Trump’s comments about purchasing the island sent shock waves through the Danish territory, and enlivened its independence movement.

Sisimiut, the second-largest city in Greenland.

Photograph by Daniel Dorsa

When President Donald Trump addressed a joint session of Congress last week, people in Greenland listened very closely. Greenland, a semi-autonomous territory of Denmark, is holding a general election on March 11th, and Trump’s interest in annexing or purchasing the Arctic island has shaped the campaign, forcing politicians to take a position on whether they support a split from Denmark. Concerns about foreign interference loom large: last month, the Danish national-security-and-intelligence service warned of increased misinformation, especially on social media, with fake profiles of Danish and Greenlandic politicians polarizing the debate. “We are in the midst of a serious time,” Greenland’s Prime Minister, Múte B. Egede, wrote in a Facebook post, announcing the March election. “A time we have never experienced in our country.”

In 2019, when Trump first floated the idea of purchasing Greenland, which has almost fifty-seven thousand residents, the Danish Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, described the concept as “absurd.” “Thankfully, the time where you buy and sell other countries and populations is over,” she said. And yet, in the years since, Trump has only doubled down on his interest in the island.

Trump wants Greenland for its vast untapped mineral resources and geostrategic importance. Climate change has made mining for rare-earth deposits possible, and the receding Arctic ice will soon make new shipping routes available. And then there is national security. Sino-Russian military collaboration in the Arctic was a concern in Washington even before Trump took office. An existing American military base, seven hundred and fifty miles north of the Arctic circle, offers what the U.S. military refers to as a “top of the world” vantage point from which to support missile defense, space surveillance, and satellite command. Full control of Greenland would allow Washington to keep Russia and China out.

In hopes of forcing a sale, Trump has threatened to place tariffs on Denmark, which is home to a number of companies with big business in the U.S., such as the pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, which makes Wegovy and Ozempic. And, should Denmark be unwilling to strike some sort of deal, Trump has suggested that the U.S. might even take Greenland by force. “One way or the other, we’re going to get it,” he said last week, in his address to Congress.

Even if the Danes did want to sell Greenland, it is hard to see how they could. Although Greenland is part of rigsfællesskabet, the Danish Realm, a 2009 law recognized the island’s right to self-governance. No deal would be possible without the buy-in of Greenland’s parliament, the Inatsisartut. After Trump’s address, Egede, who is running for reëlection as part of the democratic socialist Inuit Ataqatigiit party, posted a response on Facebook. “Kalaallit Nunaat is ours,” he wrote. (“Kalaallit Nunaat” is “land of the Greenlanders” in Greenlandic.) “We don’t want to be Americans, nor Danes; We are Kalaallit. The Americans and their leader must understand that. We are not for sale and cannot simply be taken. Our future will be decided by us in Greenland.”

Whether Trump understands this is beside the point. In pressing the issue, he has changed the terms of the debate in ways that could ultimately work in his favor. Greenland is free to call a referendum on independence at any time, but under Danish law, such a change in status would require parliamentary approval. There is a nascent independence movement in Greenland, and Trump’s overtures have fuelled it. People on the island are beginning to imagine being supported by a nation other than Denmark. During his speech, Trump took a moment to address the people of Greenland directly. “We strongly support your right to determine your own future,” he said. “And if you choose, we welcome you into the United States of America.” Pele Broberg, the chairman of Greenland’s pro-independence Naleraq party and an outspoken member of the parliament, told me that Trump’s comments this year have sent shockwaves through the political system. “It is extremely helpful,” he said. “It short-circuits all the usual narratives of why we can’t become independent.”

In 1721, Greenland officially became a Danish colony when the Danish-Norwegian Lutheran pastor Hans Egede arrived in present-day Nuuk, where he founded a mission and a trading company, paving the way for the Danish government to assume a full trade monopoly with Greenland. By 1953, as decolonization swept the world, the Danish government, loath to give up ninety-eight per cent of its landmass, made Greenland a semi-autonomous part of its kingdom but retained de-facto control. Greenland has a tiny population spread across a massive ice-covered territory with few roads and would not be able to support itself economically except with the help of another power. “The argument in Denmark is the classical colonial argument—these people can’t take care of themselves, so we have to,” Jacques Hartmann, a professor of international law who was born in Denmark and teaches at the University of Dundee, in Scotland, told me. Danes often invoke the roughly five hundred million dollars in annual subsidies that make up about half of Greenland’s budget. Less mentioned in the Danish debate are the historical benefits Denmark has reaped from the relationship, including geostrategic influence and revenues from fishing and mining.

