Trump Allies Target Greenland’s Rare Earths to Counter China’s Grip

It was a frigid and foggy morning in southern Greenland, and Drew Horn had spent two hours waiting in a helicopter hangar at snow-covered Narsarsuaq Airport, staring into the stubborn gloom, hoping to get up in the air.

Horn is the chief executive officer of GreenMet, a Washington-based company that arranges deals between the US government and the private sector around critical minerals. The former US Marine and Army Green Beret has emerged as a key middleman amid President Donald Trump’s campaign to harness the natural resources of the world’s largest island for America’s benefit.

Horn and his partners had traveled to Greenland to size up Tanbreez, an untapped trove of rare-earth minerals that GreenMet agreed to help develop with its owner, Critical Metals Corp. Rare earths have become a crucial component for producing everything from missile-defense systems to smartphones, and US companies are heavily reliant on China to supply them, putting the minerals on the front lines of geopolitics.

GreenMet is hoping that it can benefit from the president’s increasing marriage of foreign policy with American commerce. Trump is eager to deploy US financial and technological muscle – and has signaled that he is willing to impinge on Greenland’s sovereignty and even use American military might – to secure access to its natural resources and outflank China on trade. Though Trump has said little about Greenland publicly of late, the island remains a priority for him, especially amid a rare-earth trade fight with China, a senior administration official said.

There was only one way that May morning for Horn to get a good look at Tanbreez — from above — and he didn’t have long. In a few days, he was due thousands of miles south, at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, to report on what he saw and show pictures of the site.

At last, a narrow seam of sunlight sliced through the canopy, opening a route to the mine. The French pilot, Pierre Ligneau, agreed to take off. The helicopter would loop around the lingering fog and snow and above the Tanbreez site.

“I give it a 70% chance,” Ligneau said when asked how likely it was they could make it back that same day. If fog returned and sealed off the flight path, it could force an emergency landing on a remote mountain slope.

“I wouldn’t have gone,” said mechanic Adelaido Berzal Crespo, the pilot’s assistant on the ground.

Thirty minutes later, Horn stepped off the helicopter, beaming. He had seen what he needed to see. “This changes the game,” Horn said.

Greenland is more than three times the size of Texas but home to only about 57,000 residents. The island has taken on greater strategic importance because of its sizable natural resources and location off the coast of northeast Canada.

Its economy is dominated by fishing, but local lawmakers see mining as an opportunity to diversify. As ice melts due to climate change, Greenland’s reserves of rare earths, gold, and diamonds are expected to become more accessible. The island is also likely to become crucial to shipping as new Arctic routes open up.

For years, companies have sniffed around Greenland’s plentiful mineral deposits, but the economics never seemed to make sense.

For one, frigid temperatures for most of the year mean many industries can only work during the summer. And high production costs and relatively low mineral concentrations have deterred large-scale mining investments. Currently, Greenland has just two active, small mines, one for gold and one for anorthosite, a rock with many industrial uses.

Though rare earths — in spite of their name — tend to be as abundant as other common industrial commodities, they can be much more difficult to find in high enough concentrations to get out of the ground in a cost-effective way. That’s because they are often mixed in among other minerals.

Figuring out how to profitably extract resources from Tanbreez will be difficult, a miner in Greenland said.

“It is a nice deposit, but the complexities to extract and purify are challenging,” said Brian Hanrahan, CEO of Lumina Sustainable Materials. “I am sure somebody at some point will figure out how to process these rare earths, but we don’t have the technology yet.”

Agencies from the Pentagon to the Energy Department are working on ways to make Greenland a viable place to do business for US industries from critical minerals to fisheries, according to the senior Trump administration official. Since Trump’s return to the presidency, his administration has looked at building hydropower and data centers in Greenland, Horn said.

There’s limited shipping access and few roads on the island, which is fringed by ragged peninsulas caked in permafrost. When Horn suggested to Greg Barnes, a 76-year-old geologist who saw Tanbreez’s potential in the 1990s, that the site needed a road from the mine down to a nearby fjord, Barnes warned that in icy weather, trucks wouldn’t be able to traverse it.

