Inside the Ludicrous, Deadly Serious Plan to Take Over Greenland
On a Saturday afternoon in Nuuk, Greenland, last March, a thousand people walked down toward the harbor, to a small red cabin that bore the Great Seal of the United States—an eagle grasping an olive branch in one foot and thirteen arrows in the other. The air was freezing, and the town was bathed in the crisp Arctic light of a late-winter sun. After almost seven decades with no diplomatic presence in Greenland, the U.S. had opened a tiny consulate in 2020, during the pandemic; now, less than two months into Donald Trump’s second term as President, it was the site of the largest demonstration in Greenlandic history.
This piece was supported by the Pulitzer Center.
Even before Trump retook office, he had made clear his intent to annex Greenland. But, from the moment that he was sworn in, his fantasies and provocations became American foreign policy. “One way or another, we’re gonna get it,” he told a joint session of Congress. So five per cent of Nuuk’s residents stood before the consulate, beating traditional drums and chanting their country’s Inuit name: Kalaallit Nunaat. “Enough is enough,” they shouted. But no one from the State Department drew the blinds. It wasn’t clear that anyone was even there.
Across town, in the commercial center, a lone American handed out flyers. He wore a cowhide jacket and pants, mirrored sunglasses, and a black leather vest with a patch that read “Bikers for Trump.” He was tall and fit, with gray curls and a short mustache, and presented himself as a kind of unofficial ambassador—not of the U.S. government but of its President, whose cellphone number he claimed to have. “My name is Chris Cox. I’m from the United States, and I have come here to try to make some friends,” he said to an elderly Inuit man. “We are not looking at you like a tiger looks at a gazelle.”
Cox had founded Bikers for Trump in 2015, and the group had provided security at campaign rallies and at Trump’s first Inauguration—“a wall of meat,” as he put it, between protesters and the unlikely candidate who became President. When Trump lost the 2020 election, Cox spoke at a rally to call for overturning the result. “I, for one, will take the first bullet,” he said. “If there’s anybody out there from Antifa or Black Lives Matter, spend your first fuckin’ bullet in my chest.” But in Nuuk he struck a more conciliatory tone. “We are not biting at the chomps,” he said. “I just plan on doing the best we can to have an influence here.”
“He wasn’t really breaking any laws,” a senior Greenlandic police official told me later. But Cox’s interactions were inherently provocative. “Without knowing it, a lot of the Greenlanders are living in the Stone Age,” he told an Italian TV channel.
“I’m receiving a lot of death threats as a result of my work here in Greenland,” Cox noted, a few days into his trip. “People are looking at me like I’m a Russian with a machine gun right now, when they see the Trump patch.” By that point, Greenlanders had started wearing red caps with white text that read “Make America Go Away.” Nevertheless, Cox considered his mission to be fruitful. “I’ve got some suggestions for how we can clean this up,” he said, in a phone call from Nuuk to the Washington Times. “We need to change the hearts of some of these Greenlanders.”
Cox left Nuuk for Washington, D.C., where he claims to have briefed the White House and Republican lawmakers on his findings. He also did a prime-time interview with One America News Network, portraying Denmark, whose realm includes Greenland and the Faroe Islands, as an illegitimate colonial power that is committing “atrocities” against Greenlanders and “weaponizing” anti-Trump propaganda to turn people against the U.S. “Unfortunately, the natives, the Inuits and the Greenlanders, in my opinion, are suffering something we call, here in America, Stockholm syndrome,” he said.
According to Denmark’s national broadcaster, while Cox was in Nuuk, he made lists of Greenlanders who seemed open to annexation, and of those who obviously were not. He also solicited information on points of tension between Greenland and Denmark—examples of historical injustices that could be exploited for propaganda—and sought to recruit Greenlanders for a separatist movement, to tear apart the Kingdom of Denmark. Three months later, Trump appointed him to an advisory council at the Department of Homeland Security.