As it is, Copenhagen effectively decides on foreign policy and defense, and exerts a strong influence on matters of social welfare, trade, and shipping in Greenland. Many Greenlanders would describe the relationship between Greenland and Denmark as one rife with abuse and neglect. During the nineteen-sixties and seventies, Danish doctors inserted intrauterine devices in thousands of Inuit girls and women, often without their consent, allegedly to control Greenland’s birth rate—an effort that Prime Minister Egede has described as an act of genocide. (A final report by the Danish government is due later this year.) Demonstrators in Nuuk and Copenhagen have protested against the cultural bias of psychometric examinations that evaluate “parenting competency”—tests mandated by the Danish government. Authorities more frequently remove children from Greenlandic families than from Danish ones. This family-separation controversy echoes a failed social experiment from the nineteen-fifties in which the Danish government forcibly removed Inuit children from their homes and sent them to Denmark for reëducation. The Danish government didn’t apologize until 2020, by which point few of the children were still alive. “The relationship between Greenland and Denmark is at an all-time low,” Masaana Egede, the editor-in-chief of Sermitsiaq, Greenland’s leading paper, told me.

In the wake of Trump’s comments, and in the lead-up to Greenland’s election, Frederiksen, the Danish Prime Minister, has been engaged in a diplomatic tap dance to insure a common front with Naalakkersuisut, the government in Nuuk. Solutions to several long-standing Greenlandic grievances have suddenly, miraculously, been found. Greenland will now get to choose the Arctic Ambassador—the senior official to represent Denmark in Arctic affairs—with approval from Copenhagen, and the psychometric test to evaluate whether children should be taken from their homes will be scrapped. Tida Ravn, an activist and writer in Nuuk, told me that the Danish authorities are afraid Greenland will choose another country to work with. “This is the time of big political concessions,” she said.

The United States has proposed buying Greenland before. During a moment of feverish American territorial expansion, President Andrew Jackson suggested buying the island in 1832. In 1916, Denmark demanded American recognition of full Danish sovereignty over Greenland as part of the sale of the Danish West Indies to the U.S. When the American explorer Robert E. Peary learned about Denmark’s demand, he began a media campaign making the case that Greenland belonged to the United States under the Monroe Doctrine.

Since the Second World War, the United States has exercised de-facto military control over Greenland, thanks to the maverick diplomat Henrik Kauffmann, who, as Denmark’s envoy to Washington in 1941, granted the U.S. control over its security. Kauffmann, a family friend of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s, declared he would no longer receive instructions from Copenhagen after the German occupation but instead represent what was referred to as Free Denmark. After taking control of Greenland, Roosevelt instructed the Army Corps of Engineers to construct airstrips at the southern tip of Greenland—a feat that everyone had thought was impossible, Bo Lidegaard, a Danish historian and former diplomat, told me. Greenland had resources the Allies needed, such as cryolite, a mineral vital for the production of aluminum used to build fighter planes. The Ivittuut mine, in southwestern Greenland, held the world’s largest reserve. The island also served as a refuelling station for American planes on bombing sorties in Europe, and meteorological installations provided crucial weather information for warfare, not the least for the launch of D Day, all of which meant the American bases in Greenland played a crucial part in the outcome of the Second World War. “After the war, consecutive Danish governments asked the Americans to leave in various ways,” Lidegaard said. “Every time the Danish government pressed the issue, the Americans responded by asking the price for buying Greenland.” When the Truman Administration suggested buying Greenland for a hundred million dollars in gold, the Danish government rejected the proposal.

