{"id":22723,"date":"2026-02-17T21:28:29","date_gmt":"2026-02-17T21:28:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/?p=22723"},"modified":"2026-02-17T21:28:29","modified_gmt":"2026-02-17T21:28:29","slug":"why-america-may-not-have-won-world-war-ii-without-its-secret-weapon-greenland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/?p=22723","title":{"rendered":"Why America may not have won World War II without its secret weapon: Greenland"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

That very week in Washington, at a meeting of the Pan American Union, Roosevelt and his advisers spoke with hundreds of geologists and other representatives from Latin America \u2014 a resource-rich region that the U.S. saw as an answer to its strategic materials shortages.<\/p>\n

Nervous about the history of U.S. imperial high-handedness in the region, some Latin Americans thought that their countries should seal off their resources to outside control, as Mexico had in nationalizing U.S. and European oil holdings in 1938.<\/p>\n

\"A
Japan\u2019s advances in Southeast Asia after Pearl Harbor cut off rubber from the Dutch East Indies and Malaysia, prompting a rush for rubber in the Amazon and the development of synthetics. World War II posters urged Americans to conserve rubber for the war effort. U.S. Government Printing Office, Courtesy of Northwestern University Libraries<\/figcaption>

With European empires crumbling, Roosevelt faced a delicate diplomatic dance with Greenland. He wanted to maintain the appearance of neutrality, keep skeptical isolationists in Congress from revolting and give no provocations to Latin American anti-imperialists to cut off resources. Crucially, he also needed to avoid giving the resource-starved Japanese a legal justification to seize the oil-rich Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia \u2013 another European colony orphaned by the Nazi invasion.<\/p>\n

Roosevelt\u2019s solution: enlist Coast Guard \u201cvolunteers\u201d to guard Ivittuut. By the end of the summer, long before the U.S. officially entered the war, 15 sailors resigned from their ships and took up residence near the mine.<\/p>\n

Seeing Greenland as crucial to US security<\/h2>\n

Roosevelt also got creative with geography.<\/p>\n

In an April 12, 1940, press conference, just days after the Nazi invasion, he began to emphasize Greenland as part of the Western Hemisphere, more American than European, and thus falling under Monroe Doctrine protections. To calm fears in Latin America, U.S. officials recast the doctrine as development-oriented hemispheric solidarity.<\/p>\n

Maj. William S. Culbertson, a former U.S. trade official speaking before the Army Industrial College in fall 1940, noted how the scramble for resources pulled the U.S. into a form of nonmilitary warfare: \u201cWe are engaged at the present time in economic warfare with the totalitarian powers. Publicly, our politicians don\u2019t state it quite as bluntly as that, but it is a fact.\u201d For the rest of the century, the front line was just as likely a far-off mine as an actual battlefield.<\/p>\n

On April 9, 1941, exactly a year after the Nazis seized Denmark, Kauffmann met with U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull to sign an agreement \u201con behalf of the King of Denmark\u201d placing Greenland and its mines under the U.S. security blanket. At Narsarsuaq, on the island\u2019s southern tip, the U.S. began constructing an airbase named \u201cBluie West One.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A

An aerial view shows Bluie West One, a U.S. air base at Narsarsuaq, Greenland, in June 1942. Later, during the Cold War, the U.S. used Thule Air Base, now called Pituffik Space Base, in northwest Greenland as a key missile defense site because of its proximity to the USSR. USAF Historical Research Agency<\/figcaption>

During the rest of World War II and throughout the Cold War, Greenland would house several important U.S. military installations, including some that forced Inuit families to relocate.<\/p>\n

Critical minerals today<\/h2>\n

What transpired in Greenland in the 18 months before Pearl Harbor fit into a larger emerging pattern.<\/p>\n

As the U.S. ascended to global leadership and realized that it couldn\u2019t maintain military dominance without wide access to foreign materials, it began to redesign the global system of resource flows and the rules for this new international order.<\/p>\n

\"A

A 1952 chart from the President\u2019s Materials Policy Commission, established by President Harry Truman to study the security of U.S. raw materials during the Cold War. The group was commonly known as the Paley Commission. Resources for Freedom: A Report to the President<\/figcaption>

It rejected the Axis\u2019 \u201cmight makes right\u201d territorial conquest for resources, but found other ways to guarantee American access to critical resources, including loosening trade restrictions in European colonies.<\/p>\n

The U.S. provided a lifeline to the British with the destroyers-for-bases deal in September 1940 and the Lend-Lease Act in March 1941, but it also gained strategic military bases around the world. It used aid as leverage to also pry open the British Empire\u2019s markets.<\/p>\n

The result was a postwar world interconnected by trade and low tariffs, but also a global network of U.S. bases and alliances of sometimes questionable legitimacy designed in part to protect U.S. access to strategic resources.<\/p>\n

\"Two

President John F Kennedy meets with Mobutu Sese Seko of the former Belgian Congo, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, at the White House in 1963. Starting in the 1940s, the African country provided the U.S. with cobalt and uranium, including for the Hiroshima bomb. CIA-supported coups in 1960 and 1965 helped put Mobutu, known for corruption, in power. Keystone\/Getty Images<\/figcaption>

During the Cold War, these global resources helped defeat the Soviet Union. However, these security imperatives also gave the U.S. license for support of authoritarian regimes in places like Iran, Congo and Indonesia.<\/p>\n

America\u2019s voracious appetite for resources also often displaced local populations and Indigenous communities, justified by the old claim that they misused the resources around them. It left environmental damage from the Arctic to the Amazon.<\/p>\n

\"Five

Donald Trump\u2019s son visited Greenland in 2025, shortly after the U.S. president began talking about wanting to control the island and its resources. The people with Donald Trump Jr., second from right, are wearing jackets reading \u2018Trump Force One.\u2019 Emil Stach\/Ritzau Scanpix\/AFP via Getty Images<\/figcaption>

Strategic resources have been at the center of the American-led global system for decades. But U.S. actions today are different. The cryolite mine was a working mine, rarer than today\u2019s proposed critical mineral mines in Greenland, and the Nazi threat was imminent. Most important, Roosevelt knew how to gain what the U.S. needed without a \u201cdamn-what-the world-thinks\u201d military takeover.<\/p>\n

Thomas Robertson, Visiting Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, Macalester College<\/em><\/p>\n

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"The
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#America #won #World #War #secret #weapon #Greenland<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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