Why is Donald Trump so obsessed with Greenland? During his first presidency, Trump surprised many by voicing his intention in 2019 to buy the Arctic island from Denmark as part of a real estate deal.
At the time, he was mostly met with ridicule, spurred in no small part by Trump himself tweeting an image of his vulgar Trump Tower planted in the serene Greenlandic scene: “I promise not to do this to Greenland.” After all, 80 percent of the country’s surface area is covered in ice, and its GDP (US$3.24 billion in 2021) is generated largely through fishing exports and subsidies from the Danish government.
It might have appeared as if Trump’s megalomania was fixing its sights on a bizarre, even outlandish, object. Certainly, the US president did not take the wishes of the Indigenous Inuit population into consideration, while Denmark, which continues to retain certain privileges of a colonial master, brushed his remarks aside.
In the weeks leading up to his inauguration, however, Trump has doubled down on his desire for US control of Greenland. The United States needs Greenland “for national security purposes,” he stated in a press conference. Rather than viewing this as a simple real estate deal with Denmark, this time around, the president-elect declined to rule out using military or economic force to take control.
In terms of US national security, the Arctic is of considerable strategic military importance as a staging area for nuclear-armed submarines that can hide beneath the ice. Indeed, the United States has a long and somewhat bizarre…
Auteur: Christine Schwöbel-Patel