In recent months, the United States has kidnapped the President of Venezuela, launched a war with Iran, threatened Colombia, and started to move against Cuba. Trump’s obsession with Greenland has mostly slipped from the news. But Greenlanders worry that the war in Iran is only serving as a temporary reprieve; influence operations are ongoing, at Trump’s direction, and every so often he blurts out the stakes. During a rant about America’s European allies, Trump emphasized that his antipathy toward NATO“all began with, if you want to know the truth, Greenland. We want Greenland. They don’t want to give it to us, and I said, ‘Bye-bye!’ ”
The transatlantic alliance reflected a world that was designed and largely enforced by American power. Now, as American primacy fades, the U.S. government has embraced the predatory world view of its traditional opponents. Firepower matters more than values or alliances, and everything is in play. In December, the Danish Defence Intelligence Service noted that the U.S. has transformed into a nation that “uses economic power, including threats of high tariffs, to enforce its will, and no longer rules out the use of military force, even against allies.” Weeks later, Danish soldiers prepared to blow up Greenlandic runways, in case of a U.S. invasion.
“If the United States chooses to attack another NATO country militarily, then everything comes to an end—including NATO and, with it, the security that has been provided since the end of the Second World War,” Denmark’s Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, warned. She later added, “The world order as we know it—that we have been fighting for, for eighty years—is over, and I don’t think it will return.”
Around that time, Trump texted the Prime Minister of Norway, Jonas Gahr Støre; since he had not received the Nobel Peace Prize, he wrote, “I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace.” He then pivoted to Denmark’s claim to Greenland, which predates the founding of the U.S.: “Why do they have a ‘right of ownership’ anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also.” The message concluded, “The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland.”
During Trump’s first term, “Make America Great Again” primarily meant that the U.S. would withdraw from the world and shield against what he and his supporters perceived as external threats. But in his second term Trump has looked outward. In his Inaugural Address, he pledged to expand U.S. territory and to carry “our flag into new and beautiful horizons.” It is harder to remake what is already America into Trump’s vision of “greatness” than it is to make America merely bigger.
Greenland is the largest island in the world, but it has fewer than fifty-seven thousand residents, who are mostly scattered among settlements and towns along its western coast. Although it belongs to the Kingdom of Denmark, it lies to the west of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and is part of North America. The latest articulation of the U.S.’s National Security Strategy, published in November, frames Trump’s imperial ambitions as an extension of the Monroe Doctrine, the assertion by President James Monroe, in 1823, that any attempt by European powers to further colonize the Americas would be treated as “dangerous to our peace and safety.” Under Trump’s leadership, the N.S.S. says, “we will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere.”
But the elevated language of the N.S.S. obscures the fact that Trump’s pursuit of Greenland has always been in the hands of a few ideologues and opportunists. Along with Cox, the Danish government has identified two other Americans as running private “influence operations” in Greenland: a former venture capitalist and pecan farmer named Tom Dans and a former Army Special Forces commander named Drew Horn, who has sought to dominate Greenland’s rare-earth-mining sector. Both men served in Trump’s first Administration—Dans at the Treasury, Horn in the Office of the Vice-President, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Departments of Energy and Defense. But the Danish and Greenlandic governments were unaware that, during Trump’s first term, they had also represented their respective agencies on a secret National Security Council task force whose focus was the acquisition of Greenland.
A fourth man, Jørgen Boassen, is one of the very few Greenlanders who loudly support Trump; he spent much of the past year in self-imposed exile, floating between far-right American and European political gatherings, his travel and living expenses covered by American benefactors whom he refuses to identify. And then there is Trump himself, whose stated reasons for coveting Greenland do not stand up to scrutiny—except that he considers it “psychologically important,” as he recently put it to the New York Times, to own the territory rather than merely have military access to it, as the U.S. has had continuously, under a treaty with Denmark, since 1951.
European officials have been perplexed and outraged in recent months, unsure when or whether Trump will order the U.S. military to annex Greenland. But the reality is that the United States is now a country in which matters of war and peace are decided not among diplomatic or military experts, in the interests of the state, but through informal channels, by people whose personal proximity to the President—through family, business, donations, or flattery—is their principal qualification.
