ANALYSIS: The Pentagon Deploys Its Special Forces to Greenland — and No One Is Asking the Right Questions

The Ally We Didn’t Consult

When your protector starts renovating your attic without warning you, the question is no longer whether he’s protecting you—but what he’s protecting himself from.

Copenhagen finds itself in an untenable position. Denmark is a founding member of NATO. It depends on the United States for its strategic security. But Greenland is a Danish autonomous territory, with its own government—the Naalakkersuisut—and a population of 56,000 who never voted to become an American aircraft carrier.

Greenlandic Prime Minister Múte Bourup Egede has reiterated that Greenland is not for sale. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has invested $1.5 billion in the defense of the Arctic territory—an unprecedented amount for a country of 5.9 million people. This is not generosity. It is a diplomatic counteroffensive.

The Danish response no one expected

Copenhagen has deployed an additional Arctic inspection vessel. It announced the creation of an Arctic brigade. It has reinforced the Arctic Command based in Nuuk. These decisions, unthinkable five years ago, are a response to a dual threat: Russia to the north and an encroaching ally to the west.

Denmark isn’t saying no to Washington. It’s saying: we exist, too.

As the sea ice melts, appetites grow

Global warming has transformed the Arctic faster than any strategic plan. Summer sea ice has lost 40% of its surface area since 1979. The Northern Sea Route—along the Russian coast—is now navigable five months a year. The Northwest Passage, which runs along Canada and Greenland, opens up a little more each summer.

A shortcut between Asia and Europe that saves 15 days of sailing compared to the Suez Canal does not remain a geographical secret for long.

China has caught on. Beijing defines itself as a quasi-Arctic state—a lexical invention that would raise an eyebrow if it weren’t accompanied by massive investments in port infrastructure, undersea cables, and polar scientific research. China has built the Xue Long 2, a research icebreaker. It has signed drilling agreements with Russia on the Yamal Peninsula. It is eyeing Greenland with the appetite of an investor who has identified the next undervalued asset.

The minerals your phone needs

Beneath the Greenlandic ice lie rare earth elements, uranium, zinc, oil, and gas. The Kvanefjeld deposit contains one of the world’s largest reserves of rare earth elements—metals that are essential for batteries, wind turbines, semiconductors, and weapons systems.

Whoever controls these resources controls a critical link in the global supply chain. China currently dominates 60% of global rare earth refining. Washington cannot afford to let a second strategic deposit fall into Beijing’s orbit.

Greenland is not an island. It is a vault.

The Prophecy That Became Doctrine

In August 2019, Donald Trump had floated the idea of buying Greenland. The world had laughed. Mette Frederiksen had called the idea absurd. Trump had canceled a state visit to Denmark. The episode seemed over.

Five years later, the Pentagon is deploying special forces to Greenland. Congress is approving increased budgets for the Arctic. U.S. Northern Command is incorporating Greenland into its continental defense scenarios. Trump’s raw intuition—that Greenland is strategically vital—has turned into a bipartisan consensus.

And yet, the approach remains the problem. Talking about buying a territory inhabited by an indigenous Inuit people with their own language, their own culture, and their own democratic aspirations is not geopolitics. It’s colonialism in a three-piece suit.

What America Really Wants

Washington doesn’t want to buy Greenland. Washington wants to ensure that no one else buys it. The difference is fundamental. The current military buildup follows the same logic as the Monroe Doctrine: the Western Hemisphere is a zone of American influence, and any outside actor that establishes a presence there will be treated as a threat.

China proposed funding airports in Greenland in 2018. The United States blocked the project. Russia reactivated its Northern Fleet and stepped up submarine patrols in the Denmark Strait. The Pentagon responded by reinforcing Pituffik.

Every adversarial move accelerates militarization. Every instance of militarization provokes a counter-move. It is a vicious cycle, and Greenland finds itself at the very center of the vortex.

Fifty bases reopened in ten years

An empire that reopens its abandoned military bases is not preparing for peace. It is laying the groundwork for the next move.

Since 2014, Moscow has systematically rebuilt its Arctic military infrastructure. The Nagurskoye base, on the Franz Josef Land archipelago, is the world’s northernmost military installation. The Temp base, on Kotelny Island, houses S-300 air defense systems and Bastion cruise missiles.

Russia’s Northern Fleet, based in Murmansk, constitutes the world’s largest concentration of nuclear submarines. Yasen-M-class submarines, equipped with Kalibr missiles, regularly patrol the waters between Norway, Iceland, and Greenland—the infamous GIUK Gap that already haunted NATO during the Cold War.

The Revived GIUK Gap

The GIUK Gap—Greenland, Iceland, United Kingdom—is the only route Russian submarines can take to reach the North Atlantic. During the Cold War, NATO deployed a network of underwater sensors there called SOSUS. This network was partially dismantled after 1991.

