“It’s cold as shit here,” announced JD Vance as he strode into the mess hall at the Pituffik space base in northern Greenland on 28 March. “Nobody told me.” Thus began the US vice-president’s historic visit to the remote military facility, accompanied by the national security adviser Mike Waltz and energy secretary Chris Wright – the highest-ranking US delegation ever to visit the Arctic territory – where outside the temperature was -19°C and a large sign welcomed visitors to “the top of the world”.
Their presumed mission was to advance Donald Trump’s repeatedly stated goal to “get” Greenland, which he has claimed the United States needs “for national security” and “international world security”, and vowed to “go as far as we have to go” to bring it under US control. Beneath the familiar Trumpian bluster, there is a serious point about the emerging great-power contest between the US, Russia, and China in a region that is being transformed by climate change. But Trump’s aggressive pursuit of Greenland is only imperilling America’s long-standing strategy in the high north by jeopardising relations with one of its closest allies.
Vance’s three-hour visit was moved to the US military base after it became clear that the vice-president’s delegation would be met with protests if they ventured into any of the territory’s cities or towns. An earlier plan for his wife, Usha Vance, to visit Greenland’s capital Nuuk and attend a dog-sledding race in the second-largest city Sisimiut seems to have been abandoned after organisers pointed out the “underlying agenda” and that local residents planned to line the road she would travel from the airport with their backs turned to her motorcade.
“We heard reports of different Americans going door-to-door asking, ‘Can Usha Vance come and visit? We would love to have a visit,’” I was told by Markus Valentin, a journalist based in Nuuk for KNR, the Greenlandic Broadcasting Corporation. “But as far as I have heard, no one would let her in.” Thousands of protesters rallied in the capital – a sizeable proportion of Nuuk’s approximately 20, 000 residents – in response to Trump’s threats earlier in March, waving Greenland flags and carrying banners that read, “We are not for sale” and “Yankee go home!”
Instead, JD Vance led the delegation, which was nominally focused on Arctic security, to the US’s northernmost military facility, where he was decidedly vague about exactly how the administration planned to take control of Greenland. Addressing an audience that appeared to consist solely of US military personnel and travelling reporters, the vice-president said he didn’t think military force would be necessary because Greenlanders themselves – precisely none of whom he met during his visit – would be swayed by Trump’s generous terms. “Because we think the people of Greenland are rational and good,” Vance explained, “we think we’re going to be able to cut a deal, Donald Trump-style, to ensure the security of this territory, but also the United States of America.”
The overwhelming majority of Greenland’s roughly 56,000-strong population has signalled no interest in a Donald Trump-style deal. In a January poll, conducted shortly after Trump returned to power, 85 per cent of Greenlanders said they did not want the semi-autonomous territory – which is part of Denmark – to become American. Just 6 per cent said they were in favour, less than the percentage of Americans who believe the moon landings were faked. And that was before the latest round of annexation threats.
Less than 24 hours after Vance had departed, Trump undermined his vice-president’s efforts to downplay the threat of annexation. “We’ll get Greenland. Yeah, 100 per cent,” Trump boasted in an interview on 29 March. He said he had “absolutely” had conversations about annexing the territory, and that while there was a “good possibility” a takeover could be accomplished without the use of military force, “I don’t take anything off the table.”
Their combined efforts earned the censure of Greenland’s new prime minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen. He was sworn in on the same day Vance visited, in what the new government interpreted as a further sign of disrespect. “President Trump says that the United States ‘is getting Greenland’,” Nielsen wrote in a social media post shortly afterwards. “Let me be clear: The United States is not getting it. We do not belong to anyone else. We determine our own future.”
Denmark’s foreign minister also pushed back against Trump’s annexation threats and Vance’s claims during the visit that “Denmark hasn’t done a good job at keeping Greenland safe”. The Danish government was “open to criticism”, Lars Løkke Rasmussen said in a video posted to X on 28 March, because apparently this is how diplomacy must be conducted in the Trump era, “but we do not appreciate the tone in which it is being delivered – this is not how you speak to your close allies”. Rasmussen pointed out that the US had 17 military installations and thousands of soldiers in Greenland in 1945 – the US established a military presence there after Nazi Germany occupied Denmark during the Second World War – but only the base Vance visited, with around 200 soldiers, now remained.
Following Vance’s tour, Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, embarked on her own trip to the territory on 2 April, in this case with Greenland’s consent. Officially, the visit was intended to “strengthen the bond with Greenland”, but it was clearly an effort to show that neither Denmark nor Greenland intend to be cowed by Trump’s pressure campaign. It was “unheard of” for a Danish delegation to travel to the island so soon after a new government had been formed, Markus Valentin told me, but both Nuuk and Copenhagen evidently wanted “to act quickly to send a clear message to the US that Greenland is not for sale, and Greenland is for the Greenlanders”.