In January, the Times asked Trump if there were any limits to his global powers. “Yeah, there is one thing,” he replied. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
The first time Trump is known to have expressed an interest in Greenland was in late 2018, when he was seventy-two years old. He summoned his national-security adviser, John Bolton, to the Oval Office, and confided that his longtime friend Ronald Lauder had suggested that he buy the island. “He asked, What did I think of it?” Bolton recalled. “I said, ‘Well, we do have some security issues in the Arctic.’ And then I went through them and said, ‘There are probably a lot of ways to handle it. Let me do some research, and I’ll come back to you.’ ”
What followed “was all done in a slightly clandestine, cloak-and-dagger way,” Fiona Hill, who was serving as the senior director for Europe and Russia on the National Security Council, told me. Bolton summoned her to his office, but he wouldn’t say why. When she arrived, she found him ashen-faced, sitting next to a Coast Guard admiral who was serving as the White House’s homeland-security adviser. “Bolton said to us, ‘Look, Ron Lauder has told Trump he needs to buy Greenland, and we’ve got to head this off before he announces he’s buying Greenland to everybody,’ ” Hill said. “He didn’t want us to let anybody else know, not even within our directorates.” Bolton asked her to discreetly prepare a memo that presented more reasonable alternatives.
As Bolton saw it, the United States and its allies had been neglecting security in the Arctic region since the end of the Cold War. Although the U.S. had constructed seventeen military bases in Greenland during the Second World War, it started decommissioning them in the early fifties. Now the polar ice cap was melting, opening up potential Arctic sea lanes. Vladimir Putin had revived the Russian Navy, and had access to a large fleet of icebreakers. China was beginning to carry out state-funded scientific missions in the region, which could be useful for its commercial and military ambitions. The government in Beijing was also beginning to refer to China as a “near-Arctic state,” a designation that it invented and partly attributed to the fact that it borders an Arctic state. (The northernmost part of China is more than nine hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle.) One Chinese state-run entity even offered financing for three new runways and airports in Greenland.
The financing had come at Greenland’s request; after failing to persuade the Danish government to pay for the new airports, Greenland’s premier travelled to Beijing in 2017 and solicited more than half a billion dollars in funds. When U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis heard about the arrangement, he warned the Danish defense minister that China must not be allowed to gain a foothold on the North American side of the Arctic—especially with infrastructure projects that could be of use to the Chinese military. Denmark stepped in to block the Chinese loans, and pulled together the funds to finance the airports directly. Still, the incident rattled analysts in the White House and the Pentagon. Greenland had achieved self-rule in 2009, and appeared to be on a path toward independence. What would happen when Denmark—which maintained authority over Greenlandic security—could no longer intervene?
But Hill’s research proved reassuring to Bolton. She and an Arctic specialist at the State Department named Markus Thomi found that the United States, under the 1951 treaty with Denmark, already had de-facto military control of Greenland. The U.S. had taken over the defense of Greenland during the Second World War, and had preserved its military access through negotiations that allowed Denmark to become a founding member of NATO. Although the U.S. now maintained only a single base, in the far north, called Pituffik Space Base, for detecting and tracking incoming ballistic missiles from Russia, it could expand its presence in Greenland whenever—and pretty much however—it wanted to. All it had to do was ask.
Hill and Thomi put together a memo, laying out various options that were already available under the treaty. The idea, Hill said, was “to try to throw Trump off the scent and focus on putting together a broader U.S. Arctic approach.” Bolton told me much the same. “I read the treaty, and it seemed to me that it solved the problem, at least on the military side,” he said. “In terms of buying it, one thing that became apparent was that, you know, this is not the nineteenth century anymore. There are fifty-seven thousand people in Greenland. They have this feeling that they ought to have a say in their future.”
