This is Planet Money, from NPR.
Listen, I have never worked so hard to get someone on the phone.
“I'm eating beans out of a bag. That's how bad life is today.”
She's eating refried beans out of a bag. Not even out of a can, it's out of a bag. Just cold out of a bag. Like not even a spoon, like it's like, I've like cut a corner edge and I'm like scorting them in my mouth on my break. Okay, yeah, I don't know.
Graceland Bascarin has had some long busy days. I mean, you've been busy because you're like one of very few experts on, among other things, Greenland. And minerals. It's a very small nexus. Graceland is a mining economist who has worked in rare earth minerals globally.
She's the director of the Critical Minerals Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Where are these rare earth? Like, how deep into the ground, what do they look like? Have you seen them?
“Is it sparkly? Is it shiny? Like, what does it look like?”
You know, it's funny for how valuable these rocks are. They look like they're very, they're very gray. So they just look like gravel, like little gray rocks. Kind of, they're not golden sparkly. They're not shiny like a diamond, but they're incredibly valuable. Yeah, rare earth minerals are little rocks that are very, very critical for everything from military fighter jets, missiles and nuclear submarines.
To the display on your phone, the hard drive on your computer, the seat belts in cars. You have pressure, dimm, and you dimm, you have dysprosium, terbiom, holmium. Graceland knows all 17 of these minerals. She's been in mines, touched rare earths, tried to smell them once, and then I ended up snorting them.
And my colleague was like, you know, you're like snorting metal right now, right? Sorry, one second. What's up?
“And everyone wants Graceland's attention right now. What's on fire?”
Because the thing she is an expert on, rare earths and greenland, President Donald Trump has thrown into the global spotlight. All the United States is asking for as a place called Greenland. In the last month, Trump refused to rule out taking Greenland by force. He slapped tariffs on European countries unless Denmark agreed to sell Greenland to the US.
Then he walked the tariffs back and said, okay, I won't take Greenland by force. But he has still insisted that he needs to control Greenland. Greenland is in a really great position geographically. It's a long and arctic shipping route that is becoming more and more important as the ice sheets melt. And it's also just like strategically in a very important place in the world,
because it sits between the US and Russia and China. And if they were to hypothetically shoot a missile at the US, the shortest path for that missile would be over Greenland. And then, of course, Greenland has those little boring but super valuable gray rocks that the rare earth minerals. So, position given where China and Russia are sitting and rare earths.
We're chasing our weakness here. Hello and welcome to Planet Many. I'm Sarah Gonzalez and I'm Mary Childs. Greenland has said it is not for sale. Denmark has said it can't even legally sell Greenland. And over the weekend, at a security conference in Munich, US lawmakers spent a lot of time trying to walk back some of Trump's threats. But whether Trump can or will or should try to
control or purchase a territory that doesn't want to be sold, is not the interesting question here. What is interesting is how we got to this moment and how we might gracefully get out of it. Today on the show, how the US dropped the ball on the rare earths race. Like, why doesn't the US already have the minerals it wants? Also, one way the US gets strategic locations,
without threatening to buy or take over an entire territory. Yeah, you may not realize it,
but the US is always expanding its territory.
Before we get to the rare earth minerals that Greenland has become suddenly famous for, I've never been to Greenland. Not very many people will ever go to Greenland. Like, describe it for us. It's a very calm place. This is Christian Kelsen. It's got this huge field system of fields. You've got their mountains and the northern lights, the whales. Oh sure, we have humpback whales and northern lights. And this is Sarah Olsvig. So yesterday night, we saw northern lights
in our traditional beliefs. These are our ancestors playing soccer. And therefore that's actually very scary thing because they are doing so with a skull. And if you whistle, they will come and cut off your head. But they're beautiful. Northern lights. About 90% of Greenland is indigenous. Inueng. Lai Saha. Christian is in the minority. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
They know each other.
