On the menu today: I doubt it will ever come to pass, but sometimes President-elect Donald Trump is like a dog with a bone — he just keeps going at it. With just 25 days until Inauguration Day, Trump is bringing up his dream of purchasing the giant, sparsely populated, mineral-rich, and darn cold island of Greenland from Denmark. There’s simultaneously a genuine U.S. geopolitical advantage at stake — but also a sparsely populated, vast frozen island whose economy is currently dependent on subsidies from Denmark.
Here We Know That Christmas Will Be Greenland and Bright . . .
On Christmas Day, President-elect Trump shared on Truth Social his wishes for a merry Christmas “to the people of Greenland, which is needed by the United States for National Security purposes and, who want the U.S. to be there, and we will! . . .”
On December 22, Trump announced Ken Howery as his choice for U.S. ambassador to Denmark; Howery was the co-founder of PayPal and the Founders Fund, and he served as Trump’s ambassador to Sweden in his first term. Trump added, “For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.”
Good luck, Ken!
The notion of purchasing Greenland is one of Trump’s recurring favorites. Apparently, we have a cosmetics heir to thank for this lingering geopolitical controversy.
The notion came from Ronald S. Lauder, the New York cosmetics heir who had known Mr. Trump since college. “A friend of mine, a really, really experienced businessman, thinks we can get Greenland,” Mr. Trump told his national security adviser. “What do you think?”
That led to a special team being assigned to evaluate the prospects, resulting in a memo that laid out various options, including a lease proposal akin to a New York real estate deal. . . .
Greenland was one issue that absorbed the National Security Council staff for months. Mr. Trump later claimed the idea was his personal inspiration. “I said, ‘Why don’t we have that?’” he recalled in an interview last year for the book. “You take a look at a map. I’m a real estate developer. I look at a corner, I say, ‘I’ve got to get that store for the building that I’m building,’ etc. It’s not that different.”
He added: “I love maps. And I always said: ‘Look at the size of this. It’s massive. That should be part of the United States.’”
But in fact, Mr. Lauder discussed it with him from the early days of the presidency and offered himself as a back channel to the Danish government to negotiate. John R. Bolton, the national security adviser, assigned his aide Fiona Hill to assemble a small team to brainstorm ideas. They engaged in secret talks with Denmark’s ambassador and produced an options memo.
Mr. Bolton, concerned about expanding Chinese influence in the Arctic, thought that an increased American presence in Greenland made sense but that an outright purchase was not feasible. Mr. Trump kept pushing. He suggested taking federal money from Puerto Rico, which he disparaged, and using it to buy Greenland. On another occasion, he suggested outright trading Puerto Rico for Greenland.
Arkansas Republican senator Tom Cotton wrote in 2019, “I myself raised the prospect of acquiring Greenland with the Danish ambassador just last year.”
Back in the summer of 2019, after the then newly appointed Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen made clear that Greenland is not for sale, Trump tweeted, “Denmark is a very special country with incredible people, but based on Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s comments, that she would have no interest in discussing the purchase of Greenland, I will be postponing our meeting scheduled in two weeks for another time.”
Expanding on his remarks, Trump later added, “I look forward to going, but I thought that the Prime Minister’s statement that it was absurd that wasn’t — it was an absurd idea, was nasty. I thought it was an inappropriate statement. All she had to do is say, ‘no, we wouldn’t be interested.’ But we can’t treat the United States of America the way they treated us under President Obama. I thought it was a very not nice way of saying something.” Danes found the abrupt cancellation of the state visit bewildering.
Some basics: Greenland’s population is roughly 56,000, which means every last citizen of Greenland could sit in any NFL stadium with seats to spare. About 88 percent are Greenlandic Inuit, indigenous peoples traditionally inhabiting the Arctic and subarctic regions of North America, and “the majority of the people speak the Inuit language, Kalaallisut, which is the official language, while the second language of the country is Danish.”
Greenland covers nearly 840,000 square miles; more than 80 percent of the land is covered either by the Arctic polar ice cap or glaciers. It is the size of three Texases, or one and a quarter Alaskas.
Greenland is an autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark, which means it elects its own parliament but also has two representatives in the Danish parliament. This leads to an unusual quasi-independent status: “Greenlandic representatives join Danish delegations at the United Nations, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and European Union (EU). While Greenland has overseas country and territory status with the EU, the island is not a member.”
