During his first term, President Donald Trump floated the idea of the U.S. buying Greenland from Denmark. Media coverage focused on the Danes’ outraged response without clarifying how Greenland’s dependence on Denmark came to be and whether it’s in Greenlanders’ best interests. With the advent of Trump’s second term, the possibility of a Greenland purchase—or really, any kind of deal—is back, too. American interest in Greenland is not superficial, but a sign of a return to strategic realism, argues Liz Buchanan, author of the new book So You Want to Own Greenland?: Lessons from the Vikings to Trump.
Buchanan told The American Conservative in an interview that being an Australian gave her critical distance from the subject. She is the former Head of Research for the Royal Australian Navy’s Sea Power Centre and her 2023 book Red Arctic: Russian Strategy Under Putin was reviewed in TAC.
Despite being an island with a population of only 57,000, Greenland has been covered heavily by U.S. media this year. Donald Trump, Jr. and a band of his father’s allies (including the late Charlie Kirk) visited in January. Vice President J.D. Vance spoke to troops at Pituffik Space Base in Greenland in March. And earlier in September, the New York Times covered a “scathing” report about Danish doctors implanting IUDs in Greenlandic women and girls without their knowledge or permission in the 1960s and 1970s.
Media coverage of Trump’s interest in Greenland has obscured some of the really interesting facts of Greenland’s independence push, Buchanan said. The Danish have the power of the purse over Greenland in many ways. But the Greenlandic people have several bargaining chips of their own.
“The Danish people could just give freedom to Greenland, but they won’t, because Denmark has more to lose,” Buchanan told TAC. “There’s a whole treasure chest and bounty of seabed resources they would lose. Then the other issue becomes… the majority of their NATO heavy lifting is Greenland. They can’t point to Greenland and say, ‘Well, we give you access to this piece of territory.’ [The Danes would] have to spend more, and they won’t.”
Over the past thousands years, the Vikings, the Danes, the Americans, and even the Nazis have been interested in Greenland. TAC got the scoop from Buchanan about why Greenland is such a coveted strategic location.
What made you decide to focus on Greenland, and what made you think it was time to write a book on this topic?
The U.S. interest in Greenland is hundreds of years old. I was frustrated at the fact that no one, especially the media, was interrogating the history of this interest, and it was really disingenuous. It was obviously for political point-scoring, and any theatrics of what Trump was doing was of interest, but for me, it wasn’t the story. It just came from a place of frustration and I thought, hey, I think I can weave this story together in a way that is engaging.
Greenland is [the U.S.’s] front doorstep, right? It is not a European part of the world. It is squarely, by any measure of geography, North American. So I wanted to unpack the history there and show that this is really not a political short-term stunt. It is a long-term enduring interest. The point of the book was that people could be informed and see that strategic realism argument that’s there. It might not be laid down by the Trump administration in a way that is useful in telling that story, but it is an important one nonetheless.
The New York Times just published a story on the Greenlandic girls’ forced contraception. Why did you include details about it in your book?
It was quite risky from a reputational point of view. But you know what? I interrogated the evidence. I didn’t just do the CliffsNotes. I went through all of the legal proceedings. I even called one or two [general practitioners] in Denmark to understand the IUD device [and] their standards of insertion without pain relief. So I understand it in depth.
To do that to children who are not even sexually active is one thing…. These women trusted the healthcare that was being provided because still to this day, healthcare is provided by the Danish to Greenland. You were trusting your children to medical care, and they were not told what was being done…. So it is horrific, you know? I’m glad that it’s getting attention because it went on for decades. They weren’t told why they needed it. These women were hitting their 30s and 40s, trying to have babies and couldn’t understand. And then the pervasive backbone to why they were doing it, which was, they say, for healthcare, it’s like, no, you were controlling the growth of population of Inuit women and children—of Inuit women having babies. And that is a crime against humanity, I would argue. We’ve had all sorts of experiences in Australia when the British came and what they did to our indigenous people… Suicide rates, alcoholism, all of the social things that have happened to these people—and the world just wants to hear the story about why it’s Trump.
You’ve got to be asking, okay, if they were trying to control population growth, and it wasn’t the Greenlandic men or boys who were impregnating children, who was it? Danish seasonal workers. So we’re talking [about] horrific crimes against young children. So I stuck to my guns, and I said, no, this is a story that needs to be there. And it’s a fact. If we want to… include literature about how the Danish are horrified [that] the Americans are going to take sovereign territory—well, how have the Danish been managing their sovereign territory in that population? Be honest, and let people decide.
What was your favorite piece of hidden history to write about?
My favorite piece was unpacking the 1946 period [after] World War II when Greenland was occupied by the U.S. It was the letters between President [Franklin D.] Roosevelt and King Christian X of Denmark at the time. Nazis had taken over Denmark. They couldn’t physically get to Greenland at the time, although arguably, there weren’t any real designs to get to Greenland. [The Nazis] just wanted to utilize the weather forecasting short-term, but long-term, they wouldn’t have done much more. It took me like a week to get through pages and pages of discourse [regarding] King Christian X of Denmark, his uproar about the Danish representative who was isolated in Washington, DC on post. [He] obviously wasn’t going back in the middle of open war, right?
They were trying to figure out in the U.S. State Department at the time whether or not King Christian X was coerced to write these letters of uproar. It was fascinating to see the way in which Roosevelt, as a statesman, was trying to manage this. Roosevelt writes to Christian, “Dear friend, I’m going to read between the lines. I don’t think that you understand what service we’re offering by keeping Greenland occupied and out of the free-for-all on the table. We will look after it.” Then the other end of things were King Christian’s fears about it and the Danish fears, obviously, about it never being returned. They were very real. But then the Cold War kicked in, and you developed new ways to ensure a U.S. footprint stayed in Greenland.
