Beneath the headlines about Trump’s ambition to take Greenland lies an even more troubling story of brewing superpower conflict in the Arctic. Award-winning journalist Kenneth Rosen argues that years of American failure and ineptitude in the polar north have left it defenceless there against China and Russia, at a time when a warming climate makes the region more strategically crucial than ever.
One could be forgiven for thinking tensions in the Arctic, perhaps most prominently embodied by President Donald Trump’s egregious campaign to “get” and secure Greenland as another American territory, came out of nowhere. But it did not. Historically, the American desire to control Greenland has existed nearly as long as America itself. It was not Trump’s rhetoric of a takeover that struck me during my years spent traveling and reporting on the circumpolar North. It was the ineptitude surrounding the idea. To publicly make threats of invading Greenland while America continually fails by all metrics in the Arctic, at home and abroad, seemed anathema to our own desires and lacking abilities across the region. To those of us who have been watching the Arctic over the last half-decade or so, the possibility of conflict in the Arctic now feels inevitable.
The Arctic will always remain important for the same reasons it stays with those who find themselves susceptible to its otherworldly influence, viscerally clinging to those who accept its omniscience no matter one’s distance from the geographic North Pole, and especially no matter their politics. The subject of the Arctic, its permanence atop our world, seems to return with greater frequency each day.
___
The first cars and ships and planes ever brought to Greenland arrived thanks to the Americans.
___
On Greenland Air 628 from Upernavik to Qaanaaq, the island nation’s northernmost village, passengers are now friendly. They first met on the flight from Kangerlussuaq to Ilulissat, then again on the flight from Ilulissat to Upernavik. They are not visitors to the Arctic. They are coming home. The plane is a twin turboprop, its variable-pitch propellers transitioning on takeoff and touchdown for granular airspeed control. The engines whine and moan. At 20,000 feet, the cabin lights flicker on, then dim.
Through the plane’s window, there’s a starry firmament overhead, with the polar winter one long night. In the southwest, a flash of sun. On a clear day or night, the American military base is visible on approach to Qaanaaq.
The base’s lights illuminate nothing but a smattering of buildings and the airstrip, a reminder of Arctic legacies and footprints, of how time is the great unrepentant equalizer. Supporting growth and opportunity only to abandon it has been the American calling card in the greater Arctic for decades. America’s derelict ambitions in the Arctic are readily apparent across all of Greenland. At least since the mid-nineteenth century, the United States has been bullish on Greenland’s potential to be an Arctic surrogate for national defense. Then, between 2010 and 2020, those ambitions evaporated and with them went America’s literal and figurative footing across the region, its ambitions overwhelmed by its inabilities against nature and foes alike.
Beginning in 1940, after the outbreak of the Second World War, American military planners, engineers, sailors, soldiers, and scientists arrived in Greenland. The first cars and ships and planes ever brought to Greenland arrived thanks to the Americans, who established 21 strategic outposts, including weather stations, refueling depots, and airstrips. By mid-1943, more than 15,000 Americans lived and worked on Greenland, and many would stay there long past the war’s end. One such outpost at Thule, a lone weather-observation station manned by a detachment of four Danish soldiers from 1943 onward, remained more or less untouched, quiet, the province of a dogsled patrol with a mission to exert Denmark’s sovereignty over its distant and long-neglected territory.
Qaanaaq, known as Thule throughout the mid-twentieth century, lies at the extreme northwest of Greenland. Its original inhabitants, the Inughuit, a subgroup of the already sparse Inuit, lived there for centuries, navigating the frozen expanse, a people of immense resilience. In the early 1950s, renewed American activity shattered the postwar calm. A new war was rising. The US military, reimagining Thule’s strategic potential as a cudgel against great-power competition, and only 900 miles from the North Pole, arrived during the height of the Cold War with the aim of establishing a new military base. In the decades that followed, scientists and the US Army Corps of Engineers built a massive underground compound, called Camp Century. The cover for the project was scientific: They would drill ice cores to gather a deeper understanding of the planet’s geologic and climatic history, buried some four miles beneath the ice cap; these soil and ice core samples would raise material that had been hidden for more than 400,000 years. As a happy consequence, the military could also store a nuclear reactor there to help power the base, and maybe even house nuclear missiles in silos beneath the ice, in what became known as Project Iceworm.
