It’s hard to avoid America these days in Greenland. In downtown Nuuk, the capital, an electronic news ticker streams near-constant updates on the Trump administration’s fixation on acquiring this Danish territory. Even before retaking office in January, Donald Trump called owning the island “an absolute necessity” for U.S. security, and the push has steadily intensified. A few days before Vice President JD Vance made a hasty visit last month, two American Hercules airplanes emerged over the city. The pair droned across a nearby mountain and over a neighborhood in the commercial port. Then, just as quickly, they were gone.
For decades, Greenland’s primary political goal has been greater independence from Denmark, which colonized the island for over 200 years. Most Greenlanders have no interest in being American, but that doesn’t mean Mr. Trump’s volley of threats to take over the territory is easy to ignore. Greenland, which has largely governed itself since 2009, still relies on Denmark for security, foreign policy and a substantial chunk of money, among other things. That helps with the expensive task of caring for a population of over 56,000 scattered around the perimeter of the world’s largest island.
Since World War II, the free world has organized itself around American leadership and all that entails, including free trade, a nuclear security umbrella and the occasional ill-considered war. The sudden changes wrought by President Trump, notably his gamble that America’s economic and military might is more powerful than its position atop a globalized world, has forced many countries to reconsider their bedrock alliances. Do they want to stay allied with an unpredictable America? A resource-hungry China? Or build something entirely new?
How the global reassessment plays out will go a long way toward telling us, as the unipolar 20th century slips away, who will be the dominant power — or powers — of the 21st century. So far, the portents aren’t good if you’re sitting in Washington. America’s rejection of much of the world since Jan. 20 has generated a sense of strength, energy and purpose among its former friends. Leaders abroad are standing up to Mr. Trump, and their voters are responding. Small powers are thinking anew about how to secure their own futures through a broader mix of alliances and relationships.
A year ago, most Greenlanders wanted the United States, a longtime friend that already has a military base here, to continue to be part of their future. Now they are thinking — and who else? Canada, Europe, China and Russia all have interests in the Arctic, its geostrategic position and its natural resources, as do international blocs such as NATO and the Arctic Council. Whom Greenlanders choose to do business with — economically, politically and socially — will tell us a lot about the coming global realignment.
Since January, Greenlanders have faced the same questions many Americans have asked themselves: What, exactly, does Mr. Trump want? Are his overtures a starting position to negotiate better access to its minerals or a better security deal, or is acquiring Greenland now American policy? How serious the U.S. president is about annexing an ally — and how far he might go to get it — has generated a wave of mixed emotions: disbelief, anxiety, anger, defiance, pride.
Greenlanders are mostly Indigenous Inuit, and many have long wanted their island to be an independent state, although opinions differ on how and when that should happen. Today, talk of independence has seen an openness and urgency that feels new, many people told me during a recent visit. If the world is watching Greenland, can this historic wave of attention be harnessed to rethink its relationship with America — and get it closer to where it wants to be in the world?
***
Last month, in his first speech to Congress of his second term, Mr. Trump delivered a message to Greenland: “We strongly support your right to determine your own future, and if you choose, we welcome you into the United States of America.” Then he added, “I think we’re going to get it,” and, lowering his voice to a jokey, tough-guy growl: “One way or the other, we’re going to get it.” Behind him, Mr. Vance and the House speaker, Mike Johnson, smiled and laughed.
The joke didn’t land in Nuuk. On a snowy morning in a neighborhood at the edge of town, Aqqaluk Lynge paced around his bright, airy kitchen, the morning’s icebergs floating by outside the window. He pointed to a map laid out on the table — the Arctic Circle, seen from above, and tapped the vast land mass of Greenland. “We own this country. We own the resources. We own everything,” he said.
