Lithium, tantalum, niobium, zirconium… These minerals whose names we can barely pronounce have become indispensable for our industries—automotive and electronics—but also for our energy transition. We need them for everything: our batteries, our smartphones, our electric vehicles, and our solar panels.
The name "rare earths" is misleading, as they are found in numerous corners of the globe. China possesses nearly half of current deposits (and extracts 70% of global production). This is good news neither for the planet nor for our economic sovereignty. But it in no way justifies Donald Trump's predatory assaults on Greenland and his threats toward Europe.
Yet here we stand at a peculiar crossroads of history, where the melting ice of our planet's warming becomes, paradoxically, the harbinger of new extractive frenzies. For better or worse, this immense island near the North Pole is brimming with resources that are difficult to exploit. But the melting ice could change everything, in addition to opening new maritime routes. This whets the appetite of the American president—a man whose vision of sovereignty extends only as far as possession, whose understanding of alliance stops at transaction.
Security arguments don't hold up. The United States already has military bases and the means to use this ice sheet to install missiles and defend itself in case of aggression. We are indeed talking about a strategic and economic issue, where Europe must not allow itself to be pushed around.
The pattern has become wearily familiar. In weighing in on Ukraine, we clearly lack a common defense—twenty-seven nations speaking with fragmented voices while missiles rain on Kyiv. Trump's recent pronouncements that Europeans should be grateful for American protection ring hollow when that same protector threatens territorial annexation of an allied nation's territory. In supporting Iranians and listing the Revolutionary Guards on the list of terrorist organisations, we lack unity and courage when we're not being subjected to outright hostage blackmail. The recent execution of dual nationals by Tehran—met with European equivocation rather than unified condemnation—reveals the depths of our collective paralysis.
In Greenland, it would be time to show some muscle. But muscle without moral clarity is mere flexing. Trump's threats to impose tariffs on Denmark if it refuses to "negotiate" Greenland's sale represent a new low in transatlantic relations—economic coercion against a NATO ally over territorial acquisition. This is not alliance management; it is Gilded Age imperialism dressed in the language of "deals."
Emmanuel Macron and Valérie Hayer, who leads the Renew group in the European Parliament, propose deploying Europe's "bazooka": its "anti-coercion" instrument. Voted into law in 2023, it has never been used and yet applies perfectly to this situation. Originally conceived to protect Lithuania from China regarding Taiwan, it allows for restricting imports, investments, and access to public markets of a country exercising economic blackmail on one of the Union's member countries to influence its "legitimate sovereign choices."
One could not better describe the threats brandished by Donald Trump against European countries, including France, for having demonstrated their solidarity with Denmark through military exercises. Threats that he waves "until Greenland is sold." The absurdity would be comic if the stakes weren't so grave: an American president threatening Europe for conducting defensive military exercises in support of a NATO ally under threat from… America.
But let us pause to consider the deeper currents beneath these surface agitations. The scramble for rare earths is not merely about minerals—it is about the architecture of power in an age where energy independence and technological sovereignty define national survival. Europe's dependency on Chinese rare earths mirrors its previous dependency on Russian gas: a strategic vulnerability born of decades of prioritizing cost efficiency over resilience. We built supply chains as if the future would be an endless summer of cooperation, ignoring the winter that inevitably comes.
The Union, which has already shown unprecedented weakness in the face of Donald Trump's extortionate tariffs—tariffs that violate WTO rules yet elicit more European analysis than action—cannot retreat this time. Especially since it possesses the required weapon: a powerful mechanism that can be adopted by a qualified majority and not by unanimity, which often paralyzes it.
Consider the broader geopolitical recalibration underway. China's Belt and Road Initiative has systematically secured rare earth supply chains from Africa to Southeast Asia, while Europe debated regulations. The U.S. Inflation Reduction Act, for all its protectionist excesses, at least represents strategic thinking about supply chain sovereignty. Europe, meanwhile, publishes white papers. The Critical Raw Materials Act, passed with much fanfare in 2024, sets admirable targets—10% extraction, 40% processing, and 25% recycling by 2030—but implementation remains glacially slow, strangled by the same bureaucratic inertia and NIMBY politics that have long plagued the continent.
This is a real crash test—perhaps the crash test. To find out whether having built one of the world's most important economic zones, in an admirable and peaceful manner, can serve as a shield. Or whether the European Union is just a paper tiger, magnificent in its intentions, anemic in its will.
The question is not whether Europe has the legal instruments—it does. The question is whether it has the political courage to use them. Trump's Greenland gambit is testing whether Europe can defend the principle that borders cannot be changed by coercion, that allies do not threaten each other with economic warfare, and that sovereignty means something more than the ability to purchase.
History offers uncomfortable lessons. Munich taught us that appeasing territorial aggression invites more of it. The 1970s oil shocks taught us that strategic dependencies become weapons. Yet we seem determined to relearn these lessons at compound interest.
If Europe cannot deploy its anti-coercion instrument against these threats—transparent, documented, and aimed at a democratic ally—then the instrument is merely decorative, a legislative monument to good intentions. And if Europe cannot coordinate a unified response when an American president threatens a member state over a territorial dispute, then what exactly does European solidarity mean? Is it simply a fair-weather arrangement, operative only when costs are low and threats distant?
The rare earths beneath Greenland's ice are finite. But the precedent Europe sets in defending Denmark's sovereignty is infinite in its implications. Capitulate now, and every future adversary—whether in Washington, Beijing, or Moscow—will know that Europe's red lines are written in disappearing ink.
The ice is melting. The question is whether Europe's spine will remain frozen in indecision or finally thaw into action.