It is currently being rebuilt. And Greenland is its western cornerstone.

When the Pentagon talks about strengthening naval capabilities in Greenland, it is referring to underwater surveillance, acoustic detection, and the ability to block the Russian fleet’s passage to the Atlantic. This is not territorial defense. It is strait control—the oldest and most formidable form of maritime power.

56,000 Voices That No One Listens To

Amid all this high-stakes geopolitics, one question is consistently sidestepped: What do the Greenlanders think?

Greenland’s population—56,000 people, mostly Inuit—lives on a territory of 2.16 million square kilometers. It has the lowest population density on the planet. These men and women fish, hunt, and live in communities where winter lasts nine months and daylight disappears for weeks at a time.

They are not mentioned in any Pentagon briefing. They are not consulted in any NATO meeting. Their territory is divided into operational zones by strategists who have never set foot there except in uniform.

Independence on the Horizon

A people used as a geographical buffer will eventually demand accountability.

The Greenlandic independence movement gains ground with every election. Múte Egede’s Inuit Ataqatigiit party advocates for greater autonomy, or even full independence. The paradox is cruel: Greenland cannot finance its independence without exploiting its natural resources, but exploiting its natural resources attracts the very powers that make independence impossible.

The annual Danish subsidy of 535 million euros keeps Greenland in a state of economic dependence that Copenhagen uses as political leverage and that Washington views as an opportunity.

An alliance designed for Central Europe, facing the North Pole

NATO was built to defend the Fulda Gap—the plain in central Germany through which Soviet tanks were expected to pour. In 2025, the threat no longer comes from eastern Germany. It comes from the north.

Finland and Sweden’s accession to the Alliance has transformed NATO’s geography. The Baltic Sea has become an Alliance lake. But the Arctic remains a blind spot. NATO has no unified Arctic command. No common Arctic doctrine. No rapid reaction force adapted to temperatures of minus 40 degrees.

The U.S. military buildup in Greenland is also a message to European allies: if you don’t take the Arctic seriously, we’ll do it on our own.

Norway, the only ally that understands

Oslo is the only NATO member to have maintained a substantial military presence in the Arctic since the end of the Cold War. The Norwegian Northern Brigade, based in Bardufoss, trains under conditions that most Western armies cannot simulate. Norway regularly hosts NATO exercises in cold-weather environments—Cold Response, Nordic Response—which bring together up to 30,000 soldiers.

But Norway cannot defend the Alliance’s northern flank on its own. And Greenland is too far away, too large, and too sparsely populated to be defended by a single European ally.

Quasi-Arctic State: When Words Precede Ships

In 2018, Beijing published a White Paper on the Arctic in which it defines itself as a quasi-Arctic state. China is located 1,400 kilometers from the Arctic Circle. Australia, by comparison, does not define itself as a quasi-Antarctic state—but Australia does not seek to control global trade routes.

China’s Arctic strategy is the Polar Silk Road. Invest in infrastructure. Fund research. Offer partnerships that small states cannot refuse. Then transform economic presence into political influence.

And yet, it is not the Chinese fleet that the Pentagon is monitoring in Greenland. Not yet, anyway.

The Sri Lankan Precedent

The port of Hambantota in Sri Lanka tells the story that Greenland could one day face. China finances the construction. The country cannot repay the debt. China secures a 99-year lease. A commercial port becomes a strategic stronghold.

When China proposed financing three airports in Greenland in 2018, Washington recognized the pattern. So did Denmark. The project was blocked. Copenhagen financed the airports itself—a $700 million investment that the small country would never have agreed to without Chinese pressure.

The Chinese threat in Greenland is not military. It is economic. And that is precisely why it is harder to counter.

The Ghost of Thule

Some military bases are so strategically important that they outlast all changes in doctrine, all political shifts, and all diplomatic thaws.

Pituffik Air Base—renamed in 2023 after bearing the name Thule Air Base for 72 years—is the Arctic jewel of U.S. military infrastructure. Located at 76 degrees north latitude, it is home to the 12th Space Warning Squadron, which operates radars for detecting intercontinental ballistic missiles.

In 1968, a B-52 carrying four thermonuclear bombs crashed into the pack ice near Thule. One of the bombs was never recovered. Denmark discovered on that occasion that the United States was storing nuclear weapons on its territory—in violation of a bilateral agreement. The incident was hushed up. The base remained.

Pituffik is proof that U.S. strategic interests in Greenland did not begin with Trump. They date back to Truman.

From Surveillance to Projection

The shift from passive surveillance to active force projection is the major doctrinal change of 2025. Pituffik monitored the skies. In the future, Greenland will be used to control the seas, deploy ground forces, and deny entire maritime areas to potential adversaries.

