The approach makes less sense if national defence isn’t the main objective. The United States has long had a military presence on Greenland, and Denmark is a NATO ally, noted Nikola Swann, global head of governments and multilaterals at SwissThink, a credit markets consulting firm.
Access to Greenland’s stores of minerals such as copper and lithium, which are useful for critical technology such as batteries and electric vehicles, may be more important to the United States, Swann said.
Barker said basing a valuation on Greenland’s resources could be more difficult. “If Greenland really helps us to defend the US, then its value increases with the size of the US economy,” Barker said. “If the only value of Greenland was minerals, then the size of the US economy wouldn’t have much effect on the price.”
The Financial Times suggested that Greenland’s resources justified a valuation of $US1.1 trillion, but Barker said the tongue-in-cheek estimate made a dubious assumption. “The US government would not receive the full benefit of resource extraction,” he said. “It would sell drilling and mining rights to companies whose bids would leave room for their own costs and profits.”
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Don’t forget other points of leverage. Trump said this past week that he could not rule out using military force or tariffs. Denmark’s economy has soared in recent years because of pharmaceutical exports such as Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy and Ozempic, which are largely exported to the United States.
“These have been important to recent Danish economic growth,” Swann said, giving Trump an advantage.
There is one thing everyone seems to agree on. Buying Greenland “would be the deal of the century,” Barker said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