For Mr. Lynge, a writer and politician who has campaigned for Greenland’s autonomy for decades, watching Mr. Trump’s speech was one in a string of betrayals the United States has inflicted since January. He thinks the daily threat has forced Greenlanders to reconsider the bigger picture of their security. While he wants to see an independent Greenland stay within the Danish commonwealth, it may also have to consider full membership with the European Union. The territory withdrew from the union’s predecessor, the European Community, in the 1980s but remains associated with the bloc. “We are not about to isolate,” he said. “We will have to open up for the rest of the world, and that’s what we want.”
America’s interest in Greenland dates back to a string of musings and proposals to acquire the island — in 1867, 1910, 1946 and, of course, in 2019, during Mr. Trump’s first term. The United States has had a security agreement with Denmark since 1951, which allows it to maintain a base on the island that is critical to the U.S. missile defense system. Fears in Washington over the ability of both Russia and China to more easily navigate sea routes near Greenland have intensified recently — the U.S. Coast Guard has two polar icebreakers in operation; Russia has about 40 — as has interest in the island’s trove of critical minerals. Greenland is even reportedly being eyed by American tech investors as a potential site for a libertarian utopia.
In some circles in Washington, Mr. Trump’s focus on expanding U.S. control in the Western Hemisphere is a natural response to all of the above. If the United States does not gain more influence in an independence-minded Greenland, others will, says Alexander Gray, a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, a foreign-policy think tank in Washington. America can’t afford to sit back and watch China get a foothold in Greenland like it did in Panama, he said, referring to Chinese influence there. “They’re not going to have the capacity, as an independent state, to withstand Chinese and Russian malign influence — even if they want to, which I’m sure they do,” he said. “They just don’t have the capacity to do it.”
It’s true that Beijing has clocked Greenland’s importance. So far, Chinese investment in the island has been limited. In 2019, a Chinese company withdrew its bid to build two airports in Greenland after the United States reportedly objected to the idea. But Greenland has played an active part in this dynamic, sending delegations to talk to construction companies in Beijing and to mining conferences in China. Greenland has large deposits of rare earths, the minerals crucial for all manner of critical industries, including electric vehicles, iPhones and military hardware, and China controls a vast majority of the world’s capacity to refine them.
“What Europe and the United States have failed to do through decades is developing that technology,” said Svend Hardenberg, the general manager in Greenland for Energy Transition Minerals, an international company listed on the Australian stock exchange that has both American and Chinese investors as partial owners. (The company is currently in a dispute with Greenland’s government after passage of a law that bans the mining of uranium, which can be a byproduct of mining rare earths.) That means for now, “Every rare earth project in the world will have to go to China,” Mr. Hardenberg said.
A poll published in December found most Greenlanders wanted to protect the economy from China. The countries and groups that topped the list of entities people wanted more cooperation with were Iceland, Canada, the Arctic Council, Denmark and the European Union. The United States came in below all of these, but nobody I met suggested cutting ties with America altogether. Some even saw Mr. Trump’s overtures as good publicity.
It’s a mistake to think of Greenlanders as passive bystanders, says Rebecca Pincus, a former Arctic strategy adviser to the U.S. Department of Defense. “They have choices — and they have opportunities right now — because of this multipolar context,” she said. Copenhagen remains in charge of Greenland’s foreign policy, but last year, Greenland’s government issued its first foreign policy strategy, which emphasized the importance of Arctic relations. That might suggest deeper ties to Canada, Ms. Pincus said, given their close geographic and Inuit connections. “It is scary to be a very tiny state, a very tiny country, in the midst of all of this flux,” she said. “It’s a very fraught opportunity.”
***
Jane Lund Plesner remembers the day she spotted her first big discovery. She was flying not far from where she grew up in southern Greenland, scanning the rocks. “It looked very rusty — that’s usually a good sign,” recalled Ms. Plesner, a geologist who oversees copper exploration for Amaroq Minerals, one of the few companies actively mining in Greenland today. When she landed, she could see rock after rock that had all the signs of a virgin and promising deposit of copper, one of the world’s highly sought-after minerals. “It’s really cool finding something new, right?” she said. “In your own country!”
