Mother Jones illustration; Chip Somodevilla/Getty; Getty(2)

On January 15, the governor of Louisiana appeared on Fox News to discuss the fate of an autonomous European territory nearly 3,000 miles away from his home state.

“The president is serious about reinforcing the Monroe Doctrine,” Republican Gov. Jeff Landry told host Brian Kilmeade of President Donald Trump’s bellicose demands to take over Greenland. “I think this is a great opportunity for Louisiana. I think it’s a great opportunity for America. I think it’s a phenomenal opportunity for Greenlanders.”

From Venezuela to Cuba to Greenland, Trump is committed to bolstering the financial interests of US companies through imperial aggression.

When Trump appointed Landry as special envoy to Greenland a few weeks earlier—marking a significant escalation in his campaign to seize the island from the Kingdom of Denmark—the move seemed bizarre. Why is a governor, with slipping support in polls, taking on a “volunteer” job helping Trump’s campaign to control the Western Hemisphere? The Louisiana politician does not have any known expertise in global geopolitics. He has never set foot in the territory.

But in Landry there is a skeleton key to Trump’s plans. The governor is a man who can uniquely reveal the “opportunity” that Americans see from seizing the island: the extraction of Greenland’s subterranean riches.

On January 21, Trump backed off his threats to acquire Greenland through force or economic warfare, announcing on Truth Social that he’d reached a “framework of a future deal” with NATO. Negotiations are ongoing, but officials told the New York Times that the deal would potentially establish sovereign US military bases and access to mineral rights in the territory.

Landry’s appointment embodies a key philosophy that has guided Trump’s approach to foreign policy in his second term. From Venezuela to Cuba to Greenland, this administration is committed to bolstering the financial interests of US companies through imperial aggression. Political control over a foreign nation is less important than making sure Americans can profit there. It’s telling that Landry’s only plausible connection to the island is that he has done in Louisiana what American business moguls want to do in Greenland: unleash the energy industry.

A MAGA model for governance of Greenland would be similar to how Landry has treated the energy industry in his home state, actively boosting oil and gas while rolling back environmental rules. And even though Landry has publicly panned clean energy, no state is better prepared to profit from rare earth mining—spurred in large part by the global electrification surge—than Louisiana.

Here’s who stands to reap the biggest rewards from Trump’s push to take over Greenland’s resources and make the island, potentially, more like Louisiana.

The appointment of Landry—a longtime friend to the fossil fuel industry—as Greenland envoy arrives right as American investments in the island’s oil are ramping up.

For more than 40 years, oil executives have dreamed of striking liquid gold in Jameson Land, a remote peninsula on Greenland’s eastern shore, bounded by the Arctic Ocean, glaciated peaks, and a vast, deep network of fjords. Jameson Land is thought to be home to one of the largest untapped oil reserves in the world. According to a 2007 U.S. government estimate, as many as 31 billion barrels of oil could be........

© Mother Jones