But, as more people in the Administration got wind of Trump’s ambitions, “it took off in a direction that Bolton feared it would,” Hill recalled. “It was like vultures circling a corpse—people going, ‘Oh, look at this! Maybe there’s a scrap here that I can do something with, for my own interest.’ ” Hill, who had previously worked as the U.S. intelligence community’s lead analyst on Russia and Eurasia, was struck by a horrifying sense of déjà vu. “I was taken aback—although perhaps I shouldn’t have been—by how much this paralleled things I saw in Russia over and over again: people hitching their wagon to a money-making or prestige opportunity, getting some swanky title, to pursue things that were obviously not to anybody’s benefit. I’d seen that in Chechnya, across the Caucasus, and in Donbas and Crimea,” she said. “I kept thinking, We’re even more like the Kremlin than I could have imagined, in terms of hangers-on, because there’s no discipline. It’s top-down, and nobody has power unless it’s derived from Trump.”
After completing the Greenland memo, Hill and Thomi met with the Danish Ambassador and several other Danish officials. As the conversation shifted to the North Atlantic, she recalled “trying to give them a heads-up by making strange eye movements, body-language signals that something was going to happen.” But the Danes didn’t pick up on it.
In mid-July, 2019, Hill ended her tenure. She felt that there was no way to continue serving in the Administration without becoming part of the problem. “It is what it looks like—Trump is a king, and he’s thinking about his empire,” she told me. “It’s all about acquiring things—staking your claim, and then covering it in bling.”
Around the time that Hill left the White House, a phone rang at the Danish foreign ministry, in Copenhagen. It was the middle of a summer holiday, in 2019, and the sun was streaming into mostly empty offices. The caller was from the American Embassy, relaying a request from Washington: the President and the First Lady of the United States would like to visit Denmark in a little more than a month, and would appreciate a formal invitation from the Queen. (According to Bolton, White House staffers had heard that Melania wanted to see Copenhagen and thought it might be a nice stop for her and Trump on the way home from a state visit to Poland.)
“Danish diplomats, politicians, and defense officials cut short their summer vacations and threw themselves into the preparations,” the Danish journalist Martin Breum reported. “There was no room for negotiation on the dates.” On July 31st, the Danish royal family announced that Donald and Melania Trump would pay a state visit “at the invitation of Her Majesty the Queen.” Although Trump was reviled in Copenhagen, Mette Frederiksen, the Prime Minister, made clear the urgency of a warm reception. “The USA is Denmark’s most important and strongest ally in NATO,” her office wrote. “Our soldiers stand shoulder to shoulder in the world’s hotspots and in the defense of Europe’s security.”
Two weeks later, the Wall Street Journal broke the news that Trump had, “with varying degrees of seriousness, repeatedly expressed interest” in purchasing Greenland. The story came as a shock to the Danes—and to Bolton, who had spent the preceding weeks trying to figure out how to quietly warn the Danes himself. “I couldn’t imagine it leaked from the National Security Council, because we were holding it very close,” he told me. “I found out subsequently that, at various occasions down at Mar-a-Lago, Trump would be sitting around his dinner table, saying to the guests, ‘What would you think if we bought Greenland?’ And the guests would say, ‘Oh, well, that’s a good idea.’ ”
Trump later clarified to reporters that he saw the potential purchase as a real-estate deal for an island with a strategic location and rare-earth minerals. “Why don’t we have that?” he asked. “I love maps. And I always said, ‘Look at the size of this. It’s massive. That should be part of the United States.’ ” (Because Greenland is so far north, it appears more than ten times larger on a Mercator projection than it does on a globe.)
The news of Trump’s territorial ambitions did not land well in Copenhagen or in Nuuk. “Are parts of the US for sale? Alaska?” Rasmus Jarlov, who has served as the chair of the Danish parliament’s defense committee, wrote on Twitter. Frederiksen took a more diplomatic line. “Thankfully, the time where you buy and sell other countries and populations is over,” she said. “Greenland belongs to Greenland. I strongly hope that this is not meant seriously.” The prospect of a sale, Frederiksen said, was “absurd.”
Trump fixated on Frederiksen’s comment. “I thought that the Prime Minister’s statement that it was absurd—that it was an absurd idea—was nasty,” he said. “You don’t talk to the United States that way.” Later that day, while he was in a private meeting with Bolton, Melania called. Trump answered the phone on speaker, and Bolton overheard the exchange. “I don’t know why