The special operations announced by the Pentagon are the tool driving this transformation. Discreet, flexible, and deployable within hours, they make it possible to project a presence without the logistical burden of a permanent base housing 5,000 soldiers.

As the ice melts, geopolitics solidifies

The Arctic is warming four times faster than the global average. The Greenland ice sheet is losing an average of 270 billion metric tons of ice per year. What was once an inaccessible white wilderness is becoming a navigable, exploitable, and contested space.

Every additional degree opens up sea routes, reveals mineral deposits, and gives rise to territorial claims. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea was not designed to arbitrate disputes over continental shelves emerging from melting sea ice. Russia, Canada, Denmark, and Norway have all filed overlapping claims with the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf.

And yet, it is military force—not international law—that will determine who controls what in the Arctic of 2030.

The Greenland Paradox

The same global warming that makes Greenland strategically vital is threatening its ecosystem, its traditional hunting culture, and its geological stability. Inuit communities are seeing their hunting ice floes disappear, their buildings sink into thawing permafrost, and their millennia-old way of life crumble.

They are paying the price for climate change they did not cause. And they will suffer the consequences of militarization they did not ask for.

The Wake-Up Call Brussels Refuses to Heed

Europe is debating its strategic autonomy. Meanwhile, the United States is establishing bases in the European Arctic.

The European Union has no credible Arctic policy. The EU’s Arctic strategy, published in 2021, speaks of sustainable development, scientific cooperation, and multilateral dialogue. It does not mention the word “deterrence” even once.

While Brussels drafts strategies, Moscow is building bases, Washington is deploying special forces, and Beijing is signing mining contracts. Europe is a bystander in a region that constitutes its own northern flank.

The question Europe must ask itself

If the United States unilaterally decides on the military posture in Greenland—the territory of an EU member state—what remains of European sovereignty? If Washington can deploy special forces in the Danish Arctic without Brussels having a say, the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy is a fiction.

This is not a theoretical question. It is a real-time test.

Submarine Cables: The Lifeblood of the Digital World

Submarine cables running beneath the Arctic Ocean carry 95% of intercontinental data. The Far North Fiber project—a cable connecting Japan to Europe via the Arctic—is set to traverse waters that Russia considers part of its exclusive economic zone.

Monitoring and protecting this critical undersea infrastructure is part of the mission the Pentagon has assigned to its reinforced naval forces in Greenland. A severed cable in the Arctic can digitally isolate entire nations within hours.

And yet, the threat to Arctic undersea cables receives a fraction of the media attention devoted to Trump’s tweets about Greenland.

Underwater drones: the new frontier

Autonomous underwater vehicles—deep-sea drones—are transforming underwater warfare. They can map the seafloor, monitor submarine movements, and sabotage infrastructure without endangering a single sailor. Russia, the United States, and China are investing heavily in these autonomous systems.

Greenland, with its deep fjords and cold waters ideal for sound propagation, is a natural operating environment for these new systems.

A Superpower Prepared for Anything

The buildup in Greenland is not an isolated act. It is part of a broader reconfiguration of the U.S. military posture. The Pentagon is simultaneously increasing its presence in the Pacific against China, in Europe against Russia, in the Middle East against Iran, and in the Arctic against all three at once.

This is the definition of an empire in strategic overdrive. Too many fronts. Too many threats. Too few icebreakers.

The bipartisan consensus that should be cause for alarm

When Republicans and Democrats agree on something, it’s never to reduce the U.S. military presence anywhere.

The Arctic Security Initiative, passed by Congress, enjoys rare bipartisan support. Republican hawks see it as a confrontation with Russia. Democratic strategists see it as competition with China. Both parties stand to gain—at the expense of the Inuit people, who do not vote in U.S. elections.

What the Arctic Tells Us About the World to Come

The U.S. military buildup in Greenland is not just about bases and ships. It is the litmus test of a world where the great powers have stopped pretending that international law is enough to settle disputes. Where the sovereignty of small nations carries less weight than the minerals beneath their feet. Where global warming is no longer just an environmental catastrophe—it is a catalyst for conflict.

Greenland embodies all the tensions of the century: climate, resources, shipping lanes, rivalry among major powers, the rights of Indigenous peoples, sovereignty, and military technology. Everything converges on this immense island that most people couldn’t even locate on a map.

The question no one is asking

The Pentagon is bolstering its forces in Greenland. The question isn’t why—the reasons are obvious. The question isn’t how—the means are in place. The real question is the one no one is asking: When will Greenland cease to be an object of global geopolitics and become a subject in its own right?

When will the 56,000 Inuit have a say in the decisions that are turning their land into a battlefield?

The answer, for now, can be summed up in one word. And that word chills the blood more surely than the Arctic winter: never.

Signed, Jacques PJ Provost