Donald Trump’s attempt to take Greenland drove away many long-time allies. But it also aroused the interest of a group of technology billionaires who see the island as a potential laboratory for « libertarian cities », that is, privately governed areas, without regulation or democracy.
Since the beginning of the year, tensions over the future of Greenland have increased the risk of a military confrontation between the United States and its NATO allies, although all parties say they want to avoid war. In January, several European NATO members sent small military contingents to Danish semi-autonomous territory for what they described as a joint reconnaissance and exercise mission, which French diplomat Olivier Poivre d’Arvor characterized as a « first exercise » in order to signal that « NATO is present », in the face of threats of US takeover.
These movements of European detachments to Nuuk, the capital of Greenland (with a population of approximately 20,000 inhabitants), and its surroundings, occurred after a meeting at the White House on January 14 between US Vice President JD Vance and the Foreign Ministers of Greenland and Denmark. After that, Denmark’s Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen said that there was still a « fundamental disagreement » with the Trump administration over the status of the territory and rejected any acquisition of Greenland by the US as being something « totally unacceptable ».
One could imagine that the Trump administration – already busy with the supervision of the invasion of the Twin Cities (Minneapolis and St. Paul) by the Immigration and Customs Service (ICE), tightening the siege on Venezuela’s oil reserves and threatening Iran – had more than enough problems in early 2026. However, even after backing down in the open discussion about the use of military force to take Greenland, the government continued to insist on its campaign to put the island under US control, despite the objections of long-time Western allies, some Republican senators, the vast majority of Americans and an even larger portion of Greenlanders.
But that doesn’t mean that Donald Trump doesn’t have allies in this matter. Behind the scenes, a coalition of Silicon Valley billionaires supports the takeover. Their motivation is that they see Greenland as a potential place for a practically unregulated “libertarian city”, which would serve as a laboratory for their vision of governance without democracy.
Billionaires eyeing Greenland
The acquisition of Greenland has been one of Trump’s favorite projects for a long time, an idea he first considered in 2019. At that time, despite Trump’s insistence that acquiring the island would be as simple as doing « a large real estate deal », the proposal was widely ridiculed as absurd and did not prosper. This time, however, Trump seems to be serious – and European leaders are sounding the alarm. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, a conservative whose country did not join the deployment of European troops earlier this month, said that any US attempt to annex Greenland « would be the end of the world as we know it ».
The roots of Trump’s apparent obsession with the acquisition of Greenland are not, at first glance, entirely clear. Trump is likely to be aware that if the United States incorporates Greenland into his empire, this would be the largest territorial acquisition in American history – a perspective that may appeal to his imperialist impulses. He also framed the potential acquisition of Greenland as a matter of national security, and is not alone in this analysis: the island’s position between Europe and North America has long been stirring the US, and as Greenland warms up rapidly due to the effects of climate change, it becomes increasingly able to accommodate international maritime traffic and, consequently, a growing target for rare earth mining.
It is this last possibility that is perhaps the most tempting for members of Trump’s inner circle and for the technology oligarchs who held prominent places in his inauguration last year. Members of this elite group have had their eyes on Greenland for some time. Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman and Bill Gates invested in KoBold Metals, a company that uses artificial intelligence to search for rare minerals, a 2022 project to search for minerals for batteries in western Greenland. Forbes has identified other allies of Trump, including Estée Lauder’s heir, Ronald Lauder, and the Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, who have or had extensive trade ties with the island.
« Brown’s vision for Greenland includes artificial rain in summer, winter days artificially extended by the reflection of sunlight on frozen terrain and ‘property’ based on a ‘private letter state’ represented by symbols. »
In fact, according to former national security adviser John Bolton, it was Lauder who first aroused Trump’s interest in acquiring Greenland in 2018. Lauder, who studied administration with Trump, has been increasing his investments on the island: the Danish newspaper Politiken reported at the end of last year that Lauder acquired a stake in two Greenlandic companies, one that sells mineral water extracted from an island on the west coast of Greenland and another that tries to generate hydroelectric power in the largest lake on the island.
