Trump is talking about Greenland again

2025 is ending much as it began: with President Donald Trump talking about annexing Greenland.

On Sunday, Trump appointed Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry as a special envoy to Greenland with the goal, as Landry put it, “to make Greenland a part of the US.” Though the territory has been moving gradually toward greater independence, Greenland has been under Danish rule since the 18th century. “We need Greenland for national protection,” Trump told reporters on Monday.

The move provoked a sharp response from the prime ministers of Denmark and Greenland, who said in a joint statement: “National borders and the sovereignty of states are rooted in international law. … You cannot annex other countries.” Other European leaders have weighed in, as well, with French President Emmanuel Macron reaffirming that “France’s unwavering support for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Denmark and Greenland.”

Trump has been talking about either buying or annexing the world’s largest island since 2019, during his first term. He brought up the issue again last January, when he raised alarm in European capitals by refusing to rule out using military force to take the territory if necessary. But, while he once described control of Greenland as an “absolute necessity” for US national security, the issue had been on the back burner for most of this year until Landry’s appointment, with the exception of occasional flare-ups over alleged US influence operations targeting the island.

Trump’s Greenland fixation had once seemed somewhat random. Danish leaders initially hoped it was a joke. But after a year of seeing Trump’s second term foreign policy in action — particularly the recent release of his administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS) — the Greenland gambit now seems to actually serve his broader goals. It makes a lot more sense in the context of the president’s surprisingly activist vision of America’s role in the world.

Greenland fits into the administration’s heavy focus on the Western Hemisphere and what the NSS calls the “Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine” to “deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere.”

Explaining Greenland’s security importance on Monday, Trump said, “If you look up and down the coast of Greenland, you can see Russian and Chinese ships all over the place.” It’s true that the Arctic is increasingly becoming an area of strategic competition, as melting ice makes it more accessible, and that China and Russia have been building up military and commercial assets in the region, though neither has done so particularly close to Greenland.

Critics routinely point out that Greenland’s strategic importance is not an argument for actually controlling it. The US already has a military base in Greenland, and the Danes have made clear they’re not opposed to an expanded US military presence. The Danish government has, in the past, blocked Chinese commercial interests in Greenland, in part out of a desire to maintain good relations with Washington.

But having Greenland under the control of a friendly European government is no comfort to this White House. In the worldview laid out in the NSS, liberal European governments are viewed as a threat to American interests on par with if not greater than China and Russia. In a recent interview, Vice President JD Vance even questioned whether European governments with “destructive moral ideas” could be trusted with nuclear weapons.

The NSS calls for promoting “patriotic” (i.e., right-wing) parties in Europe, and an earlier draft reportedly called for urging countries to pull away from the European Union. An effort to peel away strategically important territory close to North America from European control is very much in keeping with this effort. 

As political scientist Abraham Newman recently told Vox, Trump’s territorial threats against Greenland and other US neighbors like Canada are very much in keeping with a “neo-royalist” worldview, which rejects the notion that all countries have equal sovereignty. “It’s about dominance, about saying [to Canada and Denmark], ‘You are not equal to us,’” Newman said.

The seemingly unusual appointment of Landry — who has little foreign policy experience and is staying in office as governor of Louisiana as he takes on this new role — is also in keeping with a Trump diplomatic approach that is more often conducted through a semi-formal network of allies and loyalists, rather than through the traditional US foreign policy bureaucracy. An old friend of Trump’s, the cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder, may have been the one who initially planted the idea of controlling Greenland in his head.

Finally, Trump may have said this week that US interest in Greenland is “not for its minerals,” but it’s been widely reported that Lauder and other Trump associates have been working to sell him on the potential riches beneath Greenland’s soil. Greenland is believed to have large deposits of oil, as well as a variety of minerals, including the rare earth elements that China currently has a near monopoly over. If nothing else, the events of this year have driven home the fact that US options on China policy are limited as long as that monopoly continues.

Again, US companies can exploit these resources (and to some extent, they already are) without Greenland actually being part of the US. But under Trump, the US has taken a stake in foreign chip sales, tied diplomacy in Ukraine to minerals concessions, and made retaking Venezuelan oil fields an explicit aim of the US military build-up targeting that country. The line between commercial interests and security goals is far more porous under this administration than it has been in the past.

The US actually taking control of Greenland still seems like an extreme long shot. There’s little indication that Greenlanders want to join this US or will be swayed by Landry’s charm offensive.

But, as a campaign to take control of a mineral rich region pushed by his business partners and carried out by his ideological allies while cementing American dominance in the Western Hemisphere and undermining European sovereignty in the process, it feels today less like an eccentric deviation for Trump’s foreign policy than a neat distillation of it.

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