The president has infuriated NATO allies and left Greenland’s foreign minister in tears
A few months after the 2020 election, New York Times reporter Peter Baker and his wife, the New Yorker’s Susan Glasser, traveled down to Mar-a-Lago to interview Donald Trump for their book “The Divider.” As Glasser wrote in the New Yorker on Jan. 8, they asked him in passing about his odd desire to take over Greenland, revelations of which had briefly appeared in the press and which they’d also heard about from some of his former staff. Trump told them he’d looked at the map and wondered, “Why don’t we have that?… Look at the size of this, it’s massive, and that should be part of the United States. It’s not different from a real-estate deal. It’s just a little bit larger, to put it mildly.”
It’s been speculated, notably by MSNOW’s Chris Hayes, that Trump was looking at the Mercator Projection map that we probably all remember from our grade school geography textbooks. For a variety of technical reasons, this navigation map distorts the size of the land masses near the poles. But it’s possible that Trump doesn’t know that and instead thinks that Greenland is about the size of the African continent. Greenland is about 25% bigger than Alaska, but it isn’t that big.
The president apparently got the idea of annexing Greenland from cosmetic heir Ronald Lauder, who seems to have a special interest in mineral deals both there and in Ukraine, and has been pushing Trump on the notion for years. Lauder offered to be a secret envoy to Denmark to try to make the deal. During his first term, Trump even floated a proposal to trade Puerto Rico for Greenland, as if he were playing marbles on the playground. At the time it was just another one of his kooky ideas that went nowhere, largely because the people around him were able to give him another shiny object to chase. But Trump obviously has never forgotten it, and over the past year he has shown a pathological determination to dominate the Western hemisphere, starting with his obsession for turning Canada into the 51st state, his recent incursion into Venezuela and, now, his renewed threats against Greenland, which have ratcheted up in the last few weeks.
Trump claims that the United States has to have Greenland for national security purposes because the Arctic is under threat from Russia and China. The U.S., he has said, must possess the island in order to prevent them from taking it. But his administration is not the first to notice Greenland’s strategic value, which is why there have been friendly treaties and agreements regarding it between Europe and the United States for many decades. As a semiautonomous Danish territory, Greenland is protected by NATO, which would not only marshal the U.S. military to respond to any attack but would also rally the alliance’s other 31 countries.
If the U.S. or Trump’s pals want to make deals for mineral rights, they are free to do so. There is no reason that anyone other than Greenlanders themselves must “own” the island. But as Trump told the New York Times, he feels ownership is “psychologically needed for success” — whatever that means — so he is determined to either get the people of Greenland and Denmark to give or sell the island to him, or to take it by force.
