By: Jason Ostedder

When President Donald Trump first floated the notion of the United States purchasing Greenland in the summer of 2018, the reaction across much of the global media spectrum oscillated between incredulity and mockery. Commentators derided the proposal as an anachronistic fantasy — a vestige of 19th-century imperialism resurfacing in the digital age. Yet as Israel National News reported on Thursday, the Greenland gambit was never the spontaneous eccentricity it was portrayed to be. Rather, it was the culmination of a meticulously nurtured strategic vision, seeded by one of Trump’s closest confidants: billionaire businessman and philanthropist Ronald Lauder.

Now, fresh reporting from the British newspaper The Guardian — examined in depth by Israel National News — reveals the extent to which Lauder was not merely an advocate but the prime architect of the Greenland initiative, urging the former president to reconsider the Arctic island not as a curiosity, but as a linchpin in America’s 21st-century geopolitical posture.

Ronald Lauder is no stranger to political power corridors. An heir to the Estée Lauder cosmetics empire, he is also a longstanding donor to the Republican Party, a former U.S. ambassador to Austria, and a confidant of Trump stretching back more than six decades. Israel National News has often chronicled Lauder’s unique dual identity — at once a titan of industry and a behind-the-scenes policy influencer whose interests range from Holocaust restitution to transatlantic security architecture.

According to The Guardian report, Lauder’s campaign to bring Greenland to Trump’s attention intensified shortly after Trump entered the White House. Former National Security Adviser John Bolton recalled that Trump summoned him to the Oval Office and announced, with characteristic bluntness: “A prominent businessman suggested that the United States buy Greenland.” Bolton would later learn that the businessman in question was Lauder, whose lobbying had transformed a private fascination into an item on the presidential agenda.

The Israel National News report noted that Lauder’s intervention did not emerge in a vacuum. As early as 2016, he had donated generously to Trump’s fundraising efforts and later remarked publicly: “I am helping Trump with some of the most complex diplomatic challenges imaginable.” Greenland, it seems, was foremost among them.

What distinguishes Lauder’s role is that his commitment went far beyond mere advisory chatter. The Guardian reported that following his pitch to Trump, Lauder began quietly acquiring business holdings in Greenland — a move interpreted by analysts as both a vote of confidence in the region’s latent potential and a personal investment in advancing the island’s strategic relevance.

Greenland, though politically tethered to Denmark, occupies a geographical position of extraordinary significance. Straddling the Arctic Circle, it is perched astride emerging polar shipping routes that are becoming increasingly viable as ice caps recede. Moreover, beneath its forbidding glaciers lies a cache of rare-earth minerals indispensable to modern economies — from artificial intelligence to advanced missile systems.

In an op-ed published last year in the New York Post, Lauder crystallized the rationale that Israel National News has since highlighted as the intellectual backbone of the Greenland initiative: “Trump’s Greenland concept was never absurd — it was strategic.” He elaborated that “beneath its ice and rock lies a treasure trove of rare-earth elements essential for AI, advanced weaponry, and modern technology.”

This was not the rhetoric of a speculative tycoon, as was observed in the Israel National News report, but the language of a strategist attuned to the tectonic shifts reshaping global power.

The renewed focus on Greenland is emblematic of a broader transformation underway in international relations. As Israel National News has detailed in multiple analytical features, the Arctic is no longer a frozen backwater but the epicenter of great-power competition. Russia has militarized its northern coastline, China has branded itself a “near-Arctic state,” and NATO allies are scrambling to update their polar doctrines.

Lauder, in his New York Post essay, captured this evolving reality with disarming clarity: “As ice recedes, new maritime routes are emerging, reshaping global trade and security.” He further emphasized that Greenland now sits at “the epicenter of great-power competition,” adding that he has “worked closely with Greenland’s business and government leaders for years to develop strategic investments there.”

Israel National News reported that these relationships were instrumental in reframing Greenland not merely as a Danish territory but as a pivot point in the West’s effort to contain adversarial influence in the High North.

Trump’s willingness to entertain the Greenland purchase was consistent with his transactional approach to diplomacy — a style that Israel National News has characterized as occasionally prescient. The proposal may have been ridiculed at the time, but subsequent developments have vindicated many of its underlying premises. The Biden administration, for instance, had expanded U.S. consular presence in Nuuk and invested heavily in Arctic security initiatives — tacit acknowledgments that Greenland’s strategic value can no longer be ignored.

Yet, as the Israel National News report pointed out, Trump’s readiness to broach the subject publicly was also his undoing. Denmark reacted with diplomatic fury, labeling the idea “absurd,” while Greenlandic leaders expressed offense at being discussed as commodities. The resulting backlash forced Trump to shelve the initiative, but the seeds planted by Lauder continue to bear fruit in Washington’s evolving Arctic doctrine.

If history ultimately credits the United States with reasserting its influence in the Arctic, Ronald Lauder’s role may be viewed as catalytic. The Israel National News report emphasized that Lauder’s vision extended beyond real estate acquisition or mineral exploitation. It was about anchoring American power in a region poised to define the next century’s geopolitical landscape.

In this sense, the Greenland episode offers a revealing case study of how informal networks and private citizens can shape national policy in ways that outlast the headlines. Lauder’s advocacy was neither bombastic nor performative; it was methodical, grounded in data, and informed by a long-term perspective often absent from electoral cycles.

Although the United States did not purchase Greenland, the concept itself has entered the strategic bloodstream of American foreign policy. Israel National News reported that policymakers across party lines now acknowledge the island’s pivotal role in countering Russian and Chinese ambitions, securing rare-earth supply chains, and safeguarding trans-Arctic commerce.

What once seemed quixotic now appears prophetic.

The tale of Ronald Lauder and Donald Trump’s Greenland gambit is, at its core, a story about the collision of vision and ridicule, ambition and tradition. It is also a reminder that in geopolitics, ideas often mature long after their originators have been dismissed.

In the frozen silence of Greenland’s ice fields, far from the noise of cable news studios and diplomatic summits, the strategic future of the Arctic continues to take shape — guided, in no small measure, by the quiet persistence of a billionaire who saw the world’s next battleground beneath a mantle of snow