The Spiritual Case For Greenland

As President-elect Donald Trump digs in on his proposal to expand U.S. control over Greenland, many of his allies in the MAGA movement have defended the move in conventional foreign policy terms. According to a common variation of this argument, gaining a greater degree of control over Greenland — either by buying it, annexing it or striking a new deal with its government — would serve America’s immediate geopolitical and economic interests, given the island nation’s proximity to key shipping routes, its geostrategic importance for controlling the Arctic and its extensive reserves of critical minerals.

But in the corner of the conservative movement known as the New Right, where Trump’s hardline American nationalism co-exists alongside a strong strain of techno-utopianism, Trump’s defenders are making a less conventional — though no less influential — case for taking Greenland. In the eyes of many of the New Right, taking Greenland isn’t just in America’s material and strategic interests; it’s also key to America’s spiritual wellbeing.

Versions of this argument vary from the Wild West-y to the genuinely wacky: Some on the New Right argue that acquiring Greenland would represent the opening of a new American frontier, reviving the “frontier mentality” and “settler spirit” that imbued the American pioneers largely of the 19th century. Others argue that Greenland could serve as a sort of spiritual and technological staging ground for more ambitious feats of American expansion, including the eventual settlement of Mars. Despite differences in emphasis and scope, many of these arguments start from the premise that Trump’s reelection has brought America to the threshold of a spiritual revival — and that territorial expansion could serve as a necessary catalyst for that transformation.

“I think having a frontier is very healthy,” said Joe Lonsdale, a Trump mega-donor and Peter Thiel’s co-founder at Palantir, in a recent interview with the BBC. “It’s a frontier mindset — it’s taking new possibilities, it’s creating new things.”

So far, these arguments have been ricocheting around a small — and very online — cadre of conservatives, many of whom have ties to Silicon Valley’s emerging “tech right.” But they could find a powerful and potentially sympathetic audience in the new Trump administration. Chief among those potential allies is Ken Howery, Trump’s pick for ambassador to Denmark, which currently controls Greenland and will be instrumental to deciding its fate. An original member of Silicon Valley’s “PayPal mafia” and Trump’s former ambassador to Sweden, Howery is close to both Elon Musk and Thiel, who is a seminal figure on the New Right.

In many cases, conservatives are taking their cues from a concept that Americans may be familiar with from their high school history classes: Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis.” First outlined by Turner in 1893, the theory argues that the settling of America’s Western frontier had played a major role in shaping the country’s emerging culture and political ethic — and that the subsequent closing of the frontier in the 1890s posed a major threat to the country’s self-conception.

More contemporary historians have challenged Turner’s thesis, but Trump’s allies have nevertheless sounded distinctly Turnerian notes in their defenses of Trump’s proposal. In December, the magazine IM-1776, which has become something of a mouthpiece for the most assertively nationalistic flank of the New Right, published an article by an anonymous writer arguing that settling Greenland would represent “the opening up of a new territory for Western men to enter, a frontier that would forge, in time, a new people, conditioned by the cold climate and the harsh terrain.”

More mainstream conservatives have sounded a similar chord as well. This week, Eric Teetsel, an executive vice president at the Trump-aligned think tank Center for Renewing America, published an op-ed situating Trump’s proposal for Greenland in the tradition of “explorers defying long odds in pursuit of their dream of a better life, from Plymouth Rock to Lewis and Clark, the Sooners to the 49ers.”

“For 100 years, America’s domestic and foreign policy was dictated by the mandate to control our destiny from sea to shining sea,” Teetsel wrote. “President-elect Trump is reviving a sense of that spirit.”

None of this rhetoric is entirely unprecedented for the tech right. In recent years, Thiel and other members have dabbled in various “exit projects” designed to allow libertarian-minded individuals to escape the strictures of liberal democracies. Recent proposals range from living off the grid in the Mountain West to “seasteading,” or building autonomous communities on floating platforms in international waters.

Unsurprisingly, some on the tech right see Trump’s plans for Greenland as a potential opportunity to “exit” from mainstream American society. “Greenland represents the reopening of the frontier,” wrote Dryden Brown, the founder of a company called Praxis that is trying to build an autonomous “network state” supported by cryptocurrency. (The project has secured the backing of a number of investors in Thiel’s circle.) Earlier this year, Brown has said, he visited Greenland as a possible site for a new “privatized charter state” — the project has not come to fruition — which he hypothesized could serve as a “prototype” for a self-sustaining colony on Mars. In his post explaining his proposal, he tagged Elon Musk.

There are signs, though, that the MAGA vanguard isn’t uniformly behind the tech right’s grandiose plans for a new super colony in Greenland. On a recent episode of his War Room podcast, Steve Bannon — who has broadly endorsed Trump’s plan to acquire Greenland — distanced himself from what he called the tech right’s “transhumanist” vision for Greenland, opening up a new front in his ongoing feud with Musk and the tech right.

“I certainly hope Greenland is not what’s being proposed by these guys,” Bannon said.

Intellectual quibbling aside, Trump’s plans for Greenland — as well as his proposal to regain control over the Panama Canal and potentially claim parts of Canada for the U.S. — are responding to what many on the populist-nationalist right see as a real geostrategic challenge for the U.S. With the rise of China and the decline of American military and economic hegemony, many conservatives believe the post-Cold War “unipolar moment” is coming to a close — and imperial jockeying between major powers is ramping up.

“We have already seen that we are in an era of new imperialism,” said the conservative foreign policy analyst Sumantra Maitra, pointing to Russia’s moves in Ukraine, China’s designs in Sri Lanka and Africa, and Israeli and Turkish maneuvering in Syria. With the collapse of the multipolar global order well underway, he said,“the U.S. is starting to act like a normal great power, which is used to [defending] its own set of interests.

Nevertheless, Maitra said, he remains somewhat skeptical of the spiritual case for expansion, given that the structural and material justifications for claiming Greenland are strong enough on their own. But he sees the utility of the argument.

“If it leads to more competition and more innovation, that’s fine by me.”