That very week in Washington, at a gathering of the Pan American Union, Roosevelt and his advisers spoke with a whole lot of geologists and different representatives from Latin America — a resource-rich area that the U.S. noticed as a solution to its strategic supplies shortages.
Nervous in regards to the historical past of U.S. imperial high-handedness within the area, some Latin Individuals thought that their international locations ought to seal off their assets to exterior management, as Mexico had in nationalizing U.S. and European oil holdings in 1938.
Japan’s advances in Southeast Asia after Pearl Harbor reduce off rubber from the Dutch East Indies and Malaysia, prompting a rush for rubber within the Amazon and the event of synthetics. World Battle II posters urged Individuals to preserve rubber for the struggle effort. U.S. Authorities Printing Workplace, Courtesy of Northwestern College Libraries
With European empires crumbling, Roosevelt confronted a fragile diplomatic dance with Greenland. He needed to keep up the looks of neutrality, hold skeptical isolationists in Congress from revolting and provides no provocations to Latin American anti-imperialists to chop off assets. Crucially, he additionally wanted to keep away from giving the resource-starved Japanese a authorized justification to grab the oil-rich Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia – one other European colony orphaned by the Nazi invasion.
Roosevelt’s resolution: enlist Coast Guard “volunteers” to protect Ivittuut. By the top of the summer season, lengthy earlier than the U.S. formally entered the struggle, 15 sailors resigned from their ships and took up residence close to the mine.
Seeing Greenland as essential to US safety
Roosevelt additionally bought inventive with geography.
In an April 12, 1940, press convention, simply days after the Nazi invasion, he started to emphasise Greenland as a part of the Western Hemisphere, extra American than European, and thus falling underneath Monroe Doctrine protections. To calm fears in Latin America, U.S. officers recast the doctrine as development-oriented hemispheric solidarity.
Maj. William S. Culbertson, a former U.S. commerce official talking earlier than the Military Industrial School in fall 1940, famous how the scramble for assets pulled the U.S. right into a type of nonmilitary warfare: “We are engaged at the present time in economic warfare with the totalitarian powers. Publicly, our politicians don’t state it quite as bluntly as that, but it is a fact.” For the remainder of the century, the entrance line was simply as doubtless a far-off mine as an precise battlefield.
On April 9, 1941, precisely a 12 months after the Nazis seized Denmark, Kauffmann met with U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull to signal an settlement “on behalf of the King of Denmark” inserting Greenland and its mines underneath the U.S. safety blanket. At Narsarsuaq, on the island’s southern tip, the U.S. started establishing an airbase named “Bluie West One.”
An aerial view exhibits Bluie West One, a U.S. air base at Narsarsuaq, Greenland, in June 1942. Later, through the Chilly Battle, the U.S. used Thule Air Base, now referred to as Pituffik House Base, in northwest Greenland as a key missile protection web site due to its proximity to the us. USAF Historic Analysis Company
Throughout the remainder of World Battle II and all through the Chilly Battle, Greenland would home a number of vital U.S. navy installations, together with some that compelled Inuit households to relocate.
Crucial minerals immediately
What transpired in Greenland within the 18 months earlier than Pearl Harbor match into a bigger rising sample.
Because the U.S. ascended to international management and realized that it couldn’t preserve navy dominance with out broad entry to overseas supplies, it started to revamp the worldwide system of useful resource flows and the principles for this new worldwide order.
A 1952 chart from the President’s Supplies Coverage Fee, established by President Harry Truman to review the safety of U.S. uncooked supplies through the Chilly Battle. The group was generally generally known as the Paley Fee. Sources for Freedom: A Report back to the President
It rejected the Axis’ “might makes right” territorial conquest for assets, however discovered different methods to ensure American entry to vital assets, together with loosening commerce restrictions in European colonies.
The U.S. supplied a lifeline to the British with the destroyers-for-bases deal in September 1940 and the Lend-Lease Act in March 1941, however it additionally gained strategic navy bases around the globe. It used support as leverage to additionally pry open the British Empire’s markets.
The end result was a postwar world interconnected by commerce and low tariffs, but additionally a world community of U.S. bases and alliances of generally questionable legitimacy designed partially to guard U.S. entry to strategic assets.
President John F Kennedy meets with Mobutu Sese Seko of the previous Belgian Congo, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, on the White Home in 1963. Beginning within the Nineteen Forties, the African nation supplied the U.S. with cobalt and uranium, together with for the Hiroshima bomb. CIA-supported coups in 1960 and 1965 helped put Mobutu, identified for corruption, in energy. Keystone/Getty Photographs
In the course of the Chilly Battle, these international assets helped defeat the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, these safety imperatives additionally gave the U.S. license for help of authoritarian regimes in locations like Iran, Congo and Indonesia.
America’s voracious urge for food for assets additionally typically displaced native populations and Indigenous communities, justified by the outdated declare that they misused the assets round them. It left environmental harm from the Arctic to the Amazon.
Donald Trump’s son visited Greenland in 2025, shortly after the U.S. president started speaking about wanting to regulate the island and its assets. The folks with Donald Trump Jr., second from proper, are sporting jackets studying ‘Trump Force One.’ Emil Stach/Ritzau Scanpix/AFP through Getty Photographs
Strategic assets have been on the heart of the American-led international system for many years. However U.S. actions immediately are completely different. The cryolite mine was a working mine, rarer than immediately’s proposed vital mineral mines in Greenland, and the Nazi risk was imminent. Most vital, Roosevelt knew the right way to achieve what the U.S. wanted with no “damn-what-the world-thinks” navy takeover.
Thomas Robertson, Visiting Affiliate Professor of Environmental Research, Macalester School
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