FORTRESS GREENLAND

The USA's recent interest in 'acquiring' the Danish territory is rooted in a long and complex history of security and military interests

- WORDS: MARK WOOD

In May 1939, the US Senate debated a proposal to purchase the territory of Greenland from Denmark. The War Department was consulted but ultimately vetoed the project based on its conclusion that the territory lacked suitable locations to build facilities for aviation and naval forces. This event was one of a series of historical attempts to purchase the island stretching back to 1867.

Within the first week of his second term as President of the United States, Donald Trump was energising the mainstream media by declaring his intention to buy Greenland, (as he had said in 2019 during his first term), a scheme that was met with hostility from the Danes. While the Senate of 1939 debated from a viewpoint of political expediency, the Trump administration's perspective was apparently more about economic than political benefit. Yet this search for economic gain has a historical precedent rooted in the United States' wartime requirement for aluminium to feed its burgeoning aircraft industry.

By 1943 America was the world's largest producer of aluminium with an output of 43 percent of global production. Aluminium is manufactured by refining bauxite ore into alumina, which is then smelted into pure aluminium through an electrolytic process that requires large quantities of the mineral cryolite. Cryolite is a rare mineral of the sodium group with small deposits found in Spain, the United States and Canada; however, until the late 1980s the largest seams of cryolite anywhere in the world were located in western Greenland.