But senior Danish officials also believe Trump’s territorial ambitions are, indeed, real, even if they aren’t based on practical objectives. They’re all about the untidiness of the map.
Trump regards the huge, empty foreign landmass to his northeast as an affront to American greatness — a piece of real estate that both Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine dictate should belong to the Land of the Free.
The U.S. president takes the same map-driven view of Canada. However, there he suspects the annexation of some 40 million people might be impossible or, at the very least, a long-term project. Grabbing a large island, with the population of a medium-sized town (56,000 Greenlanders) and 80 percent covered in ice, should be simpler.
And what about sovereignty or self-determination? When Trump was asked this back in January, he replied: “I’m sure Denmark will come along.” He also made no mention of the Greenlanders, 89 percent of whom are Inuit and 85 percent of whom rejected an American future in a January poll.
So, Danish officials are convinced the Trump White House is planning something — a view substantiated by a Wall Street Journal report in May about U.S. intelligence agencies trying to identify “useful” Greenlanders sympathetic to Trump’s agenda, as well as news that Denmark summoned a top U.S. diplomat in August to discuss reports of three American citizens with alleged links to Trump conducting covert operations in Greenland. Their objective, the Danish public broadcaster DR reported, was to foment ill feeling against Copenhagen.
Hence, the Danish government doesn’t expect a military invasion — it expects an invasion of dollars. Either as an outright offer to pay a large sum to each Greenlander, or a campaign to buy influence and local politicians. And the fear in Copenhagen is that a slow-motion land grab won’t provoke a strong enough response in Brussels or among its EU partners.