Greenland has 57,000 inhabitants and significant reserves of rare earth elements and lithium. This concentration attracts major powers even before deposits become exploitable. China has announced its desire to promote a “Polar Silk Road” and encourage participation of its companies in Arctic infrastructure. An American purchase proposal was publicly associated with the Trump presidency in 2019.
The Essentials
- The presence of critical resources in a small territory can make it an object of geopolitical rivalry even before their extraction.
- China has committed substantial resources to Arctic infrastructure while Washington relaunched the Greenland debate in 2025-2026.
- The Inuit share is historically documented at around 87%, while the indigenous population is described by the UN as exceeding 90%. This majority claims the application of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), without this framework yet being enforceable against extraction decisions or foreign investment.
- ICEYE satellite data allows near real-time monitoring of the surface, infrastructure, and activity, creating an information lever whose control is asymmetrical between major powers and local governments.
- A possible exit involves a circumpolar regional architecture and institutionalized rights over data, before external rivalry sets the rules of the game.
57,000 Inhabitants, Two Superpowers, and an Island Full of Lithium
Inuit institutions are awaiting a framework to respond to this rivalry.
The mechanism is simple to describe and difficult to counter. A territory possesses resources that major economies cannot afford to ignore. Its population is too small to weigh in bilateral negotiations. Its institutions are too young to impose conditions. Result: the rules of the game are written elsewhere.
Greenland illustrates this mechanism with almost pedagogical clarity. The island’s subsoil concentrates neodymium, dysprosium, lithium—materials that condition the manufacture of batteries, permanent magnets, and military guidance systems. Greenland has significant reserves of critical resources for advanced technologies. These figures are known in Beijing and Washington before being fully integrated in Nuuk.
The Arctic Belt and Road Initiative materialized Chinese interest in port and logistics infrastructure. The American purchase proposal dates back at least to 1946, well before the first Trump administration; it resurfaced in 2025-2026 as a signal of a new phase of competition. Both of these approaches carry strong geopolitical dimensions, but uniformly reducing Greenland to a simple asset is not established.
The Government of Greenland, the Naalakkersuisut, possesses legal resources and political legitimacy. It must nevertheless account for resource asymmetries in negotiations with major powers.
Satellite Data, the Second Front of Dependence
The extraction of physical resources will await drilling. Satellite data constitutes a second front of stakes.
ICEYE satellite data and competing operators’ data allow tracking of permafrost evolution, maritime corridors, logistics infrastructure, and zones of mining interest. Satellite capabilities are highly unequal among Arctic states, but some states of modest population, particularly Norway, possess national satellite surveillance capacities. Access to this data and its sharing with local governments remain unequally distributed.
The link between physical resources and satellite data is not metaphorical. Mining investment decisions can rely on synthetic aperture radar images captured through clouds and in polar darkness, helping to map terrain and target zones for complementary geological and field investigations. This inequality of access creates an informational asymmetry between actors.
This point refers to a broader debate that Greenland cannot settle alone. Data localization laws are an imperfect and costly instrument for addressing this type of asymmetry, as analyzed here regarding the perverse effects of fragmented digital sovereignty. The challenge for a small territory is not to physically repatriate servers, but to obtain enforceable rights over data generated from its sovereign space. The distinction is crucial and rarely made in current negotiations.
UNDRIP on Paper, Asymmetry in Practice
Historical data from Statistics Greenland indicates approximately 87% Inuit, with a statistical definition based on place of birth. Members of local Inuit communities have claimed respect for the free, prior, and informed consent provided by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), which requires consultation and good faith cooperation for projects affecting indigenous lands and resources. Denmark has endorsed UNDRIP, but it is a declaration rather than a treaty subject to ratification. UNDRIP does not by itself create an automatic legal veto over foreign investments, but it can guide the application of existing legal obligations.
UNDRIP law exists. Its implementation encounters several gaps. The first is procedural: consultation mechanisms are defined by the Greenlandic government itself, with broad margin for interpretation over what constitutes “informed consent” in face of investors possessing complex financial models. The second is institutional: UNDRIP does not by itself confer automatic competence to annul a contract; a tribunal’s competence depends on consent and applicable instruments.
This gap is not unique to Greenland. It characterizes the condition of indigenous peoples everywhere their lands overlap with strategic resources. But Greenland experiences it with particular acuity because external competition is explicitly quantified and publicly assumed there.
