A war of words has erupted again over the Danish territory of Greenland amid the fallout from the US military overthrow of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on January 3. US President Donald Trump has repeatedly stated that Washington needs control over the territory and has not ruled out the possibility of taking it by force.
"We need Greenland," Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Jan. 4. "It's extremely strategically important right now. Greenland is covered in Russian and Chinese ships everywhere."
"Denmark won't be able to do that," he added.
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen responded on January 5, saying she would not "accept a situation where we and Greenland are threatened in this way." Referring to the fact that Greenland, as a Danish territory, is part of NATO, she added: "If the United States decides to militarily attack another NATO member country, then everything stops."
The current focus on Greenland represents the latest revival of Washington's long-standing interest in the territory, which the US first discussed purchasing from Denmark in the 1800s.
The 10th-century Norse explorer Erik the Red named the territory Greenland. The early settler chose the incongruous name for the territory, inhabited by indigenous Inuit, because, as he said, "it would attract people to go there if it had a favorable name."
The Norse settlements on Greenland did not survive. Researchers believe that the settlers fell victim to a changing climate and, among other hardships, economic upheavals caused by the plague. By 1721, when Danish missionaries first arrived on the island, only the Inuit population remained.
One missionary described the hardy Inuit of Greenland as a people so greedy for calories that they ate ears plucked from their own clothing. To avoid wasting minerals, he claimed, they would "scrape the sweat from their faces with a knife and lick it off."
Denmark declared sovereignty over Greenland in 1921 and imposed a trade monopoly with the island. The ban on outside traders allowed Copenhagen to purchase whale and seal blubber, a prized source of fuel for lanterns, strictly on its own terms.
During World War II, Denmark was invaded by Nazi Germany, leaving the Danish territory of Greenland open to potential German takeover.
George L. West, a U.S. Foreign Service officer, recalled that U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt “immediately decided that we must do something about Greenland.” American forces occupied the territory and secured its valuable cryolite mine.
Nazi operatives repeatedly attempted to set up secret weather stations in isolated parts of Greenland.
"It seems that a lot of your weather for Western Europe comes from that ice cap. From a military standpoint, it's invaluable to get weather reports from there," West explained, adding that part of the American mission in Greenland was to "find these [illegal Nazi weather stations] and destroy them."
The United States returned Greenland to Danish control after the war, but did not withdraw its troops. The two countries signed an agreement in 1951 that allowed Washington and the newly formed NATO military alliance to "improve and generally adapt the area for military use."
One of the American "research" facilities in Greenland was a front for Project Ice Worm, a planned network of nuclear missile launch sites beneath the Greenland ice sheet aimed at the Soviet Union.
The secret American nuclear facility was doomed from the start. Engineers struggled with the constant shifting ice that twisted and bent around silos designed to hold sensitive nuclear warheads, and it was abandoned in 1966. Radioactive waste from the site remains buried beneath the Greenland ice sheet.
Proposals to the United States to purchase Greenland date back to 1867, when Washington first seriously considered the idea.
A concrete offer for Greenland, worth about $1 billion today, was made to Copenhagen in 1946, which one senator described as a "military necessity" for the US.
The Danish Foreign Minister rejected the 1946 offer, replying that "although we owe America a great deal, I do not feel that we owe them the entire island of Greenland."
During Trump's first term in office in 2019, the US president repeatedly proposed that the United States take over the territory. Those ideas were largely rejected.
However, after he made the territory a priority in his second term, Denmark apparently responded by increasing the prominence of the polar bear, which represents Greenland, on the Danish king's coat of arms and reiterating that the territory was not for sale.
Greenland today operates a number of its own institutions, including a parliament, but remains largely dependent on Denmark.
The territory receives nearly $600 million in aid from Copenhagen each year, a fund that represents more than half of Greenland's total state budget and is equivalent to more than $10.000 for each of the territory's 57.000 residents.
According to a 2025 poll, most Greenlanders support independence from Denmark, but about 85 percent of them oppose becoming a US territory.
The complexity of the geopolitical storm brewing over Greenland was summed up by the territory's prime minister, Mute Egede, who told reporters in January 2025: "We don't want to be Danes, we don't want to be Americans, we want to be Greenlanders."
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