On his way to Canada for the G7 summit, French President Emmanuel Macron will visit Greenland at the end of the week. He will become the first European head of state to visit Nuuk to discuss security issues in the North Atlantic and the Arctic amid high-profile statements by US President Donald Trump about his desire to include the Danish island in the United States.
On Monday, June 9, Macron said that Greenland “is not an object for seizure,” apparently alluding to Trump’s repeated statements about his desire to take the Arctic island under US control. Macron’s words were made on the eve of his visit to Nuuk, during which he plans to hold talks with Greenland’s President Jens-Frederik Nielsen and Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen. According to the Elysee Palace, the topics of the talks will be the security situation in the North Atlantic and the Arctic, as well as cooperation in the field of energy and the extraction of critically important minerals.
But according to the Danish press, the purpose of Macron’s visit is to support Denmark in respecting its territorial integrity. Indeed, since returning to the White House, Trump has repeatedly expressed a desire to take control of Greenland, an Arctic island rich in minerals with a strategically important location.
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Trump has ordered US intelligence agencies to step up intelligence gathering on Greenland. And the Pentagon plans to include Greenland in the area of responsibility of the Northern Command of the US Armed Forces (NORTHCOM) as early as June.
In turn, The Washington Post wrote that Washington is studying the cost of acquiring the island. The newspaper’s interlocutors said that the staff of the White House budget department is calculating how much it might cost to maintain Greenland, taking into account the provision of public services to 57 thousand of its inhabitants. They are also trying to estimate how much revenue the island’s natural resources could bring to the U.S. budget. Moreover, of all the potential acquisitions, including Canada and the Panama Canal, which Trump spoke about, “he considers Greenland as the simplest,” the newspaper’s source said.
At the same time, Greenland’s Minister of Business and Mineral Resources, Naaya Nathaneelsen, notes that despite the increased geopolitical attention to the island, “US interest has still not turned into concrete investments.” According to her, since the beginning of the year, Greenland has been visited by delegations of private American companies, but the official dialogue with the White House has not yet begun.
Except that US Vice President Jay Dee Vance and his wife visited the island and talked with American servicemen at Pituffik base. There, he said Denmark had “done a bad job for the benefit of the people of Greenland,” and repeated Trump’s claim that the island is vital to U.S. national security and the protection of the “free world,” including from China and Russia.
“So far, all this noise has not led to an increase in direct investment in Greenland,” stressed Nathaneelsen. “We don’t see any concrete examples of American funds pouring into Greenland’s business yet.”
Moreover, the minister warned that companies from the United States and Europe should hurry up with investments. Otherwise, the authorities of Greenland will have to seek help in developing minerals in other countries, in particular in China.
Apparently, France has heard Nuuk’s call. On May 21, Greenland issued a 30-year mining license to the Danish-French mining company Greenland Anorthosite Mining (GAM). GAM, supported by the French investment group Jean Boulle Group, will mine the so-called moon rock in the west of the island, which can become an alternative in aluminum production. We are talking about anorthosite (consisting of aluminum, silica and calcium), similar to materials brought to Earth by NASA’s Apollo missions.
According to Petr Cherkasov, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Chief Researcher at the Institute of Universal History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Macron’s visit to Greenland can be viewed from different angles. “First of all, the conclusion suggests itself that this is another step in asserting itself as the leader of Europe, which is concerned about protecting the European, in this case the Greenlandic, “garden” from the American “goat” who intends to penetrate there and master it in his interests. In this sense, Macron’s visit to Greenland is a demonstration of European unity,” the expert told NG.
But it’s not just about the ambitions of the French president. “I would associate his incredible external activity with the instability of the position of the owner of the Elysee Palace, as evidenced by the results of all recent elections in France – from municipal to national. To divert the attention of the French from serious internal problems, to switch it to issues of international politics, to intimidate the threat from the East in the hope of uniting a divided society. That’s what I see as one of the main goals of Macron’s policy,” Cherkasov stressed.
He believes that Macron is achieving his goals to some extent, as evidenced by the unprecedented rise in anti-Russian sentiment in France since the time of the Fourth Republic, fueled by the media. “Even now, I think that negotiations with the Prime Minister of Denmark and the head of the government of Greenland will not do without calls to protect the EU’s Arctic space not only from Trump, but also from Putin,” the expert noted.