Lessons from the Diplomacy of Vulnerable Territories
Michel Duclos, former ambassador and analyst of international order mutations, has documented that small territories endowed with critical resources risk losing their room for maneuver before contract signing. According to his analysis, a regional architecture built before bilateral rivalry is fixed could reduce this vulnerability.
Applied to Greenland, this thesis has a concrete translation: building circumpolar partnerships with Canada, Norway, Iceland, Finland, which give Greenland a capacity for collective negotiation before Chinese investments create fait accompli and before American pressures reduce options to a binary choice.
This reading deserves to be completed by a consideration that economists like Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson have formulated: a regional architecture remains fragile if it is not accompanied by internal institutions capable of distributing extraction gains to the local population rather than centralizing them. Circumpolar multilateralism can reduce external pressures; it does not automatically ensure that the population benefits from what is extracted.
Taiwan offers an instructive comparison, provided it is not forced. The island has built an inverse dependence: it is the one holding the expertise that major powers cannot afford to lose, via TSMC and the advanced semiconductor supply chain. This position confers a margin of maneuver that Greenland does not yet possess over its mineral resources. The lesson is not that Greenland must become Taiwan, but that the export of raw resources without local transformation can create risks of economic dependence.
Assets That Greenland Can Still Develop
Greenland is not without assets. The Naalakkersuisut possesses real governmental autonomy since 2009, when Denmark transferred substantial competences, including control over natural resources. This autonomy is a solid legal basis. It has not yet been converted into diplomatic architecture.
Three levers are identified in the work of the Arctic Council and analyses from the Greenlandic Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The first is deliberate diversification of extraction partnerships. Granting mining licenses to operators of several different nationalities—European, Canadian, Australian—rather than to a single power reduces dependence and creates competition between investors that strengthens Nuuk’s negotiating power.
The second is the institutionalization of rights over data. Contractually requiring that satellite data and prospecting data collected on Greenlandic territory be shared with the government in usable formats, with restrictions on commercial use, constitutes a form of information sovereignty accessible without needing to build a space industry.
The third is local transformation. Conditioning extraction licenses on a minimum of processing on-site, refining, preparation of concentrates, creates local added value and makes Greenland less substitutable in the supply chain. A supplier of raw ore can be replaced; a supplier of semi-transformed materials with existing infrastructure, much more slowly.
These three levers remain bets, not certainties, and their maintenance requires solid institutions. Greenland’s institutional capacity to strengthen itself before current commitments reduce options will be determining in the years to come.
The trajectory is not without encouraging precedents. The way democracies approach issues of economic governance amid rivalry between powers illustrates that these choices are rarely technical: they are political, and their outcome depends on the capacity to formulate them clearly before urgency imposes them under poor conditions.
A Circumpolar Architecture Remains to Be Built
The Arctic Council has existed since 1996. It brings together eight states, including Denmark on behalf of Greenland, and six permanent organizations of indigenous peoples, including the Inuit Circumpolar Council. But it has lost some of its deliberative capacity since 2022, when the seven other Arctic states suspended their participation in meetings with Russia, while Russia remained represented at the Council, amid rising tensions around territorial claims in the zone. The tool exists; it functions below its potential.
The window for building something more robust is open, not indefinitely. Investments in Arctic infrastructure and external geopolitical pressures risk reducing the negotiation options available to Greenland.
The difference between the two is not rhetorical. A partnership is negotiated, adapts, can be denounced with manageable costs. An infrastructure or commercial outlet dependence, once installed, is difficult and costly to undo. This is what the history of small raw materials-producing states teaches, from the phosphates of Western Sahara to Congolese copper.
Greenland has an advantage that these territories did not have: an autonomous governmental institution, a population conscious of its rights, and an international community openly discussing these dynamics. The open question is whether these assets will be converted into architecture before external pressure transforms negotiation into fait accompli.
Sources
- Government of Greenland (Naalakkersuisut), Ministry of Foreign Affairs, https://naalakkersuisut.gl/
- Arctic Council, Reports on Arctic Resources and Circumpolar Governance (2026), arctic-council.org
- ICEYE, Synthetic Aperture Radar Data, Arctic Coverage, iceye.com
- Inuit Circumpolar Council, Declaration on Arctic Sovereignty and Application of UNDRIP, inuitcircumpolar.com
- United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), UN, 2007
- Acemoglu, D. & Johnson, S., Power and Progress, 2023, PublicAffairs
- Duclos, M., Analyses on the Diplomacy of Vulnerable Territories and International Order, Institut Montaigne