It's a small town. They're just 56 to 57,000 people in Greenland. A smaller population
“than Dubuque Iowa. And everyone is on the coast. 80% of the country's covered in ice.”
So nobody lives in the middle. Basically, no traffic. I don't spend time on motorways.
There's no highways. Yeah. Yeah. No. There's not one highway. No towns are not connected. If we need to go to another town, I'll take a helicopter or a plane or a boat. Wow. That's it. Yeah. Greenland and its indigenous people were colonized by Denmark in 1721. Now, technically, it is still a part of the kingdom of Denmark. But Greenland is self governing. It's kind of like a separate nation within a nation.
It has its own democratically elected government. A lot of autonomy over domestic affairs, over foreign policy. It has its own language. And this part is very relevant right now.
Nobody in Greenland owns land. You actually cannot own land in Greenland.
If you're building a house, you can get a permit to build your house in a specific spot. But you cannot own the land that it's on. This is rooted in the inner belief that land is not for sale, but something to be shared. Galasit Nuna, Galasit Bigad, which is our way grammatically also saying that Galasit Nuna Greenland is owned by the people. And this island where no one owns land, there is something deep deep underground that
everyone does want to own. If you're standing in Greenland, a mile down below your feet. Sometimes two whole miles down, it is just massive solid ice and locked underneath that ice
“are the rare earths. That's why we called Graceland Baskrin, the critical minerals expert”
who was eating beans out of the bag. To walk us through the story of how we got to this moment where the US seems to be coveting Greenland. So one of the things that makes Greenland particularly attractive is that they don't just have rare earths, which they do, but they have heavy rare earths. There are two types of rare earths, light rare earths and heavy rare earths. And the US does have a lot of light rare earths in California, but geologically speaking, Graceland says we are
not very well endowed with heavies. But also the US doesn't even really have the capability to turn heavy rare earths into things we need. The US is working on it, but is not there yet. About 90% of the world's rare earths are processed in China. That's where the US gets them. China has a near monopoly. So if China decides to restrict exports of them to the US,
“like they did last spring, that is a bad situation. This was when the US and China were really”
tit for tattling each other during their trade war last year. And the US felt it. Less than eight weeks after China imposed those restrictions, we stopped manufacturing Ford explorers in Chicago because of that shortage. Yeah, the plant shut down for about a week. But our heavy rare earth supply chain was disrupted for months. And this US dependence on China from minerals, there's a long history that led us here. A history, Graceland says,
of the US deciding not to prioritize rare earths. From the 50s up to the mid 80s, the US was the top rare earth producer. It led the production and refining of rare earth elements. But then China started mining rare earths and the US ended up backing off. Left it to China. China's just done it. And we were happy to buy Chinese produced goods that had rare earths in them. In 1996, the US closed the bureau of mines. And we stopped making minerals a strategic focus.
Now China did the opposite. Right, starting about the early 90s, they started buying mines all around the world. And they would take those minerals and export them back to China. And they're the most minerals were processed. And really China is now enjoying mineral security as a result of the 30 odd years that it has been building its dominance. And China has also been quoting Greenland's minerals. But China's approach has been very different from President Trump's.
China has kind of been creeping into Greenland's infrastructures. China's been doing the thing it often does. It is trying to invest significantly in infrastructure in Greenland as a way to
later get some of Greenland's natural resources. China's approach by doing infrastructure first
is how it is conquered much of the world. Right. So the Belt and Road Initiative, BRI, is how it has established foothold in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, is by making the significant infrastructure investments that then give it power. Infrastructure is soft power. And China's been trying to soft power its way into Greenland's infrastructure too. So if you look at the last 10 years, China has tried to invest in Greenland's
Airports and abandoned naval station.
