Trump and the 800,000-square-mile island many Danes would prefer to forget.

JUNE 19, 2025

IMAGE: Detail of map of Greenland by Hans Poulsen Egede, 1737 (Library of Congress)

In April, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen paid a brisk visit to Greenland, ostensibly to greet and congratulate the newly elected Greenland Premier Jens-Frederik Nielsen, whose center-right Demokraatit party won a general election in March. It was only Frederiksen’s third such trip in six years; a little conspicuously, it was soon followed by a visit from King Frederik Denmark’s affable monarch. Photos of the King smiling and waving, or smiling and hiking, or smiling and fishing, were widely circulated in Danish and Greenlandic media. “King Frederik’s trip to Greenland this time carries a very great symbolic value,” the Danish Broadcasting Corporation’s royal correspondent, Cecilie Nielsen, somberly intoned. A local Greenlander was quoted saying she found the visit “exciting.”

These last-minute trips, organized as the snow was still settling from the blizzard-like visit by U.S. Vice President JD Vance and his wife, Usha, White House National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Utah Senator Mike Lee were calculated to show a united front against the Trump administration’s threat to take Greenland “one way or the other.” For the past several months, the Trump administration has routinely dispatched various cronies to Greenland and even directed its intelligence agencies to increase surveillance of the Greenlandic independence movement and attitudes toward American mining interests. At a press conference in Nuuk, flanked by Nielsen and the outgoing Greenlandic premier, Múte B. Egede, Mette Frederiksen told reporters, “It has fallen to us to stand up for the common bond that, for better or worse, we have shared for centuries.”

Trump has forced Denmark to reckon with a past that many Danes would prefer to ignore.

Along with the Faroe Islands, Greenland and Denmark constitute the Danish Realm, a political arrangement united under the Danish monarch, King Frederik. Greenlanders hold Danish citizenship, many are of mixed Inuit and Danish heritage, and approximately 17,000 live in Denmark. What the Danish government doesn’t like to admit is that Denmark enjoys geopolitical advantages from the arrangement. Retaining Greenland as a territory makes Denmark one of eight members of the Arctic Council and the third largest territory within NATO. And though Greenland retains full control of its natural resources, Denmark is responsible for its foreign policy; the economic potential of any mineral deposits, as well as the emerging trade routes in the Arctic, will likely elevate Denmark’s geopolitical influence in the region and its standing on the world stage.

And yet, until President Donald Trump’s first suggestion, in 2019, that the U.S. wanted to purchase Greenland from Denmark, the island didn’t much figure much in the Danish news cycle. At the time, Trump’s comments were dismissed in Danish media as a bad joke. Now Trump’s rhetoric of the “absolute necessity” of taking Greenland has put the Danish government in the awkward position of defending its territorial possession of a former colony that is laying the groundwork for independence. In doing so, Trump has forced Denmark to reckon with a past that many Danes would prefer to ignore. As a Danish friend who spent four years in Greenland recently told me, “Never before have there been so many Danish journalists in Greenland as there are now.”

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Though born and mostly raised in Denmark, the closest I’ve ever been to Greenland is approximately 36,000 feet above it. Transatlantic flights from northern Europe — London, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Copenhagen — routinely cross the southern half of the island, the bright, barren ice sheet often visible for up to an hour of cruising speed. Looking down on that empty landscape, I might as well have been looking at another planet, so far removed did it seem from mild and narrow Denmark with its arable, patchwork countryside and rainy, cobblestone streets. “There is nothing sublime, nothing grandiose” about the Danish landscape, the English writer Edmund Gosse once wrote. Greenland, by contrast, is nature at its most sublime and terrifying.

When the Danish-Norwegian Lutheran priest Hans Egede and his fellow missionaries arrived in Greenland in 1721, they expected to find descendants of Norse people who had settled on the southwest coast of the island in 982. They held a widely shared belief that Greenland belonged to the Dano-Norwegian kingdom, and the discovery that the Norse’s last ship had in fact sailed in 1420, didn’t seem to shake this idea. But when they arrived, the island was inhabited by a few thousand Inuit, who are believed to have come from North America around 1150, and to whom most native Greenlanders trace their cultural lineage today.

Greenland became a de facto colony on the Dano-Norwegians’ arrival, in 1721. Its size and harsh, uninhabitable interior meant that initial encounters were concentrated along the southwest coast. Colonial presence on the island was limited to a few hundred missionaries and merchants, who monopolized the island’s trade and restricted other European countries from trading with the Inuit, as had been custom throughout the 1600s. The island’s native population increased but remained below 10,000 people until the early years of the 20th century. In 1910, the explorer Knud Rasmussen, the son of a Danish missionary father and Inuit-Danish mother, established the first colonial presence on the northwest coast with the Thule trading station.

For a small population with their own long-held traditions, the transformations and upheavals of “Danization” were deeply disorienting and often detrimental to Greenlanders.

