“One way or the other, we’re going to get it,” President Donald Trump says of Greenland, the autonomous territory of Denmark that he covets for its mineral wealth and strategic position in the Arctic Circle.
He told a British broadcaster over the weekend that he sees “a good possibility that we could do it without military force.”
But if Greenlanders or the Kingdom of Denmark don’t understand the imperative of U.S. ownership of their land for the sake of world peace and security, Trump warns, he may have to resort to hostile means. “I don’t take anything off the table,” he said in the Sky News interview also aired by NBC.
The increasingly aggressive approach of the Trump White House to acquiring the world’s biggest island has so offended Greenlanders and Danes that no one in the government or business communities wants anything to do with the United States.
Vice President J.D. Vance, Trump’s bullying emissary in the campaign to disparage European allies, was forced to pare down his unwelcome visit to Greenland on Friday to a three-hour stopover at the Pituffik Space Base, the only U.S. military presence in Greenland. Even in the limited time he had to state the administration’s aspirations for annexing the territory, he managed to add more insult to the injury inflicted on European allies by calling them freeloaders at the Munich Security Conference in February and during a sensitive intelligence briefing on an unsecured chat app last month.
“We need to wake up from a failed, 40-year consensus that said that we could ignore the encroachment of powerful countries as they expand their ambitions,” Vance told a few dozen U.S. troops at the military outpost previously known as Thule Air Base. About 150 U.S. personnel are stationed at Pituffik, the last vestige of an American presence on the island that numbered 16 installations during the early years of the Cold War.
Vance used the remote stage of Pituffik to lay out how the United States expects to acquire Greenland: First, the already autonomous island that is home to only 56,000 people, mostly indigenous, should vote for independence from Denmark. Then Greenland’s leaders could sign up to be a new U.S. territory.
That undiplomatic proposal and Trump’s vow to “get” Greenland sparked immediate rejection by territorial Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen.
“Let me be clear,” Nielsen said as soon as Vance departed the territory on Friday, “the United States will not get that. We do not belong to others. We decide our own future.”
Nielsen’s victory in last month’s election was seen as a reflection of Greenlanders’ newfound hesitance to move too fast toward full independence from Copenhagen. While Denmark is a founding member of the NATO alliance, an independent Greenland would not be protected by the key alliance commitment to come to the defense of any member state under attack. The autonomous territory also depends on the Danish government for an annual subsidy of about $1 billion, or nearly 20% of its budget.
One of Nielsen’s first acts after his election victory was to announce a new coalition committed to fighting against Trump administration pressure to cede sovereign territory or natural resources to the United States.
Danish Foreign Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen responded with the polite language of Scandinavian diplomats to Vance’s brusque insinuation that Denmark has neglected Greenland, allowing China to expand into the region to gain control of its resources and new shipping lanes emerging as global warming melts the Arctic icecap.
“Many accusations and many allegations have been made. And of course we are open to criticism,” Rasmussen said, speaking in English after Vance’s visit and Trump’s claim to be keeping open the option of a U.S. invasion to take Greenland. “But let me be completely honest: We do not appreciate the tone in which it is being delivered. This is not how you speak to your close allies. And I still consider Denmark and the United States to be close allies.”
Vance made no mention of Russia’s domination of the Arctic region by virtue of its vast coastline encircling 53% of the North Pole waters. Putin remarked last week that he wasn’t concerned about Trump’s aspirations to acquire Greenland, a worrisome concession by a dictator who gives away nothing without a quid pro quo.
Former Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt pointed out in an interview on CNN on Sunday that if the Trump administration wants to enhance international security, “there’s nothing stopping the Americans from getting more engaged militarily in Greenland, having more bases, if that’s what they want.”
“There is a treaty from 1951 where it is very clear that the Americans have huge access to Greenland,” Thorning-Schmidt said, noting the “irony” of the White House accusation of poor Danish stewardship of Greenland when the United States has abandoned all but one, Pituffik, of the U.S. bases in Greenland after World War II.
On the chastising of Denmark by Vance during his visit to Pituffik, Thorning-Schmidt made clear that Danes were offended.
“I must say that we are taken aback by the language used by the vice president on Friday,” she remarked. “First of all, this whole talk about Denmark not being a good ally, that is simply not true. And it is a little bit insulting, to be honest, that we have stood side by side with America for decades.”
Trump apparently learned nothing from his failed attempt to bully Canada into joining the United States or to reclaim ownership of the Panama Canal with the false accusation that the Panamanian government had allowed China to take control the vital shipping lanes.
His threats toward American neighbors to the north shook up Canada’s election-year politics. Partisan squabbling took a back seat to patriotism as Canadians united in fierce resistance to being consumed by Trump’s imperialist aims to acquire strategically important foreign territory. Trump imposed punitive tariffs on Canadian imports after Ottawa spurned its offer-you-can’t-refuse proposal of statehood, spurring retaliatory levies on most Canadian products and components, many of them essential to U.S. manufacturing due to insufficient supplies available from U.S. domestic production.
While Trump’s beef with Canada is primarily economic, aimed at reducing the United States’ $63 billion trade deficit with Ottawa, his argument for U.S. acquisition of Greenland is the claimed need for U.S. governance of the territory to counter Russian and Chinese influence in the Arctic.
Foreign policy experts have roundly denounced the imperialist intentions expressed by Trump, Vance, and unelected presidential surrogate Elon Musk toward Greenland and by extension Denmark. Even those who share the opinion that the United States needs to expand its presence in the Arctic region for national security purposes have been critical of the disrespectful manner with which the current White House has been making overtures for territory from allied countries.
Retired Admiral James Stavridis, a former NATO supreme allied commander, appeared on multiple Sunday talk shows to praise the objective of increasing the U.S. presence in the Arctic but urged a more diplomatic and collaborative way of going about it.
Other analysts put it more bluntly.
“The American imperialism directed towards Denmark and Canada is not just morally wrong. It is strategically disastrous,” Timothy Snyder, a Yale University history professor and respected analyst of European relations, wrote in a scathing opinion published by The Guardian on Monday.
“Within the atmosphere of friendship that has prevailed the last 80 years, all of the mineral resources of Canada and Greenland can be traded for on good terms, or for that matter explored by American companies. The only way to put all of this easy access in doubt was to follow the course that Musk-Trump have chosen: trade wars with Canada and Europe, and the threat of actual wars and annexations. Musk and Trump are creating the bloodily moronic situation in which the U.S. will have to fight wars to get the things that, just a few weeks ago, were there for the asking.”
Snyder castigated Vance for a performative visit to Pituffik after Greenlanders threatened to protest an earlier planned “cultural” visit to Nuuk, the territorial capital, by the vice president’s wife, Usha Vance. Observing that Vance never left the base nor did he meet with a single Greenlander on his first-ever visit to the island, Snyder summed up the trip as one in which “nothing was experienced, nothing was learned, nothing sensible was said.”
Perhaps, Greenland should sign a mutual defense treaty with Canada. It would be a good move: the US is 0-2-1 in our military conflicts with Canada. The invasions during our revolution & the War of 1812 finished badly for the US but I think the Pig War was a tie.