The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Why on Earth Would We Take Greenland? || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: January 19, 2026

Taking Greenland is worse than pointless both economically and strategically. As importantly, Denmark is arguably America's most earnest ally, and for decades has given the United States anything it has asked for.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://bit.ly/4qjIw1J

Hey, all, Peter Zine here coming to you from a very snowy Colorado. We've got about seven inches so far, and about three more is on the way. Because of everything that's been going on across the world, and everyone's talking about what the Trump administration is going to do next, and because Greenland keeps coming up over and over and over again, I thought it would be a good time to explain why the United States taking Greenland is one of the dumbest ideas that I have heard in my life. And if you think back in the last 30 years, there's been a lot of dumb. Let's just go through what the people who say it's a good idea, why those things are all wrong. Number one, we need it for no hence purposes because there's Chinese and Russian ships everywhere.

The Russian Navy has been in a not so slow disintegration now for 30 years, and because of the Ukrainian war, they've basically lost one of their entire fleets. Now, their Arctic Sea fleet is the best one that they have, but it is a pale shadow of what it was 20 years ago, much less 40 years ago. And the Russian ability to project power to the North Atlantic simply does not exist. And for that, the United Kingdom is a better counter, and we already have naval bases there. Number two, have we militarized that we can project power? No.

80% of the country is under permanent ice, another 5% is moving glaciers. The other 10% is kind of the climate of, say, the Aleutian Islands, but with a worse winter. No good ports at all. So any sort of infrastructure you're going to build, if you're trying to project power is going to have to be some sort of floating platform off the coast, kind of like what the United States tried to do with Gaza, which was a disaster, but you're going to be doing this for military vessels. There's also the question of what would that achieve. Some people say that if you control Greenland, then you can control at least part of the Arctic Ocean route to ship

between Asia and North America. And while that is true, you're talking about a trillion dollar investment to encourage the Chinese to dump product in the United States. That's a really weird value proposition. And then third is mining. People like to talk about rare earths and they say that Greenland has loads. Well, first of all, no one has prospected functionally in Greenland yet. So anyone who says they've got a lot is just making shit up. Second, again, 80% of Greenland is under an ice cap, not a glacier, an ice cap.

And even if the most extreme version of global warming happens, you will not be able to meaningfully operate in that zone this century. So you might be able to poke some things on the side. That is fair. But again, rare earths aren't rare. They are a byproduct of other mining. It's not like you can go sink a single shaft into the ground and start pulling up your lanthanides or whatever else you want. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You need a massive complex to process whatever else is there, bauxite, copper, silver, whatever, and because this is a country, country with under 100,000 people and none of them live in the places that are probably mineral rich.

Wow, I'm really getting covered here. You're now talking about either building a trillion dollars of infrastructure just to process metals that you can get somewhere else at a tenth of the cost or shipping all the ore out, which would mean a mammoth piece of infrastructure to handle that kind of cargo. There's nothing about this so that is cost effective. And then there's the issue of what we'd be able to get that we don't need to have. Because Denmark is such a firm ally,

they allow us to do whatever we want in Greenland, pretty much whenever we want. During the Cold War, we had a few dozen, maybe about 30 or 40 facilities there. We have slimmed that down to one, just the station at Thule. They have made it very clear in Trump II that if we want to go back and reopen any of those facilities or build new ones, they're happy to help. They're happy to help pay for it. So there is nothing that we would get from direct control that we don't already have, except for the head. of managing a remote territory that someone else is already managing better. All it would do is wreck the United States' alliance with the country that arguably has been the most loyal and enthusiastic ally we have ever had. Denmark isn't like the United Kingdom or France where they have delusions of their own strength. It isn't like Australia where it's kind of remote. This is a country that's in the heart of where the North Sea meets the Baltic Sea and has been the plug that has kept the Russians from having a functional Navy for decades.

And every time we have called upon them, they have answered. You wreck that relationship. And it's difficult to imagine that we have any alliances where we would still be seen as a trusted partner. And then you're talking about the U.S. going to the loan and having to do everything on the global scale by itself and large-scale excision of American power from Europe. And if you know your history,

the last couple of times we decided we didn't want to work with Europe. We ended up going back with several hundred thousand men, a lot of whom didn't come home. So no, not worth it.