Making Greenland Great Again (and Again)

Greenland has recently come to Donald Trump’s attention, along with Canada. Perhaps he’s been reading William Seward’s memoirs. Seward, Lincoln’s Secretary of State (who was nearly assassinated the same night Lincoln died) stayed on in his post long enough to purchase Alaska (and be ridiculed for it) in 1867, and (fun fact) to entertain a plan to acquire Greenland.

He hoped that if the United States obtained both Alaska and Greenland, Canada could be persuaded by this pincer movement to join the United States as well. His Greenland scheme reads like a blockbuster NBA trade: The US would ship two islands in the Philippines to Germany, Germany would give Schleswig-Holstein back to Denmark, and a grateful Denmark would transfer Greenland to the United States. Swashbuckling days in the State Department!

Nobody bit on the plan on the time, but now here’s Donald Trump expressing a desire to “have” Greenland and Canada, leaving out the parts where Germany gets part of the Philippines and Denmark gets Schleswig-Holstein. 

Greenland today sits at the center of a thorny set of issues that are not likely to go away just because our President is bombing elsewhere. Greenland has spent most of human history on the margins, but it sits squarely in the middle of emerging geopolitical competition across the Arctic, contains coveted reserves of mineral resources, and is ground zero for the climate crisis.

It has a vast land area and a tiny population flickering on the edges. Who should have what say over its future? To consider these questions, let’s review some basic information. Here’s a quick primer on this very unusual place less than 2,800 miles from Seattle. 

Just the Facts

Greenland is the world’s largest island. It’s about five times the size of California, and about 80% of it is covered in ice up to two miles thick (but shrinking). Its population is about 58,000 (the same as Lacey, WA) and seems to be shrinking as well. Greenland’s natural environment is exceptionally beautiful, fragile, and severe. It’s a hotbed (so to speak) of climate science. Politically, it is an autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark.

This means that it’s a parliamentary democracy with an elected Prime Minister but also a High Commissioner appointed by the Danish Crown. Greenland manages local affairs autonomously, but Denmark controls foreign policy, including having veto power over foreign investments. Subsidies from Denmark of nearly $600 million a year account for 60 percent of Greenland’s income. 

The idea of complete independence is fairly popular among Greenlanders, but the idea of losing Denmark’s subsidy is not. When American President Donald Trump expressed the desire to “have it,” Denmark replied that Greenland was not for sale. Trump suggested taking it anyway. An American attempt to take it by force would shatter NATO, though Trump might see that as a feature, not a bug. 

Greenland’s human history is unusual, like so much else about the place. The Inuit, who make up most of the modern population, are relatively recent arrivals to the Western Hemisphere. Their direct ancestors, the Thule people, crossed from Siberia to Alaska in around 1000 CE, and reached Greenland around 1300 CE. They aren’t descended from the ancestors of today’s Native Americans who reached the Western Hemisphere many millennia before.

When they first met the Norse settlers in Greenland, human encirclement of the globe became complete. The Inuit were the last of at least three or four culturally and genetically distinct groups to cross over to Greenland from Arctic Canada over the past 4,500 years or so, arriving a few centuries after the previous wave, the Dorset people, appear to have died or departed.

There were also settlers coming the other way. In 982 CE Eric the Red, exiled from Iceland (in part for killing Eyjolf the Foul), explored the Southwest coast of Greenland, and returned in 985 with shiploads of settlers to colonize it. Around 1500 CE the Norse colony died out, and the exact reasons for its demise are still debated.

In the 1700s Denmark sent an expedition to find them but found them gone. As “Plan B,” the Danes stuck around, planted the flag, and began evangelizing the Inuit, who to this day are mostly practicing Lutherans. 

History’s Pawn

Greenland has passed in an out of history repeatedly, and its custody has often been debated. Denmark claimed it as a colony in 1814. Norway contested this repeatedly, even after a 1933 court ruling by the Permanent Court of International Justice confirmed Denmark’s claim. During World War II, when both Norway and Denmark were governed by Nazis, Norway’s President Vidkun Quisling unsuccessfully pressed Hitler to take Greenland (which Hitler did not control) from Denmark and give it to Norway, on the basis of the claim that Eric the Red was born in Norway.

When Germany took over Denmark, the Danish Ambassador to the US broke with Denmark’s new Nazi government and asked the United States to protect Greenland from Nazi plans to militarize it to support their North Atlantic submarine fleet and provide weather reports to German forces in Europe.

The US obliged, citing the Monroe Doctrine, and for the rest of the war the Americans hunted down the meteorologists Germany kept sending ashore on Greenland’s rugged east coast. One of Greenland’s most epic contributions to world history occurred in early June, 1944, when weather forecasts from Greenland persuaded Supreme Allied Commander Eisenhower to set June 6 as D-Day. 

By the war’s end, the US had built massive infrastructure to support the ferrying of aircraft from the US to Britain. Denmark, which had historically worried that the US might claim Greenland, worried again that the US might not give it back after the fall of the Third Reich. A 1951 treaty between the US and Denmark confirmed Denmark’s sovereignty but gave the US the right to maintain military bases.

