Greenland is not a periphery or a war zone, but a litmus test of global stability

Greenland has gained extraordinary political and media importance in the past year. In the second term of the Trump administration, national security, missile defense, and raw material strategy considerations have given new impetus to the positional struggle in the Arctic. Although the US president ruled out the possibility of military escalation in Davos, he and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte agreed on the framework of a “long-term” agreement. While Greenlandic Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen recently made it clear at the Munich Security Conference, which also had an Arctic focus: “Greenland’s self-determination is a red line,” and Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen stated that Denmark and Greenland are in “full agreement” on the issue. Greenland’s representatives have only a limited say at the negotiating table in redefining Washington’s role. As a result, the question is no longer just who wants what kind of security guarantees in the Arctic, but also whose security we are actually talking about.

The voice of indigenous communities is lost in the geopolitical noise

While the world watches the region from the perspective of great power competition, the Greenlandic society of about 57,000 people lives under daily psychological and infrastructural pressure. This pressure is so great that the island’s leadership, the university and local community have already begun to withdraw from the public. Securitization – when political actors frame an issue as an existential threat – thus largely overshadows the dimensions of personal, local security.

Yet the Arctic is the fastest-changing frontline of global warming: its average temperature is rising nearly four times faster than the world average. The melting of the Greenland ice sheet is responsible for about 20% of global sea level rise, which is about 0.8 millimeters per year. The weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Circulation (AMOC) system can also affect Europe’s climate (Gulf Stream), possibly causing sudden cooling and extreme weather patterns.

For locals, this is the least of the theoretical debates: extreme storms, infrastructure damage, water and power outages indicate the concrete consequences of the change. In January this year, a state of emergency was declared due to the failure of the Buksefjord hydroelectric power plant in Nuuk, and the population was urged to stockpile at least five days’ worth of supplies. The discourse on the economic opportunities that climate change opens up – new shipping routes, mining – is thus taking place in a region where even basic infrastructure is vulnerable.

Great power fault lines on a former island of peace

The Arctic has long been characterized by a kind of “exceptionalism”: the region’s governance has been built on mutual trust, scientific cooperation and the involvement of indigenous communities. The Arctic Council has provided a forum for scientific findings to be integrated into decision-making, and the region has remained a success story of diplomacy. All these mechanisms, however, not only resulted in us starting to think of the Arctic as a low-tension region, while the geopolitical significance of the region itself did not, but only the amount of European, Western attention (its security policy significance) decreased significantly (“low-attention region”) after the Cold War. As the saying goes, “the security policy discourse has changed, but the map has not.”

However, the war in Ukraine that broke out in 2022 fundamentally shook this previous model based on peace and cooperation. The Council’s operations were frozen, the region was practically divided, and a significant part of scientific cooperation became impossible. The management of climate change was pushed into the background behind the military and economic positional struggle, while the political neutrality of science was also questioned.

Stability instead of securitization