Trump’s Greenland Threats and the Plunder of the Arctic

Not surprisingly, Trump’s imperial designs on the country have not been warmly received there. In December 2024, before taking office, he beganmusing about his desire to acquire Greenland, a strategic landmass that has been at the center of U.S. policy in the Arctic since World War II. This proclamation was followed by a semiofficial visit to the island by Don Jr., during which YouTube influencers distributed $100 bills to random people in the capital, Nuuk. At the State of the Union address, Trump reiterated his intent to “get” Greenland to make its people rich and most of all to advance the cause of “international world security,” whatever that is. In March, JD Vance, along with his wife, Usha, and then-national security adviser Mike Waltz, traveledto the U.S. military base in far northwestern Greenland. Earlier plans to attend a dog sled race and visit some of the tourist sites in Nuuk were abandoned after it became clear that residents were planning to snub the vice president.

And in the wake of the CIA’s ousting of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, Trump, his top aide Stephen Miller, and Vance have all doubled down on threats to use force to take over Greenland. Denmark’s prime minister has said any such action would spell the end of NATO, and Greenland’s leaders have flatly refused to entertain the possibility of becoming a vassal of the United States. In Trump’s eyes, according to reporting by Susan Glasser and Peter Baker, Greenland is a nice chunk of real estate with a lot of minerals and he’d like to add it to his portfolio.

As Dodds and Bennett make clear, the fight for the future of the Arctic will be waged not only in Moscow and D.C., but also in Nuuk, Utqiagvik, Karasjok, and beyond. Greenland may only have a population of 56,000, but they’ve been waiting 300 years for independence. And if the U.S. hope was to drive a wedge between Greenland and Denmark, perhaps accelerating the push for independence, it seems to have failed. If anything, the two countries have forged closer ties since Trump started making noise about annexing the island. Which leaves us facing the very real possibility that Trump, who last Friday in a meeting in the White House with oil executives to discuss Venezuela said the U.S. would take Greenland “whether they like it or not,” will do the unthinkable.