As Horn and other investors see it, Greenland’s rare-earth deposits could provide a ready reserve if China restricted exports. After Trump rolled out his Liberation Day tariff plan in April, China curbed exports of seven rare-earth minerals and magnets. The minerals and so-called permanent magnets became the focal point of trade talks between the world’s two largest economies. China agreed to lift the restrictions – except for defense companies — as part of a larger framework accord in June.

Regardless of the détente, the US is soliciting proposals from industry and experts to create a domestic mine-to-magnet supply chain within six to 12 months.

The president’s posture toward Greenland could make a challenging business proposition even more imposing. Trump has coveted Greenland, which is part of the Kingdom of Denmark, since his first term. The US needs Greenland “for economic security,” Trump has said, while refusing to rule out taking it by force.

Within weeks of his inauguration in January, Trump started pressuring officials including then-National Security Advisor Mike Waltz on Greenland. A visit by Vice President JD Vance to the island in March, as local government negotiations after a general election were still underway, infuriated the island’s leaders.

In response to Trump’s campaign to take over the island, Greenlanders voted in lawmakers who say that they intend to resist US adventurism. Trump’s aggressive posture has also rankled Denmark, complicating Washington’s relations with an ally and fellow member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Trump will need to balance diplomacy with US economic, technical and financial might to achieve his goals in Greenland, and Horn is part of that statecraft.

A West Virginian who hunts deer with a bow and earned a degree in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Horn worked in the Defense and Energy Departments during Trump’s first term. He was an associate director of policy to Vice President Mike Pence before becoming a senior adviser to the Director of National Intelligence.

Horn was also accused during the first Trump term of being a key figure in a failed Venezuela coup attempt. He denies any wrongdoing.

“I have a well-documented background as a Green Beret combat veteran that leads to a lot of assumptions,” Horn said. “I met with a lot of crazy people, some of them claim some totally ridiculous stuff that’s been disproven.”

After Trump lost the 2020 election, Horn started GreenMet, where he has used his connections to link investors to powerful people in Washington. The firm’s first big splash came in 2023, when it sold the mineral rights of a lithium brine deposit in Arkansas to Exxon Mobil Corp., as the giant oil company was boosting its access to a material used in electric-vehicle batteries.

GreenMet has been drawing increasing attention from critical-minerals companies and investors who are eager to draw on Horn’s connections. He said he’s working on projects including the redevelopment of a rare-earth mine in Missouri, and has recently made two trips to Africa to discuss mineral agreements for US companies.

Horn identified Tanbreez as a potential source for rare earths for the US just as China was clamping down on exports. In 2023, China said it would limit exports of gallium and germanium used by the Pentagon to make military satellites, missiles and night-vision goggles. The move made it clear that the US would have to find alternative sources.

The US has only one company, MP Materials Corp., that mines and processes rare-earth metals from a single active mine in California. China’s rare-earth industry is highly subsidized by the government and has been known to flood the market to drive down prices whenever potential competitors emerge.

Horn first traveled to Greenland in 2019, after Trump shocked the world by saying he wanted to buy the island. He and the Trump team opened a consulate, the first US outpost there since the 1950s. Then the pandemic arrived, and the idea of Greenland was eclipsed.

Fast forward to this spring, when Horn departed Washington on a Tuesday evening at the end of April for Iceland, where he connected to a flight that got to Copenhagen Wednesday morning. The next day, Horn flew to Nuuk, Greenland’s capital.

After arriving in Nuuk and dining on raw whale meat and whale skin, Horn and his team retired for the evening. Horn spent most of his first full day in the city on the southwest coast in his hotel, on the phone with US-based clients, exchanging intel on his plans and Trump’s sudden firing of Waltz.

While Horn worked the phones, Jorgen Boassen, a vocal backer of Trump, was sitting in a nearby restaurant. Boassen works for American Daybreak, a consultancy run by Thomas Dans, a venture capitalist who served in the first Trump administration. Boassen sees in Trump a chance for Greenland to get out from under Europe’s thumb.

“We buy everything through Denmark, it’s not right,” said Boassen, who has built up a large following on social media but doesn’t hold any office. “To export fish, we send first to Denmark and then they send across the globe.”

