It’s that time of year again. On December 22, 2025, exactly twelve months after appointing venture capitalist Ken Howery as US ambassador to Denmark with the message that US “ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity,” Donald Trump named Jeff Landry as his special envoy to Greenland and brought the Arctic island back to the front pages.
Since then, in a repeat of last January’s pattern, a one-sided war of words has escalated, with various figures close to Trump attempting to present a takeover of Greenland as an inevitability, and the Kingdom of Denmark, of which Greenland is one part, as a liability.
Landry, the governor of Louisiana, is a stalwart of the current Republican Party. As his state’s attorney general, he fought against efforts to limit air pollution in “Cancer Alley,” an eighty-five-mile stretch of chemical industry in a majority Black area of southeast Louisiana.
Since becoming governor, he has attempted to force every public school classroom in his state to display the Ten Commandments, classified two abortion pills as “controlled and dangerous substances,” and appointed fossil fuel executives to key state environmental jobs.
After calling for Nicolás Maduro’s execution, he offered an ICE facility that he had renamed Camp 57 in honor of himself, the fifty-seventh governor of Louisiana, as a potential future home for the kidnapped Venezuelan president.
Landry’s illustrious history of personal loyalty to Donald Trump seems to have overridden his complete lack of foreign policy experience. Then again, the role of special envoy to Greenland doesn’t come with many responsibilities, as the positions of the US, Greenlandic, and Danish governments are so far apart as to be almost unbridgeable.
The United States, as far as we can ascertain from various interviews with Trump and his advisers, wants complete control over Greenland for the sake of “national security.” This desire has provoked worries over an…
Auteur: Huw Paige
