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Damon Pace's avatar

Trump’s expansionist fixation with both Canada and Greenland are completely and totally irrational and bizarre. It seems as if he thinks he’s some sort of long-ago dictator who can take over countries just for the helluva it. At this point, Trump appears more like a random street-thug who likes to threaten and bully people just for the hell of it. As he would say in another era, sad.

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Wanda's avatar

Regarding Greenland's mineral wealth, in 2011 Greenland’s minister for industry and natural resources visited China to negotiate Chinese investment in resource extraction. The next year China’s then-Minister for Land and Resources, Xu Shaoshi, visited Greenland and shortly after Greenland repealed its law banning the mining of uranium and rare earth metals.

In 2014, an agreement was signed between the Australian company Greenland Minerals Energy, partially owned by China's Shenghe Resources, and the China Non-Ferrous Metal Industry’s Foreign Engineering and Construction Company to create a fully-integrated global rare-earth supply chain. Their first joint project was at Kvanjefjeld, which has an estimated 270,000 tons of uranium ore and the potential to become the world's largest uranium mine.

In 2019, it was announced that Shenghe would partner with China National Nuclear Corporation to develop enhanced procedures for separating rare earth elements from uranium and thorium deposits at the Kvanefjeld site.

Prior to that in 2016, the Hong Kong-based company General Nice tried to acquire the former American, later Danish, naval base at Grønnedal, aka Bluie West 7, which, perhaps significantly, is three miles east of the old Ivigtut cryolite mine. Cryolite is a rare earth mineral used in the refining of aluminum. The Danish government rejected the offer on security grounds, wondering why the Chinese would want to have a navy base in Greenland.

There are American companies that would like to invest in Greenland resource extraction but are not in a position to offer the...um..."perks" to Greenland officials that the Chinese are.

The Danes and the Greenland government in Nuuk have long been clashing over Chinese investment in Greenland, Denmark considering it a security threat. But the Nuuk government sees residual Danish control over its economy as unwanted and is looking toward complete independence from Denmark, with China providing infrastructure development and lucrative resource extraction funds to replace Danish support.

China may well be pushing Greenland to declare independence. Greenlanders, as an indigenous people as defined by the 2007 UN Declaration of the Rights of the Indigenous People, may declare independence at any time. If Greenland does so, it could terminate the American military presence, our basing agreement being with Denmark not Greenland, and, should it choose, replace it with the Chinese military -- for a suitable gratuity, of course.

Oh, China wants to establish facilities in Greenland for its BeiDou-2 satellite navigation system used by its armed forces. Wonder why.

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