Another series of cables was closer to the Cold War. There was a U.S. crash of a bomber [in Greenland], and it was nuclear armed. Follow the bouncing ball of cables that were going back and forth, and they tell a story in which the Danish are so fearful that the public will find out, because they have a non-nuclear pact. They’re worried about the Danish people ever finding out that their territory had been used for nuclear war. And it’s like, you’re smack-bang in the Cold War, what do you think’s going on there? And they tell a story of a piece of paper being handed in DC by the Danish representatives to the U.S. president’s team, to say “We neither confirm nor deny that we have an issue or want to know what your aircraft are carrying.”
And none of this came to light until there was a Danish government investigation in [the 2010s] as to the history of what was actually happening at Camp Century and the U.S. outpost in Pituffik. So it’s interesting because it kind of makes you wonder [about] the depth of some of the lies that our governments will go to tell us out of necessity. So the Danish can continue to talk about how their free healthcare and childcare and way of life is so great, and they’re all about universal values and equality. And it’s like, well, you’ve done all these other domestic political efforts that are absolutely not representative of that.
One thing I got from your book is that Trump really wants to focus on the minerals and the riches of Greenland, but that really, at the heart of it, is the strategy. As you said, it’s our doorstep. Do you think the Americans are doing themselves a disservice by just focusing on the riches and not the security angle?
I would totally be focusing much more on the bigger picture of security because anyone can look at a globe and go, oh, yeah, that’s our back doorstep, right? Maybe it’s the microfocus on the actionable outcomes to be like, “Hey, we’ve got XYZ companies that can put $10 billion in tomorrow.” Because you can then point to something and say, “We did that.” So I do think it should be flipped the other way because the U.S. win is the strategic part of it. Anyone can help with the minerals. Anyone can point to investing… to get Greenland on an economically self-sustaining footing. The problem is you don’t want China offering to do that again. And they’re being [pressured] to take that. But no one else has the same gain that the U.S. has when it comes to the strategic position of Greenland. So that should be the priority.
But another issue that is getting missed a bit in the Trump focus on unlocking Greenland’s wealth is the way in which [it] would be palatable for the Greenlandic people, that they have the economic uplift, right? That’s what you want [so] they can run and fund their own country to a level of living that they require and that they, respectfully, deserve. The problem is, you can’t just throw money at the minerals problem. You also need a workforce. This brings us to our issue, which Australia also grapples with, which is we’ve got these huge, strategic land masses and minimal people. You’ve got a declining population in Greenland as well at the workforce age. So you might open five mines. Who is going to work in them? What’s your workforce? You’re going to be importing a workforce. But then the economic gains aren’t staying in Greenland. They’re going back to the Philippines, China, to wherever you’re getting your workforce from.
Yes, we can talk about the automation and technological development in mines and how some of them are running with robotics, but again, you don’t have the infrastructure there. This is a huge leap to train people as well. The immediate strategic footing of Greenland as a protectorate is the way to go, as opposed to [the U.S. saying] we’ll invest and help you become self-sustaining.
What do people misunderstand about the polling of Greenlanders about independence?
The interesting part of the U.S. discourse on Greenland has also been the obsession with polling, which is incorrect as well. They’re focusing on this one poll that was done… I saw newsline after newsline by journalists who should know better about “the majority of Greenlanders don’t want to join America.” Well, that wasn’t the question. The question was put to the Greenlandic people as an either/or. Basically, would you like to become a part of America or be part of Denmark? If you’re giving people that binary choice, of course they’re going to say what they know.
I was trying to get to the bottom of it because it was a Danish poll. There [are] a couple of Greenlandic news sources that are a bit better to follow. But even then, I was like, you’re polling people in the capital city of Greenland. You’re polling people that are a little bit politically engaged. You’re not polling people in the smaller communities around. Anyway, that’s how I feel about polls. That’s my one trigger point where people are like, “They’ve been polled. They don’t want to be part of America.” And it’s like, well, that’s not the actual question. They want independence, first and foremost.
Do you stand by your prediction that you think Greenland will continue on its incremental march toward independence?
Yes. It’s so boring. It’s not sexy, but I feel like most of history is not surprising. There are always slow burns. I feel like independence for Greenland is a slow burn. It is an eventuality because the people want that. I think the controlling forces that are Danish want that too, genuinely. I think they’re in an impossible position right now. So I reckon they need to find a way to release Greenland but also maintain their position as the preferential partner in all defense and all foreign policy and economic realms because that is in Denmark’s survival interest as well. So there has to be a balance of those two. I think the main thing that’s pissed off the Danish has been Trump’s brashness with injecting himself into the Greenland problem and bringing awareness to the problem, if that makes sense.
I don’t know if there’ll be a forced solution. I think the fact that it’s in the news now is a problem for Denmark for all of those reasons, the messy colonial history, the future identity of the Danish realm—what are you if you don’t have Greenland? You’re not Arctic. You’re absolutely not on the Arctic Council. So there are all of these threads that once you start pulling, it’s a problem for Denmark. They’d be in damage control over this. It’s an opportunity for the U.S., I think, to try and sway the Greenlandic trajectory, but I just hope the Greenlandic people make choices that are good for their future generations. I fear that if it gets out of control on the Trump versus Denmark or Trump versus media bandwagon, that you will see Greenland wedged and starting to partner with China as a third option. And it might look easy and it might look palatable for 10 years, but that’s the biggest problem. That’s a problem, not only for Washington, it’s a problem as well for the Danes.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
The post Is Donald Trump a Viking Warlord? appeared first on The American Conservative.
Google Search