Last February, shortly after Trump took office for the second time, Lauder used the New York Post pages to defend Trump’s interest in Greenland as coldly « strategic » – writing that under the island’s « ice and rocks » lies « a treasure trove of rare earth elements essential for AI, advanced armament and modern technology ». Lauder also noted in the article that Greenlanders could hold an independence referendum « at any time », which means that the United States has a « narrow window to strengthen ties before other powers enter the scene ».
Lauder could benefit enormously if the US acquired Greenland, as well as Bezos. But perhaps the biggest defenders of the US effort to take control of Greenland are the proponents of the networked States movement, an initiative that aims to create a series of unregulated economic zones that can be administered without the interference of a nation-state’s governance.
The networked movement of the State
In August last year, Reuters reported that an elite group in Silicon Valley was pressuring the Trump administration to consider Greenland as the possible headquarters of a networked state or « libertary » city – a practically unregulated center for « artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, space launches, nuclear microreactors and high-speed trains ».
Details on how this center would be built or where exactly it would be located are still scarce, but the main actors in the network state movement are well positioned in relation to the Trump administration to make it a reality.
Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, has been one of the main defenders of the networked state model for almost two decades. Five years ago, Pronomos Capital, an urban development company supported by Thiel, invested in Praxis, founded by Dryden Brown, a former hedge fund analyst and former student at New York University. Praxis’s goal was to build a new model city from scratch, attracting venture capital and important figures from the worlds of technology and finance. Brown, to give a brief idea of the movement’s political tendencies, would have told a speech writer that he had the idea for Praxis after seeing protesters breaking windows in SoHo after the murder of George Floyd by the police and, later, would have encouraged his team to read the work of the fascist Italian writer Julius Evola
Initially, Praxis aimed to build its shiny city in the Mediterranean, but quickly turned its eyes to the north. A week after Trump’s re-election to the presidency in 2024, Brown published on the social media platform X that he had just returned from Greenland on a reconnaissance trip to Praxis – which calls itself, without any trace of irony, as « the future of Western civilization ».
« Greenland is a true border, » Brown wrote. « It’s an inhospitable place. If humanity intends to build the International Space Station on Mars, we should train in Greenland. It can serve as a test field for terraforming experiments, financed by the exploration of its potential as an industrial and mining hub. »
Brown’s fantastic vision for the future of Greenland includes artificial rain in the summer, winter days artificially prolonged by the reflection of sunlight on frozen ground, a new sovereign fund and the « property » based on a « private letter state » represented by tokens. Brown suggested that it would be in the interest of the United States to support the creation of this networked state as part of a « New Monroe Doctrine », which would project the American « cultural, economic and political power ».
« Skepticism or declared hostility towards democracy is one of the most striking characteristics of the city of freedom movement. »
Thiel is just one of Brown’s notable supporters. Praxis also has the support of companies linked to Altman, Marc Andreessen and cryptocurrency pioneer Sam Bankman-Fried, who has fallen into disgrace, and may even have an ally within the government: Ken Howery, co-founder of PayPal and a venture capital company with Thiel, who has been working since October last year as US ambassador to Denmark. According to reports, his appointment was motivated by the expectation that he would lead the negotiations for the acquisition of Greenland. Elon Musk, another key figure in the foundation of PayPal and another defender of the networked state, shares the same enthusiasm.
Trump’s imperial belligerence cannot be underestimated. But it would be a mistake to ignore how these personal aspirations align with the interests of the technological right that entered his orbit in 2024 and helped him reach the presidency.
