JANUARY 10 — When Donald Trump speaks warmly about the people of Russia and China, and even claims to enjoy cordial relations with their leaders, his follow-up line is revealing: “But I don’t want them as a neighbour in Greenland — not going to happen.”

This is not a contradiction. It is a clear expression of power politics stripped of diplomatic varnish.

Trump’s position reflects a worldview in which affection for peoples coexists with zero tolerance for strategic proximity. Greenland, in this calculus, is not a frozen backwater. It is a geopolitical red line.

Strategic irredentism, American-style

Irredentism is often understood as a desire to reclaim lost ethnic or historical lands.

The American version is different. It is strategic rather than cultural, driven not by ancestry but by security imperatives.

From the Monroe Doctrine to Alaska, from Hawaii to the Panama Canal Zone, the United States has repeatedly treated geography as destiny. Territories deemed vital to national security were never meant to remain neutral indefinitely.

They were meant to be absorbed, controlled, or denied to rivals.

Greenland fits squarely within this tradition. Trump’s interest is not whimsical or commercial.

It reflects a long-standing American instinct: if a territory is indispensable to US security, it cannot be left vulnerable to competing influence.

Military Geography and the Arctic High Ground Greenland sits astride the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom corridor, the critical gateway linking the Arctic to the North Atlantic.

This geography has shaped US and Nato military planning since the Cold War and has only grown more consequential.

From Greenland, early-warning systems can track ballistic missile trajectories across the polar route. Space surveillance, missile defence, and undersea cable monitoring converge in this location. Any hostile presence would dramatically shorten warning times and weaken deterrence.

The United States already operates Pituffik Space Base, a cornerstone of American missile-warning architecture. In an era of hypersonic weapons and space-based warfare, Greenland is not peripheral terrain. It is commanding terrain.

Trump’s fixation on Greenland is less about acquiring territory than denying access. The objective is exclusion rather than annexation.

Both Russia and China have intensified their Arctic engagement. Russia has remilitarised its northern flank, reopening bases and expanding Arctic naval and air capabilities.

China, styling itself a “near-Arctic state,” has invested in research stations, ice-class shipping, and infrastructure projects across the polar region.

From Washington’s perspective, economic and scientific engagement is rarely neutral.

Dual-use infrastructure blurs the line between civilian presence and military leverage.

Trump’s message is unequivocal: no footholds, no ambiguity, no gradual encroachment. Greenland is about drawing a hard boundary.

Invariably, beneath Greenland’s ice lies a significant concentration of rare earth elements, uranium, and other critical minerals essential for advanced manufacturing, defence systems, and high-technology industries.

For Trump, whose worldview fuses national security with economic sovereignty, this alone would be decisive.

Yet Greenland’s most underappreciated asset is fresh water.

The island contains the vast majority of the world’s fresh water reserves outside Antarctica, stored in its immense ice sheets. As global warming accelerates, this endowment is no longer a passive geographic fact. It is becoming a strategic variable.

Fresh water scarcity is emerging as a defining challenge of the coming decades.

What melts reshapes coastlines, but what remains frozen constitutes stored power.

Control, influence, and access to future water security will matter as much as oil once did.

Allowing rival powers to dominate Greenland’s resource and water landscape would replicate the very dependencies Washington now seeks to undo elsewhere.

In this logic, control over supply chains today determines military capability and societal resilience tomorrow.

Climate change and the compression of distance is another trigger.

Climate change is also transforming the Arctic from a frozen barrier into a navigable corridor.

New polar sea routes are becoming viable for longer stretches of the year, fundamentally reshaping global trade geography.

Shipping that once required lengthy detours around the entire African continent — or dependence on chokepoints such as the Suez Canal and the Red Sea — can now traverse far shorter Arctic passages.

A voyage linking Norway to Vladivostok, under favourable conditions, can be completed in less than a week.

This is a dramatic reduction compared with traditional commercial routes through the Indian Ocean, through the Straits of Malacca and the South China Sea.

The compression of time and distance carries enormous implications. Trade routes shape naval deployments, insurance risk, port relevance, and geopolitical gravity.

Whoever secures influence over Arctic navigation will shape the future architecture of global commerce.

For Trump, this reinforces a core belief: geography is power, and climate change does not dilute it — it intensifies it.

Greenland sits at the intersection of fresh water security, emerging sea lanes, and military surveillance.

To allow rival powers proximity here would be to concede leverage over the arteries of future movement, sustenance, and speed.

Formally, Greenland belongs to its people and remains within the Kingdom of Denmark. Strategically, Trump does not see sovereignty as sufficient protection.

Small and medium-sized political entities, in his view, are susceptible to great-power courtship.

Neutrality does not guarantee alignment, and alignment cannot be assumed indefinitely. Trust, in this worldview, is a liability.

Hence the bluntness. Better American dominance than contested autonomy. Better certainty than reassurance. This is realpolitik without apology.

Trump’s professed warmth toward Russia and China is transactional and conditional. It evaporates at the point of geographic proximity.

Greenland represents a boundary where personal diplomacy gives way to structural anxiety. In the Arctic, distance equals safety. Proximity equals exposure. It is here that friendship becomes irrelevant.

Trump wants Greenland not because he despises Russia or China, but because he refuses their closeness.

Not because he rejects sovereignty, but because he prioritises preemption; even if this is merely in his mind. Trump acts it out.

Indeed, not because of ice alone, but because of missiles, minerals, fresh water, shipping lanes, altitude, and denial.

In this sense, Greenland occupies the same psychological space that Cuba once did during the Cold War: a place where geography compresses time and tolerance ends.

Love for neighbours, in Trump’s worldview, stops precisely where strategic vulnerability begins.

* Phar Kim Beng is professor of Asean Studies at the International Islamic University of Malaysia and a director of the Institute of International and Asean Studies.

** This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.