The Greenland Game: Why a Superpower Is Fighting Over a Town the Size of Burlington
Greenland has about 56,000 people — Burlington and South Burlington, Vermont combined — sitting on top of some of the largest rare earth deposits on Earth: neodymium and praseodymium for magnets, dysprosium and terbium for precision-guided munitions and the F-35, plus an estimated 270,000 tons of uranium at Kvanefjeld, the eighth-largest such deposit in the world. China controls roughly 70% of global rare earth mining and close to 90% of processing.
The standoff is framed as the United States versus Denmark. It isn’t. Denmark — Lego bricks, Hans Christian Andersen, and the Faroe Islands — is the name on the deed, not the player at the table. The real board is Washington versus Beijing over Arctic position and the mineral supply chain, complicated by the fact that coercing a NATO ally to keep China out erodes the very alliance that was keeping China out. And the smallest player — the 56,000 Greenlanders who banned uranium mining in 2021 and froze Kvanefjeld in place — holds the one card both superpowers need: consent. The question to watch: who earns it?
Eric Garland is an intelligence analyst personally sanctioned by the Russian Federation in May 2022 for his work on Russian intelligence operations. He is the author of the 2016 “Game Theory” thread, named by The New York Times as one of the 25 most important tweets in history.
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SOURCES
CSIS, “Greenland, Rare Earths, and Arctic Security,” 2025
Worldometer, Greenland Population, 2026
U.S. Census Bureau, QuickFacts: Burlington & South Burlington city, Vermont (2020 Census)
Energy Transition Minerals / CSIS, Kvanefjeld uranium resource estimate
Government of Greenland, Act No. 20 (2021), uranium mining ban
CNN, Greenland–NATO standoff reporting, May 2026
