Forecasts suggest that global heating could create a shortcut from Asia to North America, and new routes for trading, shipping – and attack.
Another week, another freak weather phenomenon you’ve probably never heard of. If it’s not the “weather bomb” of extreme wind and snow that Britain is hunkering down for as I write, it’s reports in the Guardian of reindeer in the Arctic struggling with the opposite problem: unnaturally warm weather leading to more rain that freezes to create a type of snow that they can’t easily dig through with their hooves to reach food. In a habitat as harsh as the Arctic, where survival relies on fine adaptation, even small shifts in weather patterns have endlessly rippling consequences – and not just for reindeer.
For decades now, politicians have been warning of the coming climate wars – conflicts triggered by drought, flood, fire and storms forcing people on to the move, or pushing them into competition with neighbors for dwindling natural resources. For anyone who vaguely imagined this happening far from temperate Europe’s doorstep, in drought-stricken deserts or on Pacific islands sinking slowly into the sea, this week’s seemingly unhinged White House talk about taking ownership of Greenland is a blunt wake-up call. As Britain’s first sea lord, General Sir Gwyn Jenkins, has been telling anyone prepared to listen, the unfreezing of the north due to the climate crisis has triggered a ferocious contest in the defrosting Arctic for some time over resources, territory and strategically critical access to the Atlantic. To understand how that threatens northern Europe, look down at the top of a globe rather than at a map.
By the early 2040s, forecasts suggest global heating could have rendered the frozen waters around the north pole – the ocean separating Russia from Canada and Greenland – almost ice-free in summer. That potentially opens a new shortcut from Asia to North America, not around the planet’s middle but over the top, creating new routes for trading, shipping, fishing – and, more ominously, for attack.
A new theatre of conflict is consequently emerging from under the melting ice, and China, Russia and the US are increasingly locked in a battle for dominance over it. Meanwhile as rising temperatures turn the high north into an autocrat’s chessboard, territories unlucky enough to be in the way – from Greenland to Canada to the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, long coveted by Russia – risk becoming pawns.
Almost as dangerous for these countries as the threats exposed by a thawing pole are, in a way, the opportunities. Why on earth does the US think it needs to annex friendly Greenland in order to defend this critical Arctic frontier? After all, they’ve had troops stationed on this autonomous Danish territory since the second world war, and Denmark has obligingly made clear they’re more than welcome to bring more. The one benefit that does come uniquely with ownership, interestingly, is rights to the underground riches that could be unlocked as this frozen country heats up.
Greenland is a rare, untapped source not just of oil and gas but of the rare earth minerals used to make everything from electric car batteries to datacenter processors – which are to US hopes of winning a technological race with China as rubber from Malaya or cotton from India were to the old colonial economies. Though it’s often a mistake to read too much logical method into the apparent presidential madness, there is no shortage of ideologues and tech bros in Trump’s orbit capable of putting all this together and selling it to him. And while mining the Arctic might not be economically viable for many years yet, Trump’s grumbles this week about Greenland being “full of Chinese and Russian ships everywhere” suggests someone has convinced him that he can’t let rivals beat him to a valuable potential development opportunity, a concept any former real estate mogul can grasp. After all, in Ukraine, Trump sought rights to mine rare earths in exchange for security guarantees, and in Gaza he mused about building hotels on its bombed-out ruins: why not seek to make a quick buck from environmental catastrophe?
And while to Britons all this looks like a new age of empire, for the Maga faithful perhaps there’s an echo of a much more American story, that of settlers making their fortune by joining the wagon trail west, pushing the nation’s frontiers endlessly outwards, staking their claim to Indigenous people’s lands and holding grimly on to them through a brutal mix of trade and violence. The aim isn’t to invade Greenland, US secretary of state Marco Rubio explains, but to buy it, or at least rent exclusive military access. It’s a mark of how fast the relationship between the US and its former allies has collapsed – in just over a year – that this is meant to be reassuring: hey friends, we just want to exploit you, not kill you!
Given the president’s legendarily short attention span, it’s difficult to know what fate awaits Greenland. Maybe he’ll simply get bored and move on, especially once the midterms are over and there is less need for drama abroad to distract from failures at home. Or maybe the White House will borrow instead from the Putin playbook, exploiting Greenlanders’ yearning for independence from Denmark to foment the kind of domestic unrest that is so easily whipped up in the age of social media – before pitching the US as a benign savior riding into town to keep them safe and make them rich.
But either way, we had better get used to the idea this is the beginning, not the end, of the conflicts that may come as global heating redraws our maps, unpicks old alliances, and creates new deadly rivalries for land, water and natural resources.
Of course, it will be worse for those already living on the edge of sustainability, in deserts too parched for anything to grow or in coastal towns already struggling with rising sea levels, or in places too poor to protect themselves from increasingly violent storms, than it will for lucky old temperate Europe. And of course, these risks could always be better managed by collaborative governments treating events like the unfreezing of the north as a collective challenge for humans to face together, rather than a deadly race for national advantage.
But in the week Trump announced he would be pulling the US out of a raft of international climate initiatives, that clearly isn’t the world we live in. So if nothing else, let poor beleaguered Greenland be a reminder that the climate crisis will have geopolitical consequences we have barely yet begun to understand, and that whatever we can still do to cap the rising temperature or mitigate its effects still matters. Even, or maybe especially, if we can’t yet undo the damage that has already been so willfully done.
(Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist)
