Throughout the Trump administration’s month-long exercise in escalating rhetoric around the president’s burning desire for Greenland, a key line emerged. Rather than a bid for the mineral wealth buried in the Arctic island, which is semi-sovereign and administered by Denmark, Trump and U.S. officials have framed the territory as essential to bolstering the U.S.’s strategic legacy in the Far North.
Trump’s Greenland envoy, his press secretary and his vice president recently claimed it was a foreign policy ploy. “American supremacy in the Arctic is non-negotiable,” Jeff Landry, the governor of Louisiana, recently wrote in New York Timeswhile Karoline Leavitt called Greenland “vital” to deterring “America’s adversaries in the Arctic.” JD Vance said it in March: “We need to make sure America leads in the Arctic, because we know that if America doesn’t, other nations will fill the gap where we fall behind.”
Kenneth Rosen, an experienced war correspondent who has covered conflicts from the Middle East to Ukraine, spent two years traveling around the Arctic Circle, reporting from military bases, indigenous communities and breaking ice, and said wealth he believes the US has “neglected the north for too long”. While reporting for his new book Polar Warhe said he sees “a big game of catch-up, and the U.S. is not doing what it needs to do to catch up.”
The problem, Rosen said, is that the Arctic leadership power vacuum has already been filled, and for the US to catch up now would be a monumental undertaking. And while Trump’s Greenland push may be an attempt to reverse that status quo, bellicose rhetoric may do more harm to US Arctic ambitions.
Polar War: Submarines, Spies and the Struggle for Power in a Melting Arcticwas published by Simon & Schuster in January. It reads simultaneously as a geopolitical thriller, a travelogue, and an environmental meditation, with Rosen describing the delicate state of affairs in the north, where warmer temperatures and retreating sea ice have revealed new possibilities for transpolar navigation and resource extraction.
The new pole reality has set in motion a major power struggle between the US, Russia and China. Change is happening at anything but a glacial pace in the Arctic, Rosen writes, and the US is barely keeping pace with its competitors.
Trump’s Ice-Covered Jewel
On January 21, the world watched as US President Donald Trump delivered a highly anticipated speech in Davos, Switzerland, in which he reiterated his desire to control Greenland, an ultimatum that called into question the terms of Europe’s relationship with the US, the state of the NATO alliance and whether the US-led global order is still alive.
But America’s obsession with Greenland long predates Trump. In his book, Rosen describes Greenland as America’s “ace-in-the-hole,” given that the territory is home to the country’s northernmost military base. Before Trump, the US tried to buy Greenland three times, and public intellectuals had long considered the island under the control of America’s security blanket, as defined by the Monroe Doctrine, famously resurrected by Trump in 2026.
The island is seen as a crucial shield between Russia, China and the US East Coast, as well as close allies in western Europe and maritime trade in the Atlantic. In Trump’s Davos speech, he described Greenland as “right in the middle” between the US and its rivals. China, in particular, has been trying to make inroads into Greenland in recent years, Rosen writes, including efforts to build three airports on the island and buy a former US naval base on the island’s southwest corner.
But by trying to build on his status as an Arctic superpower, Trump could undermine America’s influence in the region, Rosen argued. Hosting the US military and aligning itself with US strategic interests, Greenland “is already an American partner in every way that matters,” he writes, and the bombast of Trump’s recent rhetoric may be self-defeating.
“Since the conversation turned to Greenland, there’s been this concern that the momentum we’ve had in re-engaging our confidence in the Arctic is now being lost,” Rosen said. wealth. “As long as we continue to scold the European Union and the Nordic and Scandinavian nations, we will only push ourselves further and further away from a beneficial place in the Arctic.”
What makes matters worse, at least for the US, is that its presence in the Arctic relies almost entirely on its ability to cooperate with European allies, Rosen said. While Russia and China have devoted significant resources to strengthening their own security posture in the Arctic, America has lagged terribly behind.
America’s “sclerotic response.”
Take icebreakers, a ship specially designed to withstand and navigate ice-covered waters. Russia has more than 50 of these ships. China, which calls itself a “near-Arctic state,” has at least four. The US has two, one of which has suffered multiple engine fires and canceled trips over the past few years.
Another gap is visible in military bases. In recent decades, Rosen writes, Russia has reopened and upgraded more than 50 Cold War-era facilities scattered along its Arctic coast, including radar stations, air force bases and self-sustaining military outposts. The US currently has 10 bases in Alaska and, for now, one in Greenland.
In his book, Rosen describes the US strategy as a “sclerotic response” to the reality of the situation in the Arctic. The cornerstone of the US initiative to reassert its presence in the Arctic has been the Polar Security Cutter program, which plans to deploy an upgraded fleet of three new ice transport vessels. But the program is nearly a decade behind schedule and about 60 percent over budget, the Congressional Budget Office reported in 2024. As one former diplomat told Rosen, “A strategy without a budget is hallucination.”
That the U.S. is even talking about an Arctic strategy is a step forward, Rosen said, and efforts to modernize Alaska’s military bases and deep-sea ports are important. But Trump’s bombast over Greenland risks alienating the US from its NATO allies who provide expertise in surveillance, cold weather and shipbuilding and form a stronger collective deterrent against Russia.
“The Trump administration has been very bad at using soft power, hoarding soft power for the benefit of national security,” Rosen said.
Meanwhile, Russia and its broad strategic partnership with China in the Arctic risks leaving the US behind. In a way, the race may have already been won. When asked if he sees the Arctic as being on the brink of war, Rosen was somewhat dismissive. The region may not host a traditional war, fought with guns, infantry and mass casualties. Rosen says a suite of covert “grey area” tactics are more likely to be deployed in the Arctic. These may include sabotaging infrastructure to fuel unrest, subtly interfering with training exercises to undermine Arctic capabilities, and exploiting divisions in opposing alliances.
Russia probably already does all these things. NATO countries have repeatedly accused Russia of damaging submarine power cables and gas pipelines and jamming civilian and military air signals. Rosen recounts a Russian-backed scheme from 2023 to rush its Finnish border with multiple waves of undocumented migrants from third countries, ostensibly to shuffle its security resources and fuel domestic debate over illegal immigration.
Rosen calls this strategy one of “decombobulation,” a deliberate effort to keep rivals in the dark and constantly second-guessing. And for now, when it comes to the Arctic superpower race, disorientation seems to be winning.
“Russia basically says: “We’ve already been here. We’re here and you guys have no stake in it like we have a stake in it. So you must follow our example”.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com