Over time, the original ambitions of the colonizers — to convert Greenlanders to Christianity and secure control over trade, as well as the expectation of discovering mineral resources or even gold to exploit — were abandoned or deemed unrealistic. What replaced them was the integration of Greenland into the Danish state, motivated by the belief that the island’s Inuit community needed the protection of the Danish state. In 1946, in part in response to reports in the Danish press detailing the inadequate health care and squalid housing conditions in Greenland, the government began a process of “Danization”: the extensive modernization and urbanization of Greenland in the Danish mold. A 1953 constitutional amendment formally abolished Greenland’s colonial status, integrating it as a county of Denmark instead. Greenlanders were granted Danish citizenship and representation in the Danish parliament.

As a rationale for retaining sovereignty over Greenland, Danish politicians used a familiarly colonialist argument: the small and vulnerable Greenlandic population depended on Denmark’s protection against foreign intervention. In fact, Denmark had just resigned itself to a more or less permanent American military presence in Greenland. In December 1946, U.S. secretary of state James F. Byrnes approached his Danish counterpart with an offer of $100 million in exchange for Greenland. Denmark rejected the offer but failed to convince the United States to withdraw the troops it had stationed in Greenland during World War II. Jens Otto Krag, the foreign minister and later prime minister, reasoned that Denmark, being powerless to do anything about the American presence, might as well try to get something out of the relationship. With an American base on the island, Denmark had an additional reason to stay in Greenland — it did not want to be outmanoeuvred by the U.S. and sidelined in the Arctic.

For a small population with their own long-held traditions, the transformations and upheavals of “Danization” were deeply disorienting and often detrimental to Greenlanders. In some areas, centralization policy laid waste to entire settlements as communities were moved into towns. The coal mining settlement Qullissat was abandoned in 1972 after the Danish government decided to close the mine, forcing its 1,400 residents to relocate. Many found themselves out of work, while those who did find jobs discovered they were paid less than the Danish workers arriving in droves to build infrastructure or modern apartment buildings. For many Greenlanders, these policies simply reinforced the old colonial hierarchy, as well as creating cultural loss and lack of agency. Suicide rates, especially among young men, began to rapidly increase in the 1960s and is among the highest in the world today. Rules about Greenlandic children born out of wedlock strongly penalized children with unmarried parents. Other damaging effects of Danization have only recently come to light. In 2017, a number of Greenlandic women came forward and shared that, during the 1960s, Danish physicians had inserted intrauterine devices without their consent. Some women were only 12 years old at the time. They were part of a program to control the birth rate, revelations that have since resulted in an ongoing investigation by the governments of Denmark and Greenland to investigate the full scope of what happened; their results are expected sometime this summer.

Even today, Greenlanders who move to Denmark likely face further discrimination. The share of homelessness among people with Inuit origins is much higher than for people with Danish origins. “Parenting competency” tests, used to determine whether or not a child should be removed from its parents, have been criticized for failing to take into account language and cultural barriers, leading to Greenlandic children being placed into foster care at seven times the rate of Danish children, according to research presented in 2022. The United States Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples described in 2023 how Greenlanders in Denmark felt like “invisible ghosts.”

Danes have been reluctant to discuss this colonial history. In 2014, then Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt refused even the idea of participating in a reconciliation commission with Greenland. There is a sense, spoken or unspoken, among many Danes that the colonization of Greenland was a mild and even benevolent endeavor. By comparing Denmark’s presence in Greenland to the brutal regime of the Belgians in Congo, or the British in South Africa, many Danes feel reinforced in their national self-perception as a small yet morally superior nation. My grandfather used to compare this Danish attitude to a lamppost that looks up at the stars above and thinks, “What would they do without me?”

Until 2023, teaching about Greenland was not a part of Danish primary school’s history curriculum.

The Greenlandic novelist Niviaq Korneliussen, in whose writing the dramatic surge in suicides among Greenlanders plays a significant role, says the anger and shame that many Greenlanders felt as a result of Denmark’s modernization policies was transmitted to younger generations. “My generation has inherited the anger. I have friends who are really angry, incredibly angry. And the relationship with Denmark is still complicated,” she told a Danish newspaper in 2018. “In many places [in Greenland] you can’t speak your own language,” Korneliussen has said. “Many doctors don’t understand Greenlandic. The language and cultural barriers make many Greenlanders feel threatened.”

In 1979, Greenland established its own parliament and government through democratic elections, in theory assuming legislative and administrative responsibility for its own affairs. In practice, however, it has only been able to reclaim responsibility for a small portion due to its limited administrative capacity and continued economic dependence on Denmark. With the Self-Government Act of 2009, Greenlanders became a separate people under international law, acquiring internal autonomy under Danish sovereignty. The act also provided a legal mechanism, the so-called paragraph 21, by which the Naalakkersuisut, Greenland’s chief executive body, can trigger the independence process. In the fall of 2016, Prime Minister Kim Kielsen appointed the first ever minister of independence and declared that Greenland is “irreversibly” on the road to independence; in 2017, a commission was appointed to draft a constitution. Last year, the Naalakkersuisut formed a commission to explore what exactly activating paragraph 21 will look like, and what it means that an agreement on independence will require the consent of the Danish parliament. An opinion poll earlier this year indicated that 56 percent of Greenland’s population favors independence.