A large part of the frenetic buzz around Greenland has centered on the island’s largely untapped mineral wealth. The mining industry has been slow to get going for several reasons, ranging from opposition to projects’ potential environmental impacts to the daunting logistics of the Arctic. But as Greenland’s retreating ice reveals untouched rock, and the global scramble for critical minerals intensifies, many see natural resource extraction as an important potential source of jobs and revenue to help replace the $600 million in subsidies that Denmark gives Greenland each year. Finding replacement income eventually winds its way into most discussions about independence, and therefore, so does mining.
Mining in Greenland isn’t easy, but it’s not impossible, either. From Washington, it took me three flights and a blustery helicopter ride over a network of fjords, mountains and glaciers to reach Nalunaq, a gold mine in southern Greenland operated by Amaroq, which is headquartered in Canada and has investors in Britain, Iceland, Denmark and North America. In a country that’s largely unconnected by roads, it’s a complicated undertaking.
When Eldur Olafsson, Amaroq’s founder and chief executive, first started seriously considering mining in Greenland, he studied what had worked, and what hadn’t. “You needed to show you could operate, not only to the country itself and the people, but just to the general market,” Mr. Olafsson said, sitting in a Thai restaurant in Qaqortoq, a small town not far from the mine site. “How do you do things? How do you build things? How do you operate within the community?” Mr. Olafsson, who is from Iceland, has an expansive vision: As Nalunaq profits, he hopes it will fund Amaroq’s exploration of more gold and nickel, rare earths and copper, like Ms. Plesner spotted. The more his company finds, the more other companies will follow, the thinking goes, and the more his shareholders and Greenland will benefit.
After dinner, Mr. Olafsson stopped into a white church on a hill to listen to a men’s choir that Amaroq is sponsoring to perform in Iceland. A small model of a fishing boat hangs from the ceiling beams over the church aisle. Fishing is still one of the biggest businesses in southern Greenland, as it is across the island, but the local economy has struggled. A lot of people leave for Nuuk or Denmark. Many in Qaqortoq hope that mining, one day, will give people a reason to stay.
After the group ran through their songs, including an excellent rendition of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” in Greenlandic, one choir member, Ajo Christian Lynge Hard, had a question. “What do you think of your new president?” he asked me. I asked him instead what he thought of my new president. He responded with two thumbs down. “You can tell him we are not for sale,” said Mr. Hard. “Trying to buy a land and its people is not right.”
***
On a Saturday, the dinner shift was getting ready to start in Sarfalik, a high-end restaurant in downtown Nuuk. Aggu Broberg, a sous chef, held up a small, diaphanous sphere on a string: the gizzard of a ptarmigan, a small game bird, that’s been dried and inflated. Traditionally, Greenlanders removed the herbs that ptarmigans eat and store in this tiny organ to use for tea and freshen up their homes, says Mr. Broberg, who is 31. These days, he and his colleagues use the herbs to make homemade schnapps and ice cream. “We’re just trying something new.”
Mr. Broberg is part of a local food scene that’s gaining traction thanks in part to a community of chefs doing interesting things with traditional food, and also to the growing number of visitors who want to eat it. Mining may be decades away from being able to transform Greenland’s economy, but tourism is already taking off — and fast. Thousands of cruise ship passengers pour into Nuuk and smaller towns each summer; this year, an American airline is set to start direct flights to Nuuk from the United States for the first time. There’s a short window to make sure the people who benefit from the boom are Greenlanders — for tourists to eat local food, hire local tourism outfits and fly home with a deeper understanding of the island and its Inuit culture.
“People always talk about, ‘How can Greenland actually become independent?’” said Casper Frank Moller, the chief executive and a founder of Raw Arctic, a new tourism company based in Nuuk. “I think one of the things that we can actually offer and lift ourselves is the tourism.”
