How much land does a man need? — Leo Tolstoy —o0o—
US President Donald Trump has long been salivating excessively over Greenland, to the point of touting nuanced alibis to justify his personal fixation to annex the world’s biggest island.
For centuries, Greenland (2.17 M square kilometers, mostly ice) has been a part of Denmark, which is a key ally of the US and Europe. But for many years too, the US has been cooking up ways to gobble up Greenland because of its strategic geographical location and resources.
In his first term as president, Trump already floated the idea of acquiring Greenland through purchase but Denmark rejected the idea.
Now in his second presidency, and relishing his recent success in deposing and kidnapping Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro, Donald Trump is more aggressive in seizing Greenland “one way or another.” He said he is ready to use military force to do it—even at the price of breaking up NATO.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, for 74 years, did not contemplate the scenario that one NATO member would attack another. This is because an attack on a member country is considered an attack on all of NATO, and everybody is mandated to help defend the one attacked.
The only time this was tested was during the World Trade Center attack on 9-11, and the United States composed the Coalition of the Willing to fight Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. Denmark was active in this coalition, sending its soldiers to that war for America, several of them dying in the process.
Through the years, the US has studied and tried to acquire Greenland through purchase or barter. These were in 1867, 1910, 1946, 1955, 2019 and most recently, 2025 and this year.
In 1910, the US Ambassador to Denmark Maurice Francis Egan and his Danish friends pushed the idea to trade Mindanao and Palawan for Greenland and the Danish West Indies. After this, Denmark could then barter Mindanao and Palawan to Germany for Northern Schleswig, a Danish territory that was annexed by Prussia in 1864.
This barter arrangement did not materialize, mainly because Denmark did not want to let go of Greenland. After the defeat of Germany in World War 2, Denmark was finally able to regain Northern Schleswig following the 1920 Schleswig plebiscites.
Still from Wikipedia, as in the above, there was another attempt by the United States in 1902 to take Greenland during its purchase of the Danish West Indies, which the US renamed the Virgin Islands.
Then Secretary of State Robert Lansing proposed that the issues of Greenland and the Danish West Indies be combined. After the sale, Lansing signed a treaty appendix saying that the US “will not object to the Danish government extending their political and economic interests to the whole of Greenland.”
There is another angle to the West’s obsession to acquire Greenland. In 1917, John Douglas Hazen proposed at the Imperial War Conference that the British Empire buy Greenland for Canada to prevent the United States from acquiring it.
Denmark formally declared sovereignty over all of Greenland in 1921. Norway renewed a claim to Erik the Red’s Land in 1931, but two years later the Permanent Court of International Justice ruled against Norway, finding that the claim had been transferred to Denmark in 1814.
Trump is ready to erase these historical claims and maneuvers to acquire Greenland by just a tweet or an interview pronouncement in Air Force One.
The POTUS said anything less than US control of Greenland is “unacceptable.” He said Greenland is vital for the Golden Dome that the US is building, meaning the American national security.
Trump believes that NATO should help him get Greenland because “if we don’t, Russia or China will, and that is not going to happen!”
There is a common thread that binds Venezuela, Greenland, and other countries that Donald Trump wanted to control—Mexico, Cuba, Panama, Iran and Iceland. It is the fact that US imperialism is very much alive not just in the Western Hemisphere but also in the Middle East and Asia. And Trump is ramping up its aggression to a new and higher level, leveraging what he calls the mighty US military machine.
Meanwhile, the Inuit people, the Greenlanders, the Danish residents, the people of Venezuela, Iran and Gaza, and the rest of South America are all expendables.