Oddly, these momentous changes received little or no coverage in the Danish press, despite auguring the coming dissolution of the Rigsfællesskabet, or Danish Realm. A demonstration organized in defense of the Realm in January 2017 outside the North Atlantic House in Copenhagen, where Greenland’s premier was hosting a New Year’s reception, drew only 26 people — including the organizers, the speakers and a camera crew from the Faroe Islands, a fellow territory.

Danes display a curious indifference toward Greenlanders. Until 2023, teaching about Greenland was not a part of Danish primary school’s history curriculum. This past October, the Danish Broadcasting Corporation discontinued its longstanding practice of sending “a Christmas Greeting” to Greenland. In January, a Danish TV station tested random Danes on their knowledge of Greenland; most of them couldn’t even identify its flag.

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has repeatedly said that Greenland’s future is for Greenlanders to decide; a half-truth at best, since independence will require approval and negotiations with the Danish government. With a small economy built around its fishing industry, Greenland also remains dependent on the annual block grant of 4 billion Danish kroner (approximately $600 million) it receives from Denmark, which helps the government finance essential public serves and infrastructure. In 2012, the Greenlandic geologist Minik Rosing and the politician Kuupik Kleist described this economic dependency as “the snake in the new, self-governing paradise.”

Over time, this failure has become a collective one: the failure of most Danes to acknowledge and take an interest in the lives of Greenlanders — who remain, after all, their fellow citizens.

The independence movement also faces serious domestic challenges. At present, Greenland’s population is expected to fall below 50,000 by 2050, mostly due to outward migration and the low birth rates characteristic of most Western countries. Only 14 percent of Greenlanders between the ages of 16 and 74 have a higher education, a major problem for a country that needs highly specialized professionals, like helicopter pilots or engineers. “I don’t think we’re ready to become independent,” Korneliussen, the novelist, told a Danish journalist in 2018. Krissie Winberg, chair of the Greenland Business Association, similarly told a Danish TV station in March, “I think it will be very expensive for all of us if we have to support our economy on our own. There aren’t enough of us yet to carry that burden, if you can call it that.”

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The possibility that a second Trump administration would revisit the Greenland question seems not to have occurred to the Danish government. The issue was not mentioned in the official report on the Danish Realm submitted to parliament on February 28, 2024, though threats to Greenland from China and Russia were. Nor did it pay attention to an article that appeared in the U.S. magazine National Interest in October titled, “It’s Time for a U.S.-Greenland Free Association Agreement.” Its co-author was Tom Dans, an investor and former Commissioner of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission, who last year founded an organization called American Daybreak that helped finance the highly publicized visit by JD Vance and his wife, Usha, in March. In the article, the authors cite “Russian and Chinese adventurism” in the Arctic as a security concern for the U.S., and list among the benefits for Greenlanders the option “to reside and work in the United States and be eligible for Federal programs and services.”

In the wake of America’s overtures, some Danes I spoke to complained that “they” don’t like “us” anyway, so why not just sell the island to the Americans? In February, the Danish-Greenlandic novelist Nikolaj Andersen Olsvig told a Danish newspaper that “the narrative of the Danes being the root of all evil” is prevalent among Greenlanders, claiming that “a particular attitude toward colonialism has been brought to Greenland rather than arisen there.” This idea is prevalent among many on the Danish right. The right-wing politician Morten Messerschmidt, blames a “small Greenlandic woke elite that feels oh-so-oppressed.” When Donald Trump Jr., following his trip to Greenland in January, told Fox News that Greenlanders are tired of being “treated like second- or third-class citizens,” Messerschimdt joined other Danish commentators in suggesting Greenlanders are just riding a wave of global anti-colonial sentiment. As the Norwegian literary critic Bernhard Ellefsen pointed out in the Danish newspaper Weekendavisen, these accusations fit within a broader anti-woke narrative that “seems to be thriving in the Danish public sphere.” They are the implicit outcries of Danes who perceive their country as a benign, or even worthy, colonizer.

Denmark’s postcolonial neglect of Greenland goes back much further than Trump or Frederiksen, of course. If many Danes are indifferent to Greenland, it is partly because generations of Danish political leaders have failed to explain what purpose the Danish Realm serves — or, for that matter, envision an alternative arrangement that takes into account Greenland’s move toward independence. Over time, this failure has become a collective one: the failure of most Danes to acknowledge and take an interest in the lives of Greenlanders — who remain, after all, their fellow citizens. In January, the Danish government announced a new, 12-step action plan to combat racism against Greenlanders in Denmark; it has also scrapped the parenting competency tests for Greenlanders in Denmark. But as my friend told me recently, these sudden concessions to longstanding requests are seen as a nakedly transparent attempt to save face. Asked about Donald Trump Jr., Aka Hansen, an Inuit filmmaker and activist, told The Guardian, “I am afraid nothing would have happened, had he not been here.”