case. Russia currently has about five decent-sized ports on its Arctic coast. Of these, only Murmansk is presently free of ice all year. The others require icebreakers to clear channels for freighters. Last year, just fourteen container ships sailed from China to Europe via the Arctic rather than through Suez, and this was a new record. Although the Northern Sea route was pioneered by Maersk—a Danish company and one of the biggest freight shipping firms in the world—they have no intention of running it due to its narrow seasonal window (June–October) as well as “environmental concerns, limited infrastructure, insurance challenges, and uncertain economics.” Besides Chinese ships, most traffic taking this route is Russian, and historically, it has mostly been used to transport crude oil, liquefied natural gas (LNG), and bulk commodities like coal and ore. Around a hundred ships used the route in 2025.

By comparison, about 13,000 ships travel between Asia and Europe through Suez every year. The northern route from Shanghai to Antwerp is 5,000 kilometres shorter than going via Suez, but it suffers from reliability and risk issues relating to sea ice. The only other viable route through Arctic waters is the North West Passage above Canada. This would be of more use for shipping going from Shanghai to New York, except in this case, the sailing time is much the same as going through the Panama Canal and the necessity for icebreaker escorts and the risk of ice makes the northern route more expensive. Last year, only thirteen ships used the North West Passage (some more than once) but most of these were cruise liners not cargo ships or tankers, and one of them ran aground, which underscores the environmental and insurance issues. More than twice the number of ships pass through Suez in one day than take the Northern Sea route in a year.

Headlines warn of record levels of warming but it will take centuries for the Arctic ice to disappear. Images of glaciers “calving” (i.e. dropping a chunk of ice the size of a block of flats into the ocean) are dramatic. Less dramatic is how long the camera has to stay in position to get those shots. The Greenland ice sheet is a lot bigger than a block of flats. It is a lot bigger than Manhattan. Manhattan-sized icebergs appearing in summer are dramatic. However, in the context of an ice sheet that is 1.7 million square kilometres in area, the occasional iceberg on the scale of Manhattan (60 square kilometres) is not a great loss. The largest iceberg observed to date was the Petermann ice island of 2010 which was 251 square kilometres in size. That sounds like a lot but it is about a thousandth of the area of the Greenland ice sheet. When you take volume into account it is even less. Since most of the ice is over a kilometre thick, the calved ice islands look like floating salami slices (a few blocks high) compared to the mile-high compacted slab of ice that covers eighty percent of Greenland.

I do not dispute the reality of climate change. I am just pointing out the Greenland ice is not about to melt in a decade or two. A return to the ice-free conditions of the Eocene (when mammals evolved on Earth, around fifty million years ago) will take millennia even if average global temperatures rise to four degrees above pre-industrial levels. Under such conditions, the Greenland ice sheet would melt entirely and global sea level would rise seven metres (see Section 9.4.1.4 of this IPCC report, subtitled “Projections beyond 2100”). It would take longer for the West Antarctic sheet to melt and still longer for the elevated East Antarctic sheet to melt. The IPCC’s estimated timeline for a return to global ice-free conditions like the Eocene is millennia not centuries (see Section 9.4.2.6 of their report, subtitled “Projections Beyond 2100”).

With the Earth as cool as it is, there are good reasons why Greenland has almost no working mines and why the seas off its coasts are not crowded with shipping like the Suez and Panama Canals. A major challenge for the mining of rare-earth minerals in Greenland is that most of them are found in a rock called eudialyte, and no one has yet developed a profitable process for extracting rare-earth elements from this kind of rock. Due to the need for high-temperature baking and reagents to extract the rare-earth elements, eudialyte ores turn rare-earth mining into a chemically aggressive, energy-intensive, low-margin hydrometallurgical problem. In other places, rare earths are found in a different rock formation called carbonatite, for which there are viable methods of extraction. Most of these places are in China, but since the Chinese started putting export caps on these minerals, exploration elsewhere has increased. New mines for rare-earth minerals are opening up outside China in investable places like South Africa, Brazil, and Australia.

In sum, invading Greenland is a terrible idea. The logistics are horrendous and the country is something like the opposite of an investment opportunity. Were it otherwise, we would be seeing investment! Half the cost of running the Greenland government comes from Danish subsidies. There is no credible military threat preventing investment. Mining is just too risky, too costly, and too cold. This is not to say that future technology cannot find a way to extract rare-earth elements from eudialyte ore. The problem is finding a way to do it at a cost low enough to make it commercially viable. Rare-earth mining in Greenland is not a sure thing, it is a high-risk gamble.

Finally, Greenland is not a “strategic gateway” to anywhere. It is an icy dead end. Yes, it sits under the arc of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) from the Urals, but given the right coordinates, so does the entire planet. The Americans have their base at Pituffik which exists to deal with ICBM threats. If they want more, they can reopen the Cold War bases they closed decades ago. But the truth is these bases are obsolete. Occupying Greenland will do nothing to improve nuclear-missile defence. The US does not need to take control of Germany to maintain a base at Ramsfield. Nor does it need to take control of Britain to maintain a base at Lakenheath. And it certainly does not need to take control of Greenland to keep its base at Pituffik. Under NATO, Greenland is safe. Under a United States that chooses infamy over alliances, nowhere is.