Yes, Trump’s Bold Greenland Plan Could Actually Work

President-elect Donald Trump’s suggestion that the United States explore a closer relationship with Greenland — up to and including that immense territory, the largest island in the world, joining the Union — epitomizes his out-of-the-box thinking. President Trump deployed that sort of thinking to powerful effect in his first term in office. It’s how he tackled such seemingly insoluble problems as energy supply, immigration, and Middle East peace.

The president-elect’s Greenland suggestion has triggered predictable hyperventilation and pearl-clutching among editorial page writers and elites in Washington, D.C., and foreign capitals alike. However, the United States getting closer to Greenland has obvious geopolitical benefits — and less obvious but strong grounding in international law. Let’s unpack the geopolitics and then the international law.

Greenland holds a crucial position facing the Arctic Ocean, and the Arctic Ocean is a focal point of growing contestation over the vast natural resources that its seabed contains. Russia is maneuvering aggressively to dominate the Arctic, a challenge to the United States that Greenland would help meet.

Greenland itself contains important wealth, not least of all rare earth metals. China seeks to corner the market on rare earth metals because these are indispensable to a range of technologies critical to American national security. Greenland would help with rare earth metals.

Greenland’s long Atlantic coasts, east and west, are also strategically important, adjacent as they are to the transit routes from Europe to America. If global warming really happens, Greenland’s geopolitical importance will only grow, in part because Greenland commands the eastern entrance to the Northwest Passage — the Arctic route connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific that would become one of the world’s chief oceanic lines of communication if its waters turn less icy.

What about international law? Isn’t it against the law to take another country’s territory? Since World War II, countries have largely come to accept that territory does not change hands between independent nation-states unless they agree. This is a good arrangement. It takes away one of the biggest causes of war.

For hundreds of years before, countries thought that armed conquest was a lawful means to gain territory from other countries, and many wars broke out when one sovereign tried to take a territory against the wishes of the nation-state that owned it. Largely ending the forcible taking of territory from independent nation-states was arguably the biggest gain for international peace and stability in modern times. It would be imprudent to go back to the old days of country-against-country land grab by military force.

But countries have always accepted that a sovereign might acquire a territory by agreement. This used to mean agreement between kings and other sovereigns. Today, it also means the consent of the inhabitants of the territory.

Interestingly, the United Nations, of all institutions, accepts that particular territories have a broad right to choose their own future. Greenland, for a time, was explicitly one of those territories. From 1946 to 1954, Greenland was a non-self-governing territory for purposes of Chapter XI of the UN Charter. Denmark discontinued Greenland’s formal UN status in 1954, in part out of concerns over UN interference in the territory.

However, from 1979 onwards, Denmark has recognized under its own domestic law that Greenland is self-governing; and in 2009 Denmark made clear that Greenland has the right to declare independence through a referendum, if its people choose to hold one. For over a half-century, most international lawyers have accepted — and the UN has, too — that a right of that kind entails several options for a territory like Greenland. Greenland’s people may choose to keep the status quo. They may choose independence. They also have the right to choose association with, or even union in, another nation-state. It is under this third available option that a clear path opens, if both Greenland and the United States want it, for Greenland to enter a new sovereign relationship with the United States.

What would such a relationship look like? Again, it would be for Greenland and the United States to negotiate. Experience shows that sovereign nations — including the United States — may encompass territories under a variety of constitutional settlements. A number of territories are part of the United States without being states of the United States — Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico in particular. Other creative relationships are possible — for example, the Federated States of Micronesia, Marshall Islands, and Palau are independent nation-states (and UN Member States) in Free Association with the United States. Free Association is a close and deep relationship, which, if designed and led properly, assures the vital security interests of both parties. It’s one among a range of possible deals that Greenland and the United States might consider.

So President Trump’s call for a fresh look at our relationship with Greenland hopefully will open a dialogue, at least in Washington to start, because a closer relationship would bring great benefits for American security. Moreover, Greenland coming closer to the United States has solid precedents in both international law and our own constitutional system.

President Trump has confounded the political elite — both in Washington, D.C., and foreign capitals — time and again with bold ideas that work. With Greenland, he is doing it once again — with great possibilities ahead.

Thomas D. Grant practices international law and is an academic at the University of Cambridge. He served in the first Trump administration, 2019-2021, as Senior Advisor for Strategic Planning under the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security. The opinions expressed in this article are his alone and do not necessarily reflect views or positions of the Trump Transition or any other organization or individual.