yeah, China's after those two. There's an Australian company making plans for a rare earth
“mine in Greenland and in 2018 a Chinese rare earth company signed this agreement with that Australian”
company to process the minerals that they plan to extract. This Chinese company is even the second larger shareholder in that big mine project. China plays a long game. Are we nervous about China
beating us in Greenland? Is that a fear? It seems like we're always nervous about
China outpacing us, particularly in new jurisdictions. You do start to see like, okay, yeah, like if it's like we really need them and China mainly has them and China started limiting them. And now China's trying to, you know, get in on Greenland's rare earths. You can see like maybe this is very important to our national security. But does the U.S. need Greenland's minerals in particular? Is there a point in which it becomes so important? Like, let's say China's
like, you're done. We're not giving you anything where you would go like, you know what? We
“have to try to buy Greenland or take it by force because that's how important it is. No, no,”
no, no, she says, especially if it's going to create chaos in Europe. And here is why. It is a three-part answer. First of all, the U.S. does not need to take control of Greenland for its minerals because Greenland is happy to partner with the U.S. Greenland's minister for business and mineral resources has actually said it wants to work with the U.S. seemingly over China. Denmark sometimes with encouragement from the U.S. has actually stalled Chinese investment projects in Greenland.
Greenland prefers to do business with Western countries. Even during Trump's first administration in 2019, Greenland was like, come on in, look around the U.S. saying this M.L.U. with Greenland to do this like geological survey together and exchange scientific and technical knowledge to develop these resources. And then also a U.S. company just purchased this big rare earth deposit in Greenland, not the Australian one, largely to ward off Chinese investment. But a second reason
why controlling or even just working with Greenland does not solve the U.S.'s current mineral problem is because it can take decades to extract the rare earth's there. And it could cost a trillion dollars according to some estimates, though Grayson thinks that could be a major under estimate. Because there's just so little infrastructure in Greenland, there needs to be roads built, rail built, more ports, electricity in the around freezing cold middle of nowhere.
The Arctic is considered so punishing. No one there has ever even gotten any of these minerals.
So we've never mind rare earths in Greenland. No. No, nobody has. No. She says Greenland is just not a
short or even medium term solution to the U.S.'s minerals problem. If China cuts me off today and I have three months to apply as a country, Greenland is not an answer to that. Brazil, Australia and the next couple years Saudi Arabia, they will have rare earths now if we need them in a pinch, not Greenland. In the current globally interdependent world of minerals, Grayson says you actually need other countries. That's her big point. Her third and last big reason why
controlling Greenland or even just Greenland's minerals will not solve the U.S. mineral problem is because controlling the source of minerals anywhere is not the solution. No one country is going to counter China's dominance alone even if you have all the rare earth in the world in your country. Just because you have geology doesn't mean you have minerals security because I've got to process those minerals. And those technological capabilities also don't exist in one country. So we see
countries like Australia, Saudi Arabia, India, Canada emerging as really key potential partners for processing technology. So it really is the fact that both geological and technological control
“can't be sustained with a single country. So cooperation becomes required. The only way to mineral”
security for the U.S. She says is cooperation. Trade agreements. There is no way to be mineral secure solo. And this is how the U.S. has often gotten the natural resources it needs in the past, right? Through trade. So of course also through coercion or war, but also through trade. We've traded military protection for Saudi Arabia and oil. We've found creative ways to get the resources we want from other countries by playing nice. Like there was a time during the 20
of century that we actually were trading butter from America to boxite in Jamaica, a butter for boxite trade because we needed boxite to make defense technologies. So we have had incredibly creative arrangements to get minerals. So minerals? Yes. Very important. But greenlands minerals.
Nice to have, but not absolutely critical. And plenty of diplomatic ways to get them.
While the Trump administration has talked about greenlands minerals,
President Trump has also acknowledged that greenlands rare earths are very hard to get to
deep under all of the ice and that that's not the reason he wants greenland. That it's about the strategic location part of it all, right? Just the physical place in the world that greenlands sits for missile defense. So is that a reason to get greenland? That's after the break. President Trump has made it clear. He understands greenland isn't the only source of rare earths. Rare earths are actually not that rare. And also not the easiest place to get them.
