Annexation, Eh

The United States badly needs rare minerals and fresh water. Guess who has them?

- BY CHRISTOPHER POLLON

RAIN FELL for the first time on the highest point of the Greenland ice sheet in August 2021, seen by scientists as a foreboding precedent for sea level rise and the planet. But not everyone was alarmed. The melting of ice caps began exposing virgin ground for mining, including what has been touted as some of the largest deposits of rare earth elements, or REES, in the world.

REES are a group of seventeen metals with remarkable magnetic, electrochemical, and luminescent properties. They give a smartphone its computing power and electric cars their batteries. They are necessary to make powerful permanent magnets needed by both wind turbines to generate energy efficiently and laser-guided missile systems to stay on target.

In 2019, during his first term as US president, Donald Trump mused publicly that Greenland—a semi-autonomous Arctic frontier where almost 90 percent of the inhabitants are Inuit—could be bought outright from Denmark, as a means of securing valuable metals that China otherwise controls globally.

The comments were widely dismissed at the time, but early into Trump's second term, the tone has shifted. The new Trump administration talks less about buying Greenland now and more about simply annexing it. And what has been said about Greenland is also being said about Canada.

Canada's rich deposits of uranium, nickel, potash, and a host of obscure strategic metals, including REES, could help explain Trump's persistent but cryptic threats to make Canada the fifty-first US state. His repeated characterization of Canada's vast amounts of fresh water as a "faucet" that can be activated at will by parched Americans does nothing to dispel the threat.