We think we know why Donald Trump wants Greenland. But why does everyone else see it as strategically important? It’s not about minerals, and it’s not about military bases. It’s about melting ice, emerging trade routes, and who controls the future of global commerce. And it will change the world.
Watch this week’s ThrowForward Thursday to find out more.
TRANSCRIPT
I’m not sure there are many people who would claim to understand the intentions behind some of President Donald Trump’s ideas, but I do think there are two key reasons why he is very interested in annexing Greenland.
The first is what he says, and that has got to do with the minerals that are available in Greenland. Personally, I think Donald Trump is looking at the wrong projections of the world map, the Makata projection, as we know it makes Greenland look like the size of Africa. It’s nowhere near that size, and I think he’s got a picture in his head that there are just untold resources sitting under the soil in Greenland.
Anyway, that’s beside the point, as I say, I don’t think any of us can claim to understand his mind. But the second, I think, is more serious, and this is an understanding of the Arctic Circle.
Now, in season six of this ThrowForward Thursday that we are doing at the moment, we are looking back at some of the predictions we’ve made already and seeing how they are already coming true. The future is rushing at us faster than we can imagine.
And a year or two ago, in one of our spin-off little 30-second Tour Guide to the Future videos, I talked about the fact that there may be the possibility of Arctic trade routes are opening up. If our summers really do get hotter in the Northern hemisphere and some of that perma-ice starts to melt, then trade routes that go across the top of the North Pole become viable.
And trade routes then from the northern parts of Russia, the northern parts of China, across into the top of the Atlantic, into Canada, and then even down into England, Europe, and mainland USA, all of those become viable. And the shipping lanes across the northern part of the world become something that are really, really going to be powerful for the nations who control them.
I don’t think Greenland is as strategic as maybe Donald Trump thinks it is and with the NATO Treaty’s, America or the United States of America has all the power that they need to put as many military bases in Greenland as they want to.
So I don’t actually think they need control of Greenland in order to control that space. But controlling the Arctic Ocean and the shipping lanes there is going to be something that is strategically important for the in the future, and the likes of Sweden and Finland, obviously, are going to need to also get involved in making sure that those shipping lanes are kept open, are kept safe, and contribute to commerce and society, rather than become something that is militarily controlled and becomes another conflict zone.
We need to be watching as the climate changes, obviously, geopolitics changes, and that impacts economics directly. Arctic shipping lanes and the Arctic Ocean are something to keep our eye on for sure.
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