Kauffmann’s deal was later renegotiated between Copenhagen and Washington. The new agreement, which allowed for a continued U.S. military presence in Greenland, was irrevocable. (The Danes could not end it unilaterally.) The Americans began building a major new base—the Thule Air Base—in the high north, with the Danish government forcibly relocating more than a hundred members of the Indigenous population to make way for construction. The Thule base became a cornerstone of American missile defense with the completion of a ballistic-missile early-warning station in 1961, and by making strategic targets in the Soviet Union reachable to American bombers. It also became a spearhead for Project Iceworm, a top-secret U.S. Army program to build a network of nuclear-missile launch sites under the Greenland ice sheet. As cover, the Army constructed Camp Century, a heavily publicized military base described in an Army propaganda film as “the city under ice,” ostensibly to study geomagnetism, seismology, meteorology, climatology, and glaciology. “It was a way to operate under the ice but also a way to test the stability of the ice,” Ron Doel, an associate professor of history at Florida State University and a co-editor of “Exploring Greenland: Cold War Science and Technology on Ice,” told me. “It turned out that the ice is shifting rapidly, so the tunnels collapsed. It was not practical.” (Last year, NASA scientists conducting aerial surveys of the ice uncovered the site of the secret nuclear-missile tunnels.)

In 1968, an American B-52G Stratofortress bomber, carrying four hydrogen bombs, crashed onto the sea ice near Thule after a crew member started a fire by stuffing seat cushions in front of a heating vent. This crash created a radioactive mess and a diplomatic crisis: it revealed that the United States was flying planes carrying nuclear bombs over Greenland, in contravention of Denmark’s public prohibition of nuclear weapons in Denmark and its territories. The Thule base, known today as the Pituffik Space Base, is still in operation. Operated by the 821st Space Base Group, it provides space awareness and advanced missile-detection capabilities.

Despite America’s military presence on the island, the idea of the U.S. taking Greenland by force is unrealistic. “There’s a basic lack of understanding of what kind of land Greenland is,” Ulrik Pram Gad, a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies, who specializes in Arctic identity, diplomacy, and security, told me. “It’s a colossal piece of ice with very rocky terrain around it, with no roads and scattered settlements. It’s not a territory that you can have or take or invade. That would just be silly.”

Perhaps this is why Trump seems instead to have landed on a strategy of trying to charm Greenlanders into voting for independence from Denmark. An independent Greenland could then choose to join the United States in some fashion. Two weeks before his second Inauguration, Trump sent his son Donald, Jr., to Nuuk, as an emissary of sorts. “We’re going to treat you well,” the President promised curious residents over the phone, calling into an event that his son was hosting at the Hotel Hans Egede. Some of the attendees were wearing Trump gear; others had either come for the spectacle of seeing the President’s son or were lured in by the promise of a free lunch at the upscale hotel. The Danish broadcaster DR later reported that several of the MAGA-hat-wearing diners visible in a video shared by Trump, Jr., on X were well-known homeless people, often seen on the street outside a supermarket opposite the hotel. Sharing a video of his son’s arrival on Truth Social, the incoming President wrote, “This is a deal that must happen. MAGA. MAKE GREENLAND GREAT AGAIN!”

Trump may succeed in the first part of his mission: prompting an independence vote in Greenland. Most parties in Greenland want independence, although they disagree on the question of when. Siumut, a center-left party which leads Greenland alongside Inuit Ataqatigiit, in the island’s two-party government coalition, wants a national vote on independence sometime after the general election. Trump’s bombast and the laughter among Republican lawmakers when he mentioned the U.S. acquisition of Greenland during his recent speech, however, have not been well received. “It confirms that there is no respect for us,” Erik Jensen, Siumut’s leader, told Sermitsiaq last week. “We have shown respect and wanted to coöperate with them, but their behavior is very worrying.”

After centuries of foreign domination, Greenland stands at a crossroads, buffeted by geopolitical winds largely beyond its control. A valuation by the Times, in January, estimated a price tag between $12.5 billion and $77 billion, although the newspaper didn’t explain who would actually sell Greenland to America. Axios, meanwhile, reported that the Danish government had privately communicated to the Trump team its willingness to discuss heightening security in Greenland or strengthening the U.S. military presence on the island. It is not yet public whether Greenland’s government was copied on the diplomatic cables. “Seen from Washington, the idea of an independent Greenland, unprotected by the U.S. or Denmark, is not acceptable,” Lidegaard, the Danish historian, said. He believes that, given America’s long-standing security interests in the region, full independence for Greenland is a chimera. Besides, he said, the ground has not yet been laid for a self-sufficient economy. Masaana Egede, Sermitsiaq’s editor-in-chief, was optimistic that the conversation between Copenhagen and Nuuk will continue to progress. “A lot of the talk in Denmark is about money and what they get out of Greenland,” he said. “In Greenland, it’s a conversation about equality.” ♦