“We need Greenland for national security purposes,” United States President-elect Donald Trump said this week. His repeated talk of buying Greenland has been treated as a fun news story and a source of social media memes.

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But Trump seems serious. His son Donald Trump Jr. flew to Greenland for discussions on the purchase.

It is more feasible than it initially sounds, but the European Union hates the idea. “There is obviously no question that the European Union would let other nations of the world attack its sovereign borders, whoever they are,” French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said. “We are a strong continent.”

But the EU has little power to prevent it. Greenland left the EU long before the United Kingdom did. Denmark, which owns Greenland, agreed in 2009 to allow it to declare independence if the inhabitants vote for that in a referendum. They could hold a vote in April. Greenland only has 56,000 inhabitants. The U.S. could offer them a million dollars each and still spend a fraction of its annual budget on the purchase.

Nor would this be the first time the U.S. has tried to buy Greenland. In 1868, the U.S. almost made Denmark an offer for Greenland and Iceland. In 1946, the U.S. offered Denmark $100 million in gold bars for Greenland, calling it a “military necessity.” There was even talk of swapping a chunk of Alaska for it.

A Frozen Sea Gate

Greenland, Iceland and other territories in the North Atlantic are critical for patrolling the crucial sea-lane connecting North America and Europe. Yet they are also remote, they lack the resources to sustain large armies, and they try to stay out of fights. These factors have led to all kinds of crazy ideas over the years.

Even before the U.S. entered World War ii, it invaded Greenland—kind of. Fifteen volunteers were discharged from the U.S. Coast Guard and sent in as “security guards” for Greenland’s cryolite mine, America’s only source of a mineral needed to manufacture aluminum. The U.S. Navy supplied them with naval artillery, machine guns and ammunition.

Once the U.S. entered the war, Greenland became a de facto American protectorate. Around 10,000 planes landed at the Narsarsuaq Air Base on the southern tip of Greenland. It remained in U.S. hands at the start of the Cold War for jets flying between Europe and America. Operating a base so far north led to some unique challenges. A small tugboat had to shift icebergs out of the flight path of the jets.

The Nazis were also active in the area. Their main need was weather information. Since the prevailing wind was from west to east, weather stations in the North Atlantic could help predict conditions in Europe. The Nazis tried having occupied Norway send boats to Greenland to set up weather stations. In 1943, they even invaded Labrador—now part of Canada.

A German submarine set up a weather station and meticulously disguised it as local, even scattering American cigarette packets around the place. Equipment labeled “Canadian Meteor Service” instead of “Weather Service” nearly gave the game away. But the deception worked for nearly 40 years. The base was only rediscovered when a German historian came across some papers and got in touch with Canadian officials.

The Nazis also tried setting up a base in Franz Josef Land, a Russian archipelago northeast of Svalbard. The base was abandoned after everyone got sick from eating raw polar bear meat.

The giuk Gap (Greenland-Iceland-UK) was an important feature in World War ii. To reach the Atlantic, German ships had to sail through the English Channel, the open sea between the UK and Iceland or between Iceland and Greenland.

A Nuclear Front Line

That giuk Gap took on even more importance during the Cold War. Nick Childs of the International Institute for Strategic Studies said this northern flank was a “theater that came to be seen by both sides as second only in importance to the European Central Front.” The U.S. set up a network of censors to track Russian submarines entering the Atlantic.

Greenland also stands on a direct air route from the U.S. to Russia. This led to the most tragic part of this history.

In 1968, a B-52 bomber crashed near Thule Air Base in Greenland, carrying nuclear bombs. The conventional explosives on board detonated. Thankfully, the nuclear bombs didn’t—but the explosion leaked nuclear material over the area. It was a major scandal, as Greenland was supposedly a nuclear-free zone.

In reality, Greenland was almost a front line in any nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia. Nuclear missiles fired between the two could fly over Greenland. So the U.S. maintains Pituffik Space Base, the modern name of Thule Air Base, home to a Baltic missile early warning system and the world’s most northerly deepwater port.

In recent years, Greenland has only become more important. Shipping lanes along Russia’s northern coast heading east and Canada’s northern coast heading west are become more viable. Russia dominates these lands with 54 icebreakers, including seven nuclear ones. Finland, with 10, takes second place in the icebreaker race. The U.S. has only five, none of which are nuclear. Its only really heavy icebreaker, the uscgc Polar Star, is 50 years old.

“The highways of the Arctic are icebreakers,” said U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan several years ago. “Russia has superhighways, and we have dirt roads with potholes.”

The Arctic could also have a wealth of natural resources. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates the Arctic holds 30 percent of the undiscovered natural gas in the world and 13 percent of its oil. Greenland could have major oil reserves and is estimated to have 38 million tons of rare earth deposits.

These raw materials are likely a nice bonus rather than the main reason Trump is interested in the island. Arizona has just under 1 billion tons of rare earth deposits. The trouble is getting them out of the ground without polluting the surrounding area. China has corner on the market because it doesn’t care about poisoning the locals, so it can process them much more cheaply than anyone else—not because rare earths are actually that rare.

A Prophesied Blessing

Since so much “stuff” travels via the ocean, the most dominant, prosperous empires have controlled vital naval choke points and bases—sea gates.

We live in an era of “extreme interdependence,” writes Rose George in her book Ninety Percent of Everything. “Hardly any nation is now self-sufficient.” Ninety percent of the world’s trade travels by ocean.

Greenland is an important station for the North Atlantic, a potential northwest passage, and is useful for monitoring the air and orbit over the poles.

Britain and America dominated the world through these bases. Over the last few decades, they’ve been handing them back—with the UK rushing to give away the vital Diego Garcia military base before Trump returns to office.

When America handed over the Panama Canal in 1999, Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry saw it as a sign of America’s broken will. “Now ‘bolder and stronger peoples will pass us by, and will win for themselves the domination of the world’—because of America’s weakness!” he wrote, quoting President Theodore Roosevelt.

America’s domination of these sea gates was prophesied in your Bible. So was its weak surrender. In Genesis 22:16-18 and Genesis 24:60, Abraham’s descendants were promised control of “the gate of [their] enemies.”

“A gate is a narrow passage of entrance or exit,” wrote Herbert W. Armstrong in The United States and Britain in Prophecy. “When speaking nationally, a ‘gate’ would be such a pass as the Panama Canal, the Suez Canal, the Strait of Gibraltar.” As he proved in that book, Britain and America descend from Abraham. Their ownership of these vital sea gates fulfilled prophecy.

But will America gain more sea gates in regaining the Panama Canal and taking Greenland? Whether America can buy—and more importantly, keep—these gates doesn’t come down to cost or military power. Abraham was given these promises because he feared God. President Roosevelt, who presided over the construction of the Panama Canal, feared God. “If we want to be great, we’ll only be great through God and fearing Him,” Mr. Flurry said in a recent Key of David program.

“Maybe President Donald Trump, when he gets in office and is inaugurated, he has the power to do a lot of things. And there will be more miracles that come if we learn a lesson in that process,” he said. “God wants to teach us how to fear God and not have to be punished for our sins.”

If America gets back to God, God will bless it with sea gates that can lead to prosperity and security. Without God, any prosperity and security will not last.

There is an incredible vision that points to the God behind the control over sea gates, which Mr. Flurry expounds on in “Bible Prophecy Reveals How We Won and Lost the Panama Canal.”