That bounty of research and protection could not come without a price, America’s safety and security always at the expense of others. Not only were there the physical, tangible land claims leased from Denmark and that circumvented Greenlandic approval, there was also the ecological issue of containing a nuclear dump site. Eventually, American interests in Greenland would eclipse the ambitions of Camp Century, spreading outward like the cracks that appear before a glacier calves into icebergs. The expulsion of the Inughuit to make way for the larger, more permanent Thule Air Base was swift and brutal. They were given only days to leave their ancestral homeland, forced to settle farther north in Qaanaaq in a place they had no choice but to build on their own, from the ground up. Even the cabin used by Knud Rasmussen, the legendary Arctic explorer born in Greenland to half-Inuit, half-Danish parents, was relocated from Thule. It was 1943 when the planes first landed across Greenland, and they have not stopped since. Today, most travelers to Greenland touch down on and take off from airstrips built by the US military, crosshatching paths in the skies above this Arctic island shaped by the logistical needs of deterrence, posturing, and war.
The base at Thule, renamed in 2023 as the Pituffik Space Base, is no longer home to thousands but, rather, a small contingent of the Danish Armed Forces (among the 200 Greenlandic and Danish contractors stationed there, there is the Sirius Patrol, the twelve-person dogsled patrol that travels the ice cap for months at a time) in support of the US Space Force detachment there. America’s Arctic territory mainly lies in Alaska, which has more than 34,000 miles of coastline and houses dozens of military sites; Thule is its lone counterweight, geographically adjacent to America.
The base, its contingents from the US Space Force and visitors researching the Arctic region, serves as a major space surveillance and satellite command logistics hub, and it plays a key defense role in providing early warnings of nuclear and over-the-horizon attacks. Only, like much else in the American Arctic, it is relegated to an afterthought. For now, the base, used for passive intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) monitoring, is virtually defenseless and relies on Canada for the ice breaking needed for resupply deliveries in winter. America’s Arctic issues, Mark Cancian (a senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ International Security Program) tells me by phone as I call around to contacts near and far, are not a hindrance but, rather, an opportunity for the United States to spread some of the burden sharing to allied countries. “I think that the forces and resources are limited. We’re not going to be able to rebuild the kinds of capabilities we had during the Cold War,” Cancian says. “It’s hard for the Europeans really to replace the US. The best they can do is complement us. But [the Arctic is] one place where they are arguably ahead” and it’s a place where the United States should follow, rather than lead.
___
America seems terrified to engage with those who are interested and also lacks the commitment to stay.
___
“NATO capabilities are reasonably strong for surveillance both undersea and in the air,” James Stavridis, a retired four-star US Navy admiral who was the supreme allied commander at NATO from 2009 to 2013, tells me, “but not strong in terms of ice-breaking, which is of course crucial, or response to ground-force movements.”
One of the reasons the base is defenseless is climate change. When the base was built as an extension of Camp Century, located some 215 miles southwest of the base’s location today, it was primarily intended as a first alert against nuclear attacks. “We were laying flat slabs of concrete on top of permafrost, without really understanding the scientific implications or the engineering implications and challenges that that might present,” Colonel Brian Capps, a former Pituffik base commander, told me in our first conversation. “We have had a lot of decades to learn and adjust and do a lot of infrastructure rebuilds and infrastructure tweaks,” Capps said in 2022, shortly after assuming the post.
At Pituffik, in July 2021, walls had been spreading apart at a rate of ten centimeters annually, while doorways were lifting off their thresholds. Rust, a phenomenon of wetter climates, was rampant. The runway was fracturing as a result of constant thawing and refreezing of the permafrost, coupled with pooling water on the runway after each thaw. A grim picture emerged of those bases and of troop preparedness that inherently impacted the military’s broader domain awareness.
That’s the thing about the Arctic. America seems terrified to engage with those who are interested and also lacks the commitment to stay. Time is the only real commodity here. With quick deployments, the US presence is always one of fickle commitments and evaporating knowledge, which is surprising for a region where you never meet anyone only once.
For years, American interests have been secured with each flight, each missile, and each relay tower, their strategic importance outweighing the voices of the Indigenous peoples who remain. Denmark and Greenland, forming a unified front, sought a modicum of acknowledgment from the Americans about their commitments to those northern communities when the Space Force took over the Pituffik base from the Air Force. That is why America renamed the base after the traditional Greenlandic name for the region. That was all it felt was necessary.
This article is an edited extract from Kenneth R. Rosen’s book Polar War: Submarines, Spies and the Struggle for Power in a Melting Arctic, published by Profile, £22.
28th January 2026
Join the conversation