Boassen, a former bricklayer, believes partnering with the US could boost the island’s economy, though he said he doesn’t want to be governed by the US.

Interviews with multiple Greenlandic and Danish officials revealed support for the US helping to develop Greenland’s critical-minerals industry, and even eagerness to build more US military bases. But Trump’s insistence that the US own the island is a nonstarter.

“We are not a property. Greenland belongs to the Greenlandic people and always will,” Mute B. Egede, the finance minister and deputy prime minister of Greenland, said in May during a speech in Copenhagen. “If they want some cooperation or partnership, they need to change their tone when talking to us.”

Horn said the goal has always been to forge business relationships in the region and promote US security, and that he has met with Greenlandic and Danish officials to smooth over Trump’s rhetoric.

Barnes bought the Tanbreez site in 1992 after its previous owner failed to pay a once-every-5-year fee to Greenland’s government. Barnes, who with his white beard and hair, yellow Hawaiian shirt and red hat resembles Kris Kringle on summer vacation, agreed to join Horn for his visit this spring.

For 30 years, Barnes shuttled between his home in Perth, Australia, and the small settlement of Narsarsuaq to collect mineral samples from Tanbreez. What he found, he claims, was the most significant deposit of rare earths outside of China.

Barnes said that Tanbreez is the most valuable deposit of heavy rare-earth elements in the world. He said the US State Department surveyed the deposit twice last year and Chinese officials approached him multiple times in recent years offering to buy it. He declined to do a deal with China, he said, out of concern about security.

Ultimately, Barnes sold Tanbreez to Critical Metals for $5 million in cash and the equivalent of $211 million in stock in July 2024. Tony Sage, the CEO of Critical Metals, called Tanbreez “a game-changing rare earth asset for the West.”

When it was time for Horn and Barnes to inspect the deposit, a dense fog blanketed the entire region. Horn and his team had to catch a flight back to Nuuk in 24 hours, but with the air not expected to clear, the helicopter was useless.

Horn decided to attempt to book a boat to look at Tanbreez and a nearby fjord that he said could become a port for exporting rare earths and a US naval base. Yet there was a problem: The fjord was full of ice.

A local captain said it might melt in a month.

The next day, the weather worsened. Fog still blanketed the town and snow was falling. Air Greenland had cancelled all flights — good news, because it bought Horn time.

After the brief helicopter ride, he finally got a look at the mine. He would not go to Mar-a-Lago empty-handed. Horn, Barnes, the pilot, his assistant and a few others later gathered at the hotel bar to celebrate over beers. The task was done.

A few days later, Horn arrived at Trump’s Palm Beach resort. He said his meeting with Trump’s team was productive. Being able to show aides photos of Tanbreez and the fjord gave them the evidence they needed to move forward, Horn said.

Within weeks, Critical Metals announced that it had received a nonbinding letter of interest from the US Export-Import Bank for a $120 million loan to develop Tanbreez, potentially giving it a substantial chunk of the roughly $290 million it needs to invest to bring the mine to commercial scale.

Still, uncertainties remain. Benchmark Minerals analyst George Ingall said with Greenland’s climate, limited workforce and lack of infrastructure, the feasibility of the Tanbreez project remains low.

“It’s difficult to take an evidence-based view,” Ingall said. “The only data we have is the data they publish, which we always consider with a pinch of salt.”

Sage, the Critical Metals CEO, said that they still have more drilling to do around the deposit.

“Greg Barnes did academic drilling,” Sage said. “We want to do economic drilling.”

The administration sees Tanbreez as an important option to secure more rare earths to ensure national security, according to a senior administration official. The White House knows the logistical hurdles for a rare-earth mine in Greenland, but that hasn’t dissuaded them from figuring out a way to make it work, the official said.

Still, there are no guarantees, as the Trump administration has shown a penchant for abruptly changing gears. A few weeks after Horn’s visit, most of Trump’s National Security Council team was let go, making it harder for the entrepreneur to forge ahead on Greenland.

“It could all blow up,” Horn said one night in Nuuk. “But I have to keep pushing to make it work.”