This past weekend, in a post announcing his selection of PayPal and Founders Fund co-founder Ken Howery for Ambassador to Denmark, Donald Trump stated that “the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.” While outlandish, the idea of annexing Greenland is nothing new for Trump. In 2019, the then-President floated the idea of purchasing the territory from Denmark, calling it (naturally) a “large real estate deal.” Excoriating the notion as “absurd,” Danish officials levied accusations of toxic neo-colonialism. (Trump’s decision to respond with an image of his 64-story Las Vegas hotel photoshopped onto a Greenlandic coastal village probably didn’t help.)

The reality, however, is that — inadvertently or not — Trump put his finger on a serious opportunity with potentially profound upside for the US, Greenland, and even Denmark. The increasing geopolitical importance of the Arctic, which, on account of emerging new trade routes, military competition, and a fight for invaluable natural resources like rare earth elements (REEs), is now the backdrop for growing tensions with China and Russia. Projecting American power into the next century requires proactive strategic investment anchored in the kind of Arctic expansion that a Greenland deal could provide.