During the Cold War, the US developed a network of radar stations to give advance warning of Russian bombers. Known as the DEW (Distant Early Warning) Line, these stations stretched from Alaska across Canada to Greenland. The US also built an experimental military installation under the ice which tested the idea of moving ICBMs around in railroad tunnels carved out of the ice, so the Soviet Union wouldn’t know where they were.

The advent of ICBMs and more advanced detection systems rendered the DEW Line obsolete, and the US wound down its military presence in Greenland. In 2004, the US and Denmark agreed that the US would maintain a single base, the Thule Air Base, which is now called the Pituffik Space Base. 

America’s Wandering Interest

The US has a history of off-again, on-again interest in Greenland starting long before World War II. American explorer Robert Peary (who later was first to the North Pole) was the first non-Greenlander to cross the northern part of the island and back in the late 1890s, and he claimed Northern Greenland for the United States. The US did not give up that claim until 1917, when it purchased the Danish Antilles (now the US Virgin Islands), and agreed to stop claiming Greenland as part of the deal. 

Denmark, which is not capable of defending Greenland with its smaller-than-the-New York Police Department military, has been happy to see NATO (meaning mostly the United States), commit to Greenland’s defense. The US, however, has a grand total of ONE operational heavy icebreaker, and two medium-duty icebreakers of the kind necessary to operate in that part of the world. Construction of more heavy icebreakers has suffered delays, cost overruns, and Congressional skepticism. The first is scheduled to be delivered in 2030.

Meanwhile, Russia has eight nuclear-powered icebreakers in service and is building new ones with military capabilities such as cruise missiles. China is building heavy icebreakers as well: it has deployed three and has a fourth under construction. In 2024 Russia and China conducted joint military maneuvers near Alaska and have signed an agreement to collaborate in pursuing their joint interests in the Arctic, which are ambitious. 

Greenland is also a major climate laboratory. Cores drilled all the way to the bottom of the Greenland ice sheet near the island’s summit in 1992 provided the first evidence, shocking to scientists at the time, that major climate change can happen very quickly. Today’s urgency of concern about human-caused climate change is based on this discovery. The cores showed that meaningful climate change has sometimes happened over time frames measured in decades, not millennia as had previously been assumed. 

About those Natural Resources…

Greenland is in the news recently for its potential wealth of natural resources: oil and gas, rare earths, various metals, even exceptionally pure silicon sand for making semiconductors. As the ice melts, with the potential to raise global sea levels substantially, companies and countries are jockeying for access to the resources which the melting will expose. There may be something insane about drilling for more fossil fuels made accessible by accelerating climate change, but hey, business is business. 

Today, nearly 90% of Greenlanders are ethnically Inuit, and roughly half of these are thought to have inherited at least a few genes from Northern Europe. The remaining 10% or so are mostly of Danish descent. The most rapidly growing immigrant groups are Filipino and Thai, but the absolute numbers are quite small, in the hundreds. Overall, out-migration exceeds immigration, and the birthrate is well below replacement level.

Most Greenlanders today live on the southwest coast, where the capitol, Nuuk, is the largest community. There are still small numbers of Inuit elsewhere around the island. Despite their small numbers, the Greenland Inuit speak three languages. Some speakers of Northern Kalaallisut and Eastern Kalaallisut resent the imposition of Western Kalaallisut as the official language of Greenland, replacing Danish in 2009. 

In short, Greenland is where a tiny population lives on the edge of a vast, ice-covered, resource-rich island whose melting would drown many of the world’s great cities. The Greenlanders mostly don’t love the Danes, and some would rather take their chances with the US, but many see the world’s booming interest in Greenland’s natural resources as their ticket out from under dependency on subsidies from Denmark or any other country.

It’s certainly possible that, if Greenland in its entirety were to be recognized by the rest of the world as belonging to its tiny population (akin to agreeing that the residents of Lacey, WA were the rightful owners of Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Montana, Utah, Nevada, and half of Arizona), Greenlandia could issue licenses for resource extraction which would make every Greenlander rich.

If such licenses let Russian and Chinese interests develop the kind of militarized industrial operations that China has imposed on the South China Sea, it would present a difficult challenge to the US and the rest of NATO (remember the icebreakers). Into this fraught moment stumbles Donald Trump, saying the US “has to have it,” and tossing in a threat to Canada’s sovereignty at the same time.  

Squaring the overlapping circles of interest will be difficult. Perhaps most of the ice fields and glaciers, which are not desirable for habitation, should be protected by an international treaty and reserved for scientific research with tightly regulated access to natural resources. Perhaps much of the coastal area becomes an independent nation which agrees to join NATO and abide by international agreements about resource extraction.

In such scenarios, who wins, who loses, who compensates whom, and who takes ongoing responsibility for what? Resolving all of these questions simultaneously is a tall order. To quote the Wicked Witch of the West, “These things must be done delicately.” At the moment, the US, which will inevitably play a role in Greenland’s future, does not have a delicate president. Get your MGGA hat now.