American history is a tale of mastering our physical environment or being mastered by it. We carved a canal through Panama to join two oceans and remake global trade. We dammed the Colorado River to power the factories that won the Second World War. We failed as farmers and turned the High Plains into a decade of dust. Today, retreating ice is reshaping the strategic map, and nowhere more consequentially than in the Arctic.
The Arctic is warming at four times the global average. Sea lanes are opening where impassable ice reigned for millennia. At the center of this transformation sits Greenland, home to the Kvanefjeld and Tanbreez deposits — among the largest rare earth reserves on the planet. For generations, these elements essential to batteries, semiconductors, and precision munitions were locked in ice. That barrier is gone.
It may seem like President Donald Trump is the cause of Greenland’s concern. In reality, he is responding to a growing crisis. Our adversaries noticed the potential bounty in an increasingly navigable and accessible Arctic before we did, and Greenland is a prize they have not overlooked.
In 2017, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev announced their ambition to build a “Silk Road on the ice.” By year’s end, a joint $27 billion liquefied natural gas project began operation in northwest Siberia, proof that the partnership was more than rhetoric. China has since declared itself a “near-Arctic state” despite having no Arctic territory. China’s Shenghe Resources is already the second-largest shareholder in the company developing Greenland’s Kvanefjeld deposit. Beijing controls 70% of global rare earth production and 90% of processing. It has no intention of ceding that dominance to a warming Arctic.
While our adversaries advanced, what was America’s response? President Joe Biden proclaimed climate change “the single greatest existential threat to humanity,” but his rhetoric was more operatic than impactful. A 2019 U.S.-Greenland memorandum on critical mineral cooperation was allowed to expire.
Meanwhile, our icebreaker fleet aged into obsolescence. As ice recedes, icebreakers become even more essential: they extend the operating season, keep channels navigable, and project power. Russia operates more than 40. China has five and is building more. The U.S. has three, one commissioned in 1976.
The irony cuts deeper. America has been losing position in the Arctic to the very nations melting it. Russia and China rank among the world’s largest emitters of the greenhouse gases warming the planet. China’s manufacturing sector is three times dirtier than America’s. Russia’s energy production is twice as carbon-intensive. Now both nations race to dominate the terrain that warming has unlocked.
Reasserting America’s presence in the Arctic is the only solution, and the Trump administration knows it. During Trump’s first term, the Department of Defense’s 2019 Arctic Strategy declared the Arctic “strategic terrain as a potential vector for an attack on the U.S. homeland.”
That same year, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned that shrinking ice would transform the region: “Arctic sea lanes could become the 21st century Suez and Panama Canals.” Robert O’Brien, who served as Trump’s national security adviser in the first term, put it plainly: “Greenland is a highway from the Arctic all the way to North America. It’s strategically very important because, as the climate gets warmer, the Arctic is going to be a pathway.” This is climate realism: acknowledging physical change and responding strategically.
Trump’s second term has delivered. Last June, the Export-Import Bank signaled interest in a $120 million loan to fund the Tanbreez rare-earth mine, the first U.S. government financing for Greenland’s mineral development. In July 2025, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act injected nearly $9 billion for new icebreakers, the largest Arctic maritime investment in American history. An October agreement with Finland added $6 billion more for 11 Arctic security cutters, with seven to be built in Texas and Louisiana. January’s Davos framework charts a path through allied cooperation rather than annexation, ruling out military force while securing U.S. access to Greenland’s minerals and blocking non-NATO nations from acquiring mining rights.
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The president’s critics have treated his focus on Greenland as impulsive, even dangerous. Strip away the rhetoric, and a harder reality emerges. Our adversaries are positioning themselves to exploit the opening they created. Whether, like Biden, one views climate change as “code red for humanity,” or, like Trump, a “con job,” or something in between, what matters is that the melting Arctic is creating a new geostrategic battleground.
China and Russia moved first to dominate the resources and region that will define the next energy era. Under Trump, the U.S. is moving aggressively to respond. We have mastered formidable frontiers before.
Conner Brace served in the Department of Energy during the first Trump administration. He is now senior vice president at Boundary Stone Partners, a strategic advisory firm focused on energy, infrastructure, and technology. The views expressed are his own.