Gracelyn Baskaran

speaker

85 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 8 Jan

Gracelyn Baskaran’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.

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Prof G Markets · Why Trump Wants Greenland · 8 Jan 2026 podcast

Thanks so much for having me.

President Trump's focus on Greenland is actually aligned with his broader approach to foreign policy.

What we saw starting January last year was actually a realignment of our foreign policy very closely tied to critical minerals.

In a way, it feels a bit like we're playing a real-life game of Settlers of Catan.

So if you think about foreign policy announcements on Ukraine, Greenland, Democratic Republic of Congo, Argentina, minerals has featured in every one of those discussions.

And a lot of this hinges on the fact that we are really contending with the fact that China has a dominance on the critical minerals that we need for our national economic and energy security.

So, you know, we don't have all of those geological reserves here at home necessarily.

So we're looking to go out and secure those resources from other places.

And Greenland has some really good deposits.

So the biggest mineral, I mean, you know, here in the U.S., we have a very long list of critical minerals.

We have 60 of them.

But the one that we are most vulnerable and that has kind of dominated political and market rhetoric over the last year are something that we call rare earths.

And rare earths are a group of 17 minerals.

And the funny thing, they're not actually rare.

They're found everywhere.

Right.

But it's kind of hard to find them in commercially dense quantities.

So we need rare earths.

The number one thing we think about is we need them for every form of defense technology because they go into the permanent magnets that are used in our missiles, lasers, tanks, fighter jets, submarines.

And last year in April, China, which actually had a pretty big dominance on these rare earths and particularly something we call heavy rare earths, which just means that they have a higher atomic weight.

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