“But at the same time, he said that more than minerals greenland is important for national”
security and international security. Greenland is a vast, almost entirely uninhabited and undeveloped
territory. The sitting undefended in a key strategic location between the United States, Russia
and China. It's exactly where it is right smack in the middle. Not actually undefended. It is part of Denmark, part of NATO. Also, it is inhabited. But okay, moving on, this desire to take control of strategic location. It is a big part of the history of the world and its borders. Many wars have been started over strategic location and resources. Like country A wants country B's natural resources or their physical place in the world. But without war and without
actually buying, which again, people are saying won't happen. Does the U.S. need a piece of Greenland for security? To sort that out, we called up the author of a book called How to Hide an Empire. My name is Daniel Imervar. I see your last name is slower for me, so I can pronounce it. Great. Yes. It's the W's pronounce as a V, so it is Imervar Imervar. You actually have to say it three times. The number of Imervars are so few that I am related to every one of them by
“ways that I can specify. Cool. Same with my last name. Yeah. I think I may have met some of your”
relatives. Daniel Imervar says often in the history of the world, countries have expanded their territories largely through force. But a lot of the U.S. territory actually came from purchases. Something came from war, but a lot of it came from purchase. And on the one hand, you can think, well, this is rather civilized. Like I would rather see countries just make deals, then go to war with each other. On the other hand, you realize that what it's being sold in
almost every case is not just land but people. The last major U.S. purchase of territory and all its people was more than 100 years ago. In 1917, when the U.S. bought the Danish West Indies
now the U.S. Virgin Islands from, yes, Denmark for $25 million, like $640 million in today times.
“Back then, the U.S. was worried that Germany was adding the Danish West Indies as an ideal”
base for naval warfare. So the U.S. started pressuring Denmark to sell these islands in the Caribbean. But buying an autonomous self-governing territory in 2026 for the past 80 years, since World War II, we the world have operated under this understanding that, okay, however borders were drawn, whether they were acquired by war through colonization or any other way, we are just going to respect them from here on out, which is part of why when countries invade each other, it's a big deal.
Haven't we like dived up the world already? Like who owns what? And international order is like we're all going to respect whatever boundaries there are, whatever borders there are and like it is what it is. Is that not? Yes, I mean, depends. Yes, but kind of. This is the reason we want to talk to Daniel, because in his book he talks about this whole other way that the U.S. does actually expand its borders all the time, still just in like a quieter way. Daniel says
the shape of the United States we all know is not at all representative of the actual territories and colonies of the United States. It's that plus hundreds of little dots all over the globe. And the way we got all those other little dots is through a version of buying territory that the U.S. still does when it sets up military bases. We're not sure how many and we're not sure exactly where they all are. The military admits to roughly 500 of them and journalists have found about 200
more. But you could just be like walking down the street in Greenland and then to like that's a military bay. We know about the bay. We know about one of the bases in Greenland. We but like, yeah, that doesn't mean the U.S. owns that part of the country, right? So as a matter of private property, it could be
That the United States owns in the way that you would own the land in which y...
The bigger question is the United States have sovereignty, which is, is that land U.S. territory
and generally the answer is no. These are bases that are being hosted by foreign countries.
But the United States generally has such profound rights uses over its bases that it starts to look a lot like sovereignty like Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Yeah, it's in Cuba. And Cuba has been asking
“the U.S. to leave four years. But the U.S. just won't. No. So who's piece of country is it really?”
Is that U.S. territory? Is that Cuban territory? Right. Yeah. So like the U.S. decides what rules apply on that territory? Who's jurisdiction is it? Whose flag is flown? This can be a touchy subject. And one example that I just love. It's that when the United States is setting up on a base in Saudi Arabia, it arranges architecturally to have its flag come straight out from the top of the building.
And the reason is that the Saudi government can still say that the flag has not touched Saudi
soil. When it comes to Greenland, Daniel says, yeah, it is placed in a very strategically important spot. And he can see why the U.S. would want to have a big military presence. But the U.S. does have a big military presence there. Remember the one you'd find if you were just walking around Greenland? Do you know how it sits has that? It has a massive base in Greenland. And it's used that base. And it has the right to have more bases. And actually both Danish and
U.S. flags fly over this military base in Greenland, which is fun fact in constant darkness sometimes. And then constant daylight other times. And this big U.S. military base in Greenland is used for missile early warning, missile defense, space surveillance. And here is Daniel's point.
“The U.S. can build more bases in Greenland. Have more missile early warning systems if it was?”
Since 1951, the U.S. has had nearly unchecked access to Greenland for defense purposes. It can already move freely in Greenland for defense as long as it lets Greenland and Denmark know. It has permission already to expand its military presence. So there's no need to colonize Greenland in order to have a base there. But Trump has been talking about expanding the U.S. since he came into office again.
He said he wanted to make Canada the 50 first date. Take the Panama Canal, not all the Panama
just the canal part. Take over Gaza and then of course there's Venezuela. President Trump sent American troops, two Venezuela captured its leader and then declared that the U.S. would now run Venezuela. Though much of the Venezuelan regime is actually still intact. And that is a hard-power move. Not the kind of soft power move that Daniel and Grayson both say could get the U.S. what it wants like investing in infrastructure in Greenland or
trade agreements or even expanding military presence. For Daniel, the most charitable way he can make sense of President Trump's focus on Greenland is that Trump maybe imagines that we're heading to a world where countries don't cooperate with each other anymore. We're soft power is no longer the way to do business. A world where trade will be closed off where anything that you don't physically control, you won't have access to. And if we're
heading in that direction, it behooves the United States to lock down resources that it needs and doesn't have now before there is a scramble for them. Now, if the U.S. were to start taking land by force or even try to buy up territories to lock away its resources for itself, you could argue that that would do quite a lot to push us into that world where people don't trade with each other anymore. And that world, that is the world that Zaha Olsfig, the Indigenous
“Greenlander from earlier, that's what she's concerned about. It was very clear for us that this”
is something that is bigger than Greenland. It will have ramifications unknown consequences to a much broader alliance. She says the fact that Trump so aggressively asserted that he needs Greenland has already made the idea of taking over other countries seem a little less taboo. She says that's really what people in Greenland are concerned about. People are not running around looking scared. They're not. But there's concern, mostly concerned for the broader safety and peace
for the whole world. Some people have said that Trump's play for Greenland is so obscene or offensive or dangerous that we should not even be talking about it. Zaha, who has been in Parliament and is an expert in artics studies and shares an on-profit called the Inuit Circumpolter Council, she says she wants to talk about it. I, as you probably can hear, have rejected everybody who have asked me how does it feel? Because that also positions us as sort of a passive spectators
to what's going on as just the receivers where we are the country. So we are not passive spectators,
As many have portrayed us to be.
survive and thrive in the Arctic for time immemorial for thousands of years. We've had to
“establish trade relations with so many states from all over the world and create markets for our”
resources in order for us to be able to build an economy. Zaha says Greenland is not in the market
for a new colonizer.
“Should we tell them our big names? Should we tell them? I feel like it's like they should know. We”
are calling on Antwerp. Oh I did the drum roll after it was written before. Whatever, you get it. Chickets are available to see Mary to see me on tour. You can get them at planetminibook.com.
“Our first ever event is in April. It's on April 6th. In New York City at the 90s,”
second street, why? Please come hang out. We are going to be interviewing Emily Oster,
the economist, most famous for telling pregnant women that they can have coffee and our friends amend a run check and dairy and woods will be there. Hopefully so will you. If you buy tickets to the book events, you will get a limited edition tote bag whilst flies last. We will sign your book. All that stuff. Planetminibook.com. There's a link in the show notes. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.
