American history is a tale of mastering our physical environment or being mastered by it. We carved a canal through Panama to join two oceans and remake global trade. We dammed the Colorado River to power the factories that won the Second World War. We failed as farmers and turned the High Plains into a decade of dust. Today, retreating ice is reshaping the strategic map, and nowhere more consequentially than in the Arctic.

The Arctic is warming at four times the global average. Sea lanes are opening where impassable ice reigned for millennia. At the center of this transformation sits Greenland, home to the Kvanefjeld and Tanbreez deposits — among the largest rare earth reserves on the planet. For generations, these elements essential to batteries, semiconductors, and precision munitions were locked in ice. That barrier is gone.

It may seem like President Donald Trump is the cause of Greenland’s concern. In reality, he is responding to a growing crisis. Our adversaries noticed the potential bounty in an increasingly navigable and accessible Arctic before we did, and Greenland is a prize they have not overlooked.

In 2017, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev announced their ambition to build a “Silk Road on the ice.” By year’s end, a joint $27 billion liquefied natural gas project began........

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