Trump is not the first US president to mull the prospect of acquiring Danish territory, and Greenland in particular. After the US purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867, secretary of state William Seward negotiated a treaty with Denmark to buy the islands then known as the Danish West Indies, but it was thwarted by the senate. Almost half a century later, with Woodrow Wilson in power and the First World War underway, the US again attempted to buy the islands, which they feared could be occupied by Germany if it annexed Denmark and used it as a naval base to threaten the United States. Wilson’s secretary of state, Robert Lansing, warned that if Denmark refused to sell the territory, the US might take control by force, and a peaceful transfer was agreed in 1916, in exchange for $25 million in gold, to purchase what became known as the US Virgin Islands. In the process, the US agreed to recognise Danish sovereignty over Greenland and renounce any claim of its own.
But after the Second World War, during which the US had based troops in Greenland, then president Harry Truman proposed buying Greenland in 1946 for the equivalent of $100 million in gold, or trading parts of Alaska for strategically important areas of Greenland, according to secret documents that were only uncovered in 1991. “The committee indicated that money is plentiful now, that Greenland is completely worthless to Denmark [and] that the control of Greenland is indispensable to the safety of the United States,” a state department official reported after a meeting of the planning and strategy committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in April 1946, according to a declassified memo identified by the Associated Press. The secretary of state James Byrnes was then said to have offered to buy Greenland during a meeting with the Danish foreign minister in December 1946, which he reported “seemed to come as a shock”.
Instead, the two countries became founding members of Nato in 1949 and agreed a defence treaty in 1951. This permitted the US to build military bases in Greenland, including the Thule air base in 1952, which was originally intended to facilitate US long-range bombing missions and provide early warning of ballistic missile launches from the Soviet Union during the Cold War. It was renamed Pituffik space base in 2023 to reflect the region’s Greenlandic name.
“If you look at a map of the Arctic from above, the route over Greenland is still the fastest for missiles to reach either Moscow or Washington,” explained Romain Chuffart, the president of the Arctic Institute and a professor in Arctic Studies at the University of Akureyri in Iceland. “So the militarisation was very high during the Cold War, and you can see the geostrategic location of Greenland.” The territory also forms part of the Greenland-Iceland-UK (GIUK) gap, a strategically important maritime choke point that connects the Arctic Ocean – and Russia’s Northern Fleet – with the North Atlantic. If the US ever went to war with Russia or its allies, the ability to detect and prevent Russian submarines and warships from entering that passage would be critical for defending transatlantic supply routes and the eastern seaboard of America.
“Russia has militarised its own Arctic coastline and it is trying to make a viable passage from the northern sea routes – the seaway that goes from Vladivostok all the way to St Petersburg and beyond,” Chuffart told me. “Climate change [as the Arctic sea ice melts] is already changing the dynamics there.” At the same time, Chinese companies are beginning to make greater commercial use of these northern sea routes, and the Chinese government has begun referring to Greenland as a “near-Arctic power”. But the situation is more complex than the Trump administration’s rhetoric tends to suggest. “I think this sense of the menace of Russia and China is overblown to some extent, to feed into this narrative that [the West] needs to develop our own Arctic from the North American side.”
Greenland is also thought to possess significant natural mineral resources, including deposits of rare earth minerals and uranium, which perhaps helps to explain why the energy secretary joined Vance’s recent tour. Previous estimates of the region’s oil and gas reserves, particularly given the challenges of exploiting them, are probably overblown, Chuffart said. “But I think this plays into the Trump administration’s imagination of the Arctic as a vast reserve of anything that you could want, and the need to secure minerals or oil wherever you can.”
The irony in all this is that the Trump administration could have achieved its stated objectives in Greenland – ramping up the US military presence, pushing back against Russia and China and jointly exploring Greenland’s mineral reserves – by strengthening the existing alliance. Denmark has previously positioned itself as one the US’s closest allies, sending its soldiers to fight alongside the US in Afghanistan and signalling its openness to expanding US capabilities in Greenland. The territory’s own government has repeatedly emphasised that it is not for sale, but that it is “open for business” – including with American companies.
But instead, Trump seems intent on turning America’s longstanding allies into adversaries. He has created an entirely needless crisis, sabotaging decades of US diplomacy and conceding a bewildering strategic own goal. The greatest impediment to building up US military and economic interests in Greenland is Trump’s own repeated threats to seize the territory by force.
“As far as people up here are concerned, no one actually thinks that Russia or China will get control of Greenland,” said Markus Valentin in Nuuk. “The only country that is seen as an aggressor – that has expressed a wish to annex and invade – is the United States.”
[See also: The Return of America First]
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