Wanting Greenland: When the strong stop pretending

It is not often that Greenland is discussed in international media; most of the time, the Arctic island is mentioned in discussions about climate change. Greenland’s ice cap is melting rapidly, having increased global sea levels by about 2.5 inches, or 63 millimetres, since 2002. Now, Greenland is in the news because US President Donald Trump wishes to acquire it for the US. 

He has expressed this wish repeatedly. In August 2019, Trump discussed the matter with his advisers. Shortly after, Trump confirmed that he was considering an attempt to buy Greenland for strategic reasons, arguing that it would essentially be a large real estate deal. The reactions from politicians in Denmark and Greenland were unanimous: Greenland is not for sale. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen called the proposal “an absurd discussion”, which led Trump to cancel an upcoming state visit to Denmark. 

During his second term in office, Trump has followed up on his wish, this time focusing on the strategic need to own Greenland for reasons of “national security for the United States”. In addition, he dispatched his son, Donald Trump Jr., on an “unofficial visit” to Greenland in January 2025, where Donald Jr handed out MAGA caps and offered lunch to a small group of homeless people, and held press conferences with the media.  

A couple of months later, Vice-President JD Vance and his wife visited Greenland, ostensibly to watch a traditional dogsled race in Ilulissat that Usha Vance had supported with funding. However, protests in Greenland changed the plan to just a visit to the US Pituffik Space Base in northwest Greenland. Vance used the opportunity to give a speech where he said: “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland.” He added: “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this incredible, beautiful landmass.”

Trump stated his ambition to acquire Greenland in an official context when he directly threatened to use military action to take Greenland in a speech to a joint session of Congress in March 2025 stating: “I think we’re going to get it. One way or the other, we’re going to get it.” Needless to say, the threat by a US president, who is also the commander-in-chief, to attack the sovereign territory of a NATO ally, has obviously rattled political circles in Greenland and Denmark — in addition to several partners in the EU. 

Moreover, NATO’s Article 5 notes that an armed attack on any member of the military alliance “shall be considered an attack against them all”. Consequently, Mette Frederiksen has said that a US attack on a NATO ally would be the end of “everything”. However, the secretary-general of NATO, Mark Rutte, has refused to address the question of a US attack on Greenland, saying: “I never comment when there are discussions between Allies.”

At the World Economic Forum in Davos on 21 January, Trump said he would not seize Greenland by force, but pressed for immediate negotiations to bring the island under US control.

Immediately before Christmas in December 2025, Trump appointed Louisiana governor Jeff Landry as the US special envoy to Greenland. Landry has no experience in foreign policy, but believes that with “culinary diplomacy”, he can persuade people to make Greenland a part of the US. More recently, he has announced that he has been “invited by a Greenlander” to watch the dogsled competition in Ilulissat, but the Greenland Dog Sledding Association (KNQK) issued a statement that it was “wholly inappropriate”, adding it was conducting an investigation to find out who invited Landry. 

In an effort to raise the discussions on Greenland to a diplomatic level, the Danes requested a meeting on 14 January 2026 between Minister of Foreign Affairs Lars Løkke Rasmussen and Greenland Minister of Foreign Affairs Vivian Motzfeldt with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. In the meeting, where JD Vance also participated, and where a frustrated Rasmussen concluded that the partners “agreed that they disagreed”, but also succeeded in proposing a joint high-level working group to discuss various options. 

Before the meeting, Donald Trump issued a statement on social media where he argued that acquiring Greenland is essential for US national security and “anything less than that is unacceptable”. A couple of days later, Trump threatened to impose tariffs on countries that do not “go along” with his plan to annex Greenland. The US president said that 10% tariffs will be imposed from 1 February, followed by a 25% rate from 1 June on all goods from the eight European countries exporting to the US. “This Tariff will be due and payable until such time as a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland,” Trump added.

Evidently, the diplomatic meeting of 14 January did not sway the president; on the contrary, it appears to have further entrenched — or perhaps even encouraged — him to use whatever means to acquire Greenland. For now, after meeting Rutte at Davos, he has said that he will not be imposing the tariffs that were scheduled to go into effect on 1 February.

Denmark’s claim to Greenland as part of the Kingdom of Denmark can be traced to the arrival of Hans Egede, a Danish missionary, on the island in 1721. The island remained a Danish colony for more than 300 years, until the Danish constitution adopted in 1953 stipulated that Greenland was an integrated territory of the Kingdom. 

American ambitions to buy Greenland also have a long history. After the purchase of Alaska from the Russian empire by the US for a sum of US$7.2 million in 1867, officials under Secretary of State William Seward discussed acquiring Greenland as part of a broader push into the Arctic. This idea did not take off at the time, but resurfaced when the Danish West Indies (now the US Virgin Islands) were sold to the US for US$25 million worth of gold in 1917, due to the fear that Denmark was not able to defend the island against German occupation during World War I.

In 1941, when Germany occupied Denmark, Danish ambassador to the US Henrik Kauffmann signed an agreement granting America access to Greenland for military bases to protect it from German occupation. Subsequently, the US established several military bases in Greenland. Elder generations of Inuit people can still recall that American soldiers were welcome — not least because they offered American chewing gum to children as well as adults!

After the war, President Truman in 1946 secretly offered to purchase Greenland for US$100 million, which was declined by the Danish government. Instead of a sale, the US and Denmark concluded the 1951 Defense of Greenland Agreement to support NATO’s collective security. This agreement affirmed Danish sovereignty over Greenland, but also granted the US broad authority to pursue military objectives on Greenlandic territory.

During the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the US operated 16 military bases and 10,000 staff in Greenland. However, the US withdrew most of its military personnel and abandoned all but one of its bases after the end of the Cold War in 1991, leaving only around 200 staff at the Pituffik Space Base.

A 2004 amendment further authorised the US to establish and operate “defence areas” for NATO purposes, without prejudice to Danish sovereignty. In other words, the existing formal agreement from 2004 between Denmark and the US allows the Trump administration and the US Congress to establish all the military facilities and personnel that might be needed to monitor and defend Greenland against any force from Russia, China or whatever country that might harbour a wish to attack the island.

The events have seemingly escalated to a stage where it is difficult to predict — let alone rationally understand — why Trump wishes to abandon NATO allies and engage the US in another war. It is worth noting that he has already received two peace prizes, one awarded by the international football association FIFA and another as a gift from the Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado. 

The idea to attack Greenland is indeed unpopular wherever you look. A Reuters/Ipsos poll recently found that a mere 17% of Americans approved of Trump’s efforts to take over Greenland, and that substantial majorities of both Democrats and Republicans opposed using military force to annex the island. Only 4%, including just one in ten Republicans and almost no Democrats, said military force would be a “good idea”.

It is, of course, also quite unpopular in Greenland, where a survey conducted by Verian in January 2025 asked Greenlanders: “Do you want Greenland to leave Denmark and become part of the United States?” The results show that 85% of Greenlanders did not want to leave Denmark and become part of the US, while 6% wanted to become part of the US, and the remaining 9% were undecided.

They could also take heed of the fate that the US Virgin Islands has suffered since Denmark sold the island to the US in 1917. Even if the population of these islands are so-called “US citizens”, they are not allowed to vote in the US, and most of the population lives in poverty, relying on uncertain subsidies from Congress and a tourism industry owned by US corporations.  

With Trump in office, old certainties in geopolitics have been melting away. He has shown little concern with international law, treaties or organisations. In this sense, he is a true MAGA American — with a bare minimum of knowledge about the world outside the US, and even less interest in learning anything about it.

His latest action, placing a tariff on European countries that support Greenland sovereignty in the Kingdom of Denmark, illustrates the problem. It actually does not make sense for the US to single out countries that are members of the EU for a tariff, because the EU is a tariff union.

In contrast to the Trump administration, the EU takes the “Musketeer Oath” seriously, and a tariff on one country would be seen as a tariff on all. Moreover, the EU Lisbon Treaty in 2011 incorporated Article 42.7, which states: “If a Member State is the victim of armed aggression on its territory, the other Member States shall have towards it an obligation of aid and assistance by all the means in their power…”

So, we are back to the happy old days of gunboat diplomacy, when major powers ruled the waves. An attack on Greenland, the Prime Minister of Spain Pedro Sanchez recently argued, would probably be a death knell for NATO, and that would probably delight the Russian President Vladimir Putin. 

In a wider context, the absence of respect for international law and territorial sovereignty quickly removes any restraint that could have held back invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Ukraine and now Denmark. Obviously, a “reunification” of Taiwan by military means would also be perfectly fine.

Related: The Greenland myth: Why invasion talk misleads | From Caracas to Cambodia: How far will Washington go?