Arriving at the Pituffik Space Base in northern Greenland on Friday, the US vice-president was greeted with a sign that read “Welcome to the top of the world”.
Visitors to this remote US military outpost, which is closer to the North Pole than the US, must brace themselves for the brutal conditions of the tundra, which has record lows of -69C and hurricane-intensity winds.
For Greenlanders, JD Vance’s visit can hardly be described as welcome. The outgoing prime minister, Mute Egede, denounced the trip as “highly aggressive” and the tour was scaled back this week to avoid offending the hosts.
“It’s cold as shit here. Nobody told me,” Vance said after landing with his wife, Usha, while talking to US troops eating lunch in a mess hall on the base. “The president is really interested in Arctic security, as you all know, and it’s only going to get bigger over the coming decades,” he said, before thanking the troops for their work and heading off to a briefing on Arctic security.
• Why does Trump want Greenland?
About 150 American troops live permanently at Thule air base, which has recently been renamed Pituffik, an Inuit word that means “the place we tie our dogs”.
For nine months of the year, the base is hemmed in by ice and the only link to the outside world is a runway constructed for US nuclear bombers during the Cold War. The conditions are so inhospitable that soldiers are paid cold weather bonuses.
Despite the conditions President Trump believes an American presence in Greenland is vital for US security — and will only become more so as the ice sheets melt, attracting predatory interest from China and Russia.
“We need Greenland for international safety and security,” Trump said this week. “We need it. We have to have it … when you look at the ships going up their shore by the hundreds, it’s a busy place.”
The US first occupied Greenland during the Second World War, using it to monitor Nazi submarines in the North Atlantic. After the liberation of Denmark, the US signed a treaty with Copenhagen formalising the American military presence there. The base at Pituffik was established in 1953, with 130 indigenous Greenlanders forcibly removed from their seal and walrus-hunting grounds to make way for its construction.
The site was chosen in part because of its proximity to the Soviet Union. If the USSR fired an intercontinental ballistic missile at the US, the most likely route would be over the Arctic. The early-warning radar station at Pituffik, along with similar installations on the northern coast of Canada and Alaska, would allow the US to detect a Soviet attack seconds after launch. As China and Russia race to develop hypersonic missiles, the location remains significant because the northern route to the US remains the most plausible path of attack.
Given that hypersonic missiles have become almost impossible to shoot down owing to their manoeuvrability in the air, the US may need to build more radar stations to detect incoming missiles, potentially explaining Trump’s desire to annex Greenland. “It’s not possible to properly defend a large section of this Earth — not just the US — without it,” Trump said.
The Pituffik base, shrouded in near-permanent darkness during winter, is managed by US Space Command rather than the air force, reflecting the extraterrestrial concerns of the American troops based there.
Satellites revolve around the Earth in two types of orbits: geostationary, which means they hover above a fixed spot on the map; and polar, which means they circle over the Arctic and Antarctic.
Polar-orbiting satellites are often used for military purposes, such as spying, secure communications, meteorology and missile-warning systems.
However, military satellites need to ping a ground station as they orbit over the North Pole and the Pituffik base makes contact with satellites 15,000 times a year. To maintain an advantage in space over China, many believe the US must reinforce its military presence in the Arctic.
“The volume of threats, the diversity of threats that [China] is presenting is a particular challenge,” warned General Chance Saltzman, chief of the US Space Force, last year. “The pace with which they put counterspace capabilities into play is mind-boggling.”
Even if many in Europe have been bemused by Trump’s focus on Greenland, an uninhabited wilderness, President Putin considers US designs on the island entirely logical. Speaking this week in Murmansk, Russia’s Arctic capital, Putin said that Trump’s policy was a continuation of two centuries of US expansion northwards, beginning with the acquisition of Alaska from Russia in 1867.
“The purchase of Alaska from Russia was ridiculed in the American press — it was called ‘madness,’ ‘an ice box’ and ‘President Andrew Johnson’s polar bear garden’,” Putin said. “That acquisition … is probably viewed very differently in the United States today.”
In his 5,000-word speech, Putin speculated that the melting ice caps offered Nato a “springboard” to attack and he has prepared Russia for conflict in the Arctic.
Over the past two decades, Russia has renovated dozens of Soviet-era military bases, satellite imagery suggests, including sizeable airfields on the Franz Josef Land, Novaya Zemlya and New Siberian Islands archipelagos.
In Murmansk, Putin launched the Northern Fleet’s latest nuclear submarine, the Perm, armed with Zircon hypersonic missiles. He has said the missiles, which Russia claims travel at nine times the speed of sound, have “no equivalent in the world”.
Boasting the largest fleet of ice-breakers, Russia is arguably better prepared than any other country to exploit the economic opportunities of the melting Arctic. The distance from China to Europe over the top of Russia is one third of the length of the traditional route through the Suez Canal, leading Beijing to express interest in transforming the northeast passage into a “polar silk road”.
As well as shipping opportunities, the Arctic has trillions of dollars worth of minerals buried under the ice. It also has 30 per cent of the world’s undiscovered gas and 13 per cent of undiscovered oil.
Given China’s stranglehold over the world’s supply of rare earth minerals, Trump is likely to regard Greenland as a way for the US to restore some balance. Greenland has untapped deposits of the minerals, vital to modern technologies, as well as zinc, lead, gold, iron ore and copper.
Without formally annexing Greenland, there is some evidence that the US is edging China out in the scramble for Greenland’s rare earth minerals. Last year, an Australian firm halted the sale of a rare earth mineral mine in Greenland following US and Danish lobbying. “There was a lot of pressure not to sell to China,” said Tony Sage, the chief executive of Critical Metals.
Trump first speculated that the US could buy Greenland in 2019, saying it could be “essentially a real estate deal”. Five years later, the arrival of Vance and Mike Waltz, his national security adviser, in Greenland means a proposal once dismissed as a folly is being taken much more seriously by the 56,500 people who live there.
Denouncing the “highly aggressive” trip, Egede said the threat posed by Trump to his country was “so serious that the level cannot be raised any further”.