« Freedom » against democracy
The influence of the movement of networked states on the Trump administration’s approach to its increasingly belicish foreign policy is not limited to Greenland. It is no coincidence that this vision, driven by Praxis, of a libertarian city in Greenland resembles so much the Trump administration’s plan for Gaza. Both spaces exist in the imagination of the Trumpist administration and its Silicon Valley allies as a kind of nullius land – Gaza because it was so conveniently razed by the Israeli military after October 7, and Greenland because it is so sparsely populated.
The Trump administration’s first major plan for the future post-genocide of Gaza proposed to transform the Strip into « a Mediterranean center for manufacturing, trade, data and tourism, benefiting from its strategic location, access to markets (Europe, Gulf Cooperation Council [CCG], Asia), resources and a young workforce, all supported by Israeli investments in technology and the CCG ». Gaza is not being reimagined as a totally free and private state, but the Trump administration’s vision for its future was clearly shaped by the libertarian city movement: it does not include the right to self-determination or democracy for the Palestinian people, only the extraction of unregulated resources, free trade and submission to the interests of the United States, Israel and the Gulf countries.
Skepticism or declared hostility towards democracy is one of the most striking characteristics of the libertarian city movement. Already in 2009, Thiel wrote about his belief that freedom and democracy are not « compatible ». The goal, wrote Thiel in that essay for Cato Unbound magazine, was not to win popular support for his libertarian vision, but to escape completely from the political process: « As there are no more truly free places in our world, I suspect that the way to escape should involve some kind of new and hitherto unpublished process that leads us to some unknown country, » wrote Thiel, « and for this reason I have focused my efforts on new technologies that can create a new space for freedom ».
Thiel kept his word. He invested well over $1 million in an institute that ended up failing in its attempt to build a « libertarian utopia » on the islands of French Polynesia, before his company invested heavily in Praxis. Pronomos also invests in Próspera, a network state on the island of Roatán, Honduras, and in Itana, a developing network state in Nigeria.
There is a certain irony in the fact that the Trump administration seems so favorable to a project that ultimately aims to completely abandon nation-states. The government seems willing to use the full weight of the US state to serve the economic goals and colonial fantasies of the super-rich of Silicon Valley, even if these goals and fantasies are only partially aligned with the goals and ambitions of the United States itself. Van Jackson wrote that the geopolitics of the networked states movement is concerned with « instrumentalizing state power to challenge the state form, » a useful formulation to understand why Trump promised to build libertarian cities on federal lands within the US during his 2024 campaign.
The goal of the Trump administration, supported by its allies in Silicon Valley, is to confiscate land and resources and distribute profits directly to private capital. Traces of this approach are evident in the government’s ongoing incursion into Venezuela, where the United States confiscated and began selling the country’s oil reserves, depositing profits into a series of US-controlled bank accounts, including a main account located in Qatar. Trump also signed an agreement with Ukraine to have preferential access to mineral extraction in the country and a number of other natural resources in exchange for the continued support of the United States in its conflict with Russia.
Now, more than seven years after Lauder aroused Trump’s interest, Greenland has become the focus of the president. Greenlanders, who have never enjoyed full political independence, are in a difficult position: as the intensification of climate change puts their fishing industry and their ways of life at risk, it also makes the extraction of rare earth minerals and drinking water from Greenland a seductive possibility. For billionaires inside and outside high elective positions, Greenland is imagined as a border, a space that, in the words of Quinn Slobodian, exists to be « surrounded and converted into private property » and serve as a laboratory for dystopian experiences of libertarian governance.
The fate of the inhabitants of Greenland, the Americans, the liberal international order in ruins or the future health of the planet is not a major concern for Trump and his Silicon Valley supporters. They seem to care little about the current international order or the sovereignty of other nations in general, and are not interested in the fate of those who do not have millions of dollars in personal assets or initial capital. They only believe in enriching themselves and, it seems, in establishing a new type of state infrastructure to eliminate even the smallest restrictions on their power. If everything goes wrong, there is no reason to fear – the leaders of the movement can always take refuge in their air raid shelters.
source : jacobin
