Donald Trump added a strange sentence into his pre-Christmas announcement of Ken Howery as US ambassador to Denmark. Alongside other recent comments about taking over the Panama Canal and welcoming Canada as his country’s fifty-first state, the president-elect returned to a previous bugbear. “For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity,” Trump posted on Truth Social.
With this statement, Trump was both calling back to his 2019 offer to purchase the Danish territory in “essentially a large real estate deal” and mirroring the words of Senator Owen Brewster, who in November 1945 said that US ownership of Greenland was a “military necessity.” Trump’s declaration of imperial desires on social media indicates simultaneously how much and how little the world has changed in the last eighty years.
Greenland’s 56,000 people retain the ability to decide their own destiny, able to declare independence from Denmark under the self-government act signed in 2009. In Greenlandic prime minister Múte Egede’s New Year’s address, he suggested a referendum on the issue could take place this year. “We must work to remove the obstacles to cooperation — which we can describe as the shackles of colonialism — and move forward,” he said.
Jeppe Strandsbjerg, an associate professor at the University of Greenland and the Royal Danish Defence College, says that while this speech was “very much an election statement” for Egede’s Inuit Ataqatigiit party ahead of elections later this year, it also “reflects a deep frustration with how things are going in certain areas. There’s a perception that the Danish…
Auteur: Huw Paige