In 2008, Greenland voted in a nonbinding referendum for greater self-government and expanded home rule; 76 percent voted for greater independence from Denmark.
Greenland’s prime minister, Múte Egede, issued a statement shortly before Christmas, “Greenland is ours. We are not for sale and will never be for sale. We must not lose our long struggle for freedom.”
(I wonder how many Greenland citizens know that residents of certain U.S. territories acquire citizenship at birth and are then free to travel and work in the United States.)
In 2020, after Trump’s comments about purchasing the island, the U.S. reopened its consulate in Nuuk, Greenland, for the first time in 67 years. Also that year, the U.S. announced that the Agency for International Development would provide $12.1 million for projects in Greenland, focused on economic development, including the mineral industry, tourism, and education. The locals welcomed the investment but insisted they did not see it as a down payment on a purchase of the island.
I hate to disrupt a good controversy with facts, but the U.S. already plays a significant role in the national defense and economy of Greenland. The island is the location of the Pentagon’s northernmost installation, Pituffik Space Base (pronounced “bee-doo-FEEK”), formerly known as Thule Air Base:
Pituffik SB’s “Top of the World” vantage point enables Space Superiority. Pituffik SB supports missile warning, missile defense, and space surveillance missions from the solid-state phased-array radar operated by the Twelfth Space Warning Squadron (12 SWS) and Satellite Command and Control through the Pituffik Tracking Station operated by the 23rd Space Operations Squadron, Detachment One (Det-1).
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, New York District, builds the structures for this base, designed to handle the harsh Arctic climate; “Construction takes place during the summer and autumn months when the temperature is a ‘balmy’ 40 degrees Fahrenheit.”
The U.S. National Science Foundation conducts research on the Greenland ice sheets.
Finally, there’s a whole lot of valuable stuff underneath those glaciers and frozen ground and off the shores, according to the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources, including rare earth elements and uranium, and “assessments suggest there is a huge potential for oil exploitation in the waters off Greenland.”
The recent Danish government decision for a defense “buildup” in Greenland was planned long before Trump’s recent statements.
Danish defense minister Troels Lund Poulsen said the package was a “double digit billion amount” in krone, or at least $1.5 billion.
Poulsen said the package would allow for purchasing two new inspection ships, two new long-range drones, and two extra dog sled teams.
It would also include funding for increased staffing at Arctic Command in the capital, Nuuk, and an upgrade for one of Greenland’s three main civilian airports to handle F-35 supersonic aircraft.
“We have not invested enough in the Arctic for many years, now we are planning a stronger presence,” he said.
Sled dogs! You can watch a 2013 video here about “Slædepatruljen Sirius (Sirius Sled Patrol) or informally Siriuspatruljen (Sirius Patrol),” a “unique elite Danish navy unit that conducts long-range reconnaissance patrolling, and enforces Danish sovereignty in the arctic wilderness of Northern, and Eastern Greenland, an area that includes the largest national park in the world. Patrolling is usually done in pairs, sometimes for 4 months often without additional human contact.”
The U.S. has purchased large swaths of land throughout its history, from the Louisiana Purchase to Florida to Texas to Alaska; in fact, the U.S. purchased the Virgin Islands from Denmark for $25 million in gold coins back in 1917.
Nor is this the first time an American president has inquired about the availability of Greenland for purchase. In 1946, President Harry S. Truman secretly sought to buy Greenland from the Danes.
The United States in 1946 proposed to pay Denmark $100 million to buy Greenland after flirting with the idea of swapping oil-rich land in Alaska for strategic parts of the bleak Arctic island, documents in the National Archives show.
The $100 million was to be in gold. And even though the sale did not go through, the United States ended up with the military bases it wanted anyway.
A State Department memo at the time declared, “The control of Greenland is indispensable to the safety of the United States.”
ADDENDUM: You’ll want to read this essay from our CEO, Chuck DeFeo:
In 2025, we will commemorate the centennial of William F. Buckley Jr., a man whose vision gave birth to the modern conservative movement. At a time when conservatism seemed all but lost — fractured and uncertain — Buckley rose to create something entirely new. He united diverse voices under a single banner and provided a philosophy rooted in liberty, tradition, and moral courage. It was a movement born not of nostalgia but of audacity and conviction.
And if you haven’t read it yet, the special issue of the print magazine, marking Buckley at 100, is a must-read.