The government is trying to manage this growth to ensure it doesn’t overwhelm the tiny population. A new tourism law emphasizes local ownership, and in Nuuk, the municipality has been holding meetings to hear from citizens on how it should develop to accommodate more visitors.
“We are trying not to be too fast. We want the citizens to be a part of this,” said Avaaraq Olsen, the mayor of Sermersooq municipality, in which Nuuk is located. It’s a priority in a former colony that was left out of decisions about development and growth for too long. “I think we’ve learned from what hasn’t been done for many years. For many, many years, Greenlanders have just been witnessing the modernization and the fast development in the country.”
So much in Nuuk feels new — buildings are flying up around town — but the past is never far away. Colonization here, as in most parts of the world, has left a complicated legacy, including entrenched social problems, that, while not unique to the island, take a toll on a small society. The government, for instance, places a relatively large number of children in institutions or foster care, partly because the social welfare system is modeled on Denmark’s and doesn’t “reflect the culture,” said Bonnie Jensen, an associate professor at the University of Greenland. In a population of fewer than 57,000 people, having around 800 kids in out-of-home care has an outsized impact, she says. So does the island’s growing homelessness problem. At a shelter near Nuuk’s harbor, a staff member said the beds were filled by people who have moved from small towns to the capital looking for work. In keeping with house rules, she has to turn people away if they are drunk or high, even on the coldest days of winter.
Decolonization, as in other parts of the world, has become a big topic in recent years, particularly among the younger generation, says David Ottosen, a photographer and student at the University of Greenland. “That’s a big one for us here — coming to terms with our Greenland and Danish relation and our dynamic and dysfunction,” he explained. “I think that kind of spills into a lot of issues in our country.”
People talk about a growing sense of polarization, particularly when it comes to relations with Denmark. Parliamentary elections in March were partly a referendum on domestic issues like health care and the economy, but their results reflected two different stances when it comes to independence. Demokraatit, the pro-business party that won the largest share of seats, favors a more gradual path toward independence as Greenland gets its economy in better shape. Naleraq, the party that came in second, would like to see negotiations with Denmark over independence begin more quickly.
“All the other political parties will say, ‘We have too many social problems. We’re not entirely self-sufficient,’” said Juno Berthelsen, a head of office in Greenland’s Foreign Affairs Ministry who ran for a parliamentary seat with Naleraq. He doesn’t believe these things should hold Greenland back. “We want to be in charge of our own future on all areas, also security and defense and foreign affairs,” he said. “The sooner we start, the better.”
The Trump administration has been fanning the longstanding tensions between Danes and Greenlanders as it mobilizes officials in Washington to come up with a financial plan and public relations push to acquire the island from Denmark. Copenhagen has stood firm, announcing in January more than $2 billion in new investment in Arctic security; this month, the Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, visited the territory in a show of solidarity with Greenland’s new government.
On my last day in Nuuk, I bought a ticket on a small boat that carried a group of mostly Danish sightseers into a fjord outside the city. The driver navigated slowly between bright blue icebergs and stopped for a little while to let his customers fish for cod and red fish in the dark, still water. Before heading back, we pulled up to an isolated cluster of holiday homes atop a hill, where a young couple climbed down a rocky slope and boarded the boat to get a ride back to town.
The woman, Julia Aka Wille, writes about the social problems in Greenland for a national newspaper, Sermitsiaq, and was home for a break from her studies in Denmark. She thinks she and her fellow citizens soon will have answers to some of Greenland’s toughest questions, including how it can manage its own affairs without Denmark’s help.
“I feel our confidence in ourselves is getting stronger and stronger, better and better,” she said, sitting in the back of the boat as it sped back toward the capital. “Every Greenlander’s goal is to be the master of our own house.”
Krista Mahr is the international senior editor for Opinion. Damon Winter is a staff photographer on assignment for Opinion.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post I Caught a Glimpse of the New World Order in Greenland appeared first on New York Times.
