The formidable reality confronting any US, NATO, or European plans for Greenland is its ice. The relentless frozen expanse obstructs harbours, encases valuable minerals, and transforms coastlines into treacherous fields of white and blue shards, posing a year-round threat to shipping.
Navigating this challenging environment necessitates a specific solution: icebreakers. These colossal vessels, equipped with powerful engines, reinforced hulls, and heavy bows, are engineered to crush and cleave through thick ice.
However, the United States currently possesses only three such ships, with one reportedly in such disrepair as to be almost unusable. While agreements are in place to acquire an additional eleven, procurement faces significant geopolitical hurdles, as potential sources include either adversaries or recently alienated allies.
Despite toning down his rhetoric, U.S. President Donald Trump seems set on the U.S. owning Greenland for security and economic reasons: to keep what he calls “the big, beautiful piece of ice” out of the hands of Moscow and Beijing, to secure a strategic Arctic location for U.S. assets, and to extract the island’s mineral wealth including rare earths.
Without specifying any plan, he told world leaders gathered in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday that “to get to this rare earth you got to go through hundreds of feet of ice.”
Yet there is no meaningful way to do that — or anything else in the semiautonomous Danish territory — without icebreakers’ crucial ability to cut trails through frozen seas.
Even if they decided to surge U.S. material into Greenland tomorrow, “they would have two or three years gap in which they’re not really able to access the island most of the time,” said Alberto Rizzi, a fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
“On a map, Greenland looks surrounded by sea, but the reality is that the sea is full of ice,” he said.
If the U.S. wants more icebreakers, there are only four options: the shipyards of strategic adversaries China and Russia or longtime allies Canada and Finland, both of whom have recently weathered blistering criticism and threats of tariffs by Trump over Greenland.
Icebreakers are expensive to design, build, operate and maintain and require a skilled workforce that can only be found in certain places like Finland, with expertise forged in the frigid Baltic Sea.
Finland has built roughly 60% of the world’s fleet of more than 240 icebreakers and designed half the remainder, Rizzi said.
“It’s very niche capabilities that they developed as a necessity first and then they have been able to turn it into geoeconomic leverage,” he said.
Russia has the world’s largest fleet with about 100 vessels, including colossal ships powered by nuclear reactors. Second comes Canada, which is set to double its fleet to around 50 icebreakers, according to a 2024 report by Aker Arctic, a Helsinki-based icebreaker design firm.
“Our design and engineering work order books are pretty full at the moment and the near future looks promising,” said Jari Hurttia, business manager at Aker Arctic, as he describes rising interest in the firm’s “unrivalled special competence which is not available anywhere else in the world.”
China currently has five compared to the U.S. three, and is rapidly building more as they expand their ambitions in the Arctic, said Marc Lanteigne, a professor at the University of Tromsø in Norway who teaches often at the University of Greenland in Nuuk.
“China is now in a position to develop indigenous icebreakers, and so the U.S. feels it must do the same,” he said.
Washington has to play catch up, and fast, said Sophie Arts, a fellow at the German Marshall Fund focused on Arctic security.
“President Trump has really bemoaned this lack of icebreakers, especially in comparison to Russia,” Arts said. The current U.S. icebreaker fleet is “basically past their life cycle already.”
So he turned to the undeniable expertise of the European Union’s northernmost nation and the U.S.’s neighbor to the north.
“Both Canada and Finland are really, really vital to this,” Arts said. “Cooperation is what makes this possible … the U.S. doesn’t really have a pathway to do this on its own at this time.”
During his first administration, Trump prioritized the U.S. military’s acquisition of ice-capable vessels, a strategy that the Biden administration followed up on by signing an agreement called the Ice PACT with Helsinki and Ottawa to deliver 11 icebreakers constructed by two corporate consortiums with Finnish designs.
Four would be built in Finland, while seven would be constructed in a Canadian-owned billion-dollar “American Icebreaker Factory” in Texas as well as a shipyard in Mississippi under joint U.S.-Canadian ownership.
Any mining of critical minerals would face high costs in the harsh conditions at sea and on land in Greenland. Investments there would take years if not decades to pay off, Lanteigne said.
Even with adequate icebreakers, the price to build and maintain mining or defensive facilities — like those envisioned in the yet-unfunded $175 billion Golden Dome missile defense network linking detectors and interceptors in space and on the ground — would be enormous.
That means U.S. allies in the Arctic might still welcome more investment by Washington in Greenland.
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said in a statement that she would be open to strengthening Arctic security including the U.S. Golden Dome program “provided that this is done with respect for our territorial integrity.”
While both the U.S. and the 27-nation European Union including Denmark and Finland have pledged to vastly increase investment in Greenland, it is clear who currently has the hard-power capability to actually reach the vast frozen territory roughly three times the size of Texas.
“It’s kind of absurd because I don’t think Finland would scrap the deal with the U.S. as a response to threatening to invade Greenland,” Rizzi said. “But if Europe wants to exercise significant leverage to the USA, they could say ‘We’re not going to give you any icebreakers and good luck reaching the Arctic, or projecting power there, with those two old ships that you have.’”
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen reminded world leaders Tuesday at Davos of the key EU-technology base for any Arctic endeavors.
“Finland — one of the newest NATO members — is selling its first icebreakers to the U.S.,” von der Leyen said at the World Economic Forum.
“This shows that we have the capability right here, in the ice so to speak, that our northern NATO members have Arctic-ready forces right now, and above all, that Arctic security can only be achieved together.”
She announced after an emergency summit of the 27 EU leaders in Brussels on Thursday that the EU would surge defense spending in Greenland including an icebreaker.
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