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During 2024, the race for northern routes intensified. The Northern Corridor project promoted by Russia and China has reopened interest in the Arctic and the Poles, prompting the newly-elected US President Trump to take up the issue immediately. Let us try to understand the reasons for a possible ‘Arctic War’.

A look towards the North

The infamous North is always little thought of. At the North Pole is Father Christmas’s village with his Elves producing presents for good children, but nothing more. We are used to looking at the world map from the side of the equator, but if we try to look ‘from above’, putting the Pole in the middle, the spatial view of the earth’s geography allows us to make very different considerations.

The Arctic as a macro-region covers some 14 million square kilometres and hosts as yet uncalculated reserves of hydrocarbons, precious metals and rare earths.

Competition between Arctic powers is exacerbated by overlapping territorial claims on the seabed. Article 76 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) allows states to extend their continental shelf, but claims often overlap, as in the case of the North Pole, claimed by Russia, Denmark and Canada. Russia, in particular, has intensified its military presence in the Arctic, reopening Cold War bases and developing advanced naval and missile capabilities.

The United States, initially less active, has recently increased its strategic engagement in the area, seeing Russia and China – the latter a self-described ‘quasi-Arctic nation’ – as challengers for control of resources and routes. China, despite having no Arctic borders, has invested in the ‘Silk Road Pole’, promoting infrastructural and scientific cooperation with Arctic countries.

In this terra incognita, Greenland, the world’s largest island, resides in the North Atlantic and Arctic Circle, occupying a position midway between North America and Europe. About 80 per cent of the island’s surface is covered by an ice sheet, second in size only to Antarctica. This ice sheet, which reaches thicknesses of more than 3,000 metres, is one of the planet’s main freshwater reserves. The rest of the territory consists of ice-free coastal areas, home to spectacular tundras and fjords. There is also a central glacial plateau surrounded by coastal mountains, with peaks exceeding 3,700 metres, such as Mount Gunnbjørn, the highest point on the island. The deeply incised fjords are home to active glaciers that contribute to the flow of icebergs to the ocean. Climatically… it’s cold!

American ambition on Greenland

The Blond Clump in the White House immediately spoke of Greenland and the ‘conquest’ of the landmass. For what reason?

Greenland is the largest island in the world and corresponds to 22% of the territory of the United States, i.e. the sum of Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Poland and the United Kingdom put together, with only 60,000 inhabitants. It is part of the Kingdom of Denmark but has extensive autonomous powers.

According to a report by the US Geological Survey, 13% of the world’s oil resources and 30% of its gas resources, plus gold, rubies, diamonds, zinc, iron, copper, rare earths and a lot of uranium, are found underground (between dry land and seabed relevance), with an estimated total value of around USD 400 billion, a year’s GDP for Denmark.

Trump already hinted at a gold rush in the region in the summer of 2019, but there is much more: huge reserves of oil, gas, palladium, nickel, phosphate, bauxite, uranium rare earths and more.

There are already several undisclosed American military bases there, except for the well-known one in Pituffik, which is the centre of the entire NORAD space protection network. There is no doubt that the main strategic weight of the icy island is geo-strategic being part of the North Pole and controlling access to the Pole for the entire Southwest. On the other hand, the United States is only considered a polar nation for a part (north) of Alaska, which was once Russian land bought by the Americans.

For the North Pole, bordering Siberia, the Chinese plan to develop their Polar Silk Road, a strategic alternative to avoid the South-East Asian straits (then Bab el-Mandeb, Red Sea, Suez) and also shorten the crossing time to Europe.

The Danes, who are very ecological and pacifist, will have to face a serious image problem: if the authorisations arrive to start exploiting the resources of the territory and clearly the situation will change radically, where Denmark will take a leading role in the nuclear market. For Greenland, on the other hand, the goal is much bigger: in addition to uranium, the melting of the glaciers is revealing the presence of other treasures in its subsoil that are tempting the rare earth giants and strategic industries. All to the detriment of local communities and their way of life, but this does not matter much to the market powers that be.

For Trump’s America, there are no small diplomatic advantages: the Arctic Council established in 1991 now has all NATO member countries (Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, the United States), except Russia, which is an eminent member but is the subject of war conflict and is kept on the sidelines at the decision-making level.

The accession of Sweden and Finland into NATO was a key step in securing the Arctic War. In particular, with Finland and secondarily Sweden, one of the most important Russian bases in the Arctic, the Kola Peninsula, is directly threatened. With around 40 vessels, the Russians can boast the world’s largest fleet of icebreakers and their presence at the Pole is well organised and continuously reinforced.

A few days ago, Trump relaunched the idea of buying the island, an idea that the Americans have been pursuing since 1867 and that Trump himself had put on the table during his first presidency. He then moved Ken Howery, the ambassador who was in Sweden, the one who evidently drove home with interesting and convincing arguments Stockholm’s renunciation of the neutrality that had lasted, more or less, for two centuries.

It is curious that Howery, the young global leader of the World Economic Forum, was one of the founders of PayPal and is part of the Pay Pal Mafia that includes Thiel, Musk, Nosek, Levchin. Musk and Howery magically find themselves together. What a curious coincidence.

The presidential entourage is interested in the northern part of the ‘Green Land’ in the middle of the ice – while the population is almost all in the south. The Inuit are the population with the highest suicide rate in the world: drowning them in dollars doesn’t make them happy, but maybe it helps. Whether it is a sectoral purchase, a long-term lease, permits to build and concessions to mine – or perhaps an operation of political subversion within the Danish balance of government – the US is ready to play its hand.

This is consistent with the US intent to ‘reunify America’ in order to make it great again, and is even better understood if we consider the coincidence of the Panama issue, for which Trump has reiterated his desire for annexation. A strategy that makes sense if we consider that Trump takes seriously the multipolar evolution of the world: he therefore needs to compact his pole, putting all the pieces together, being ready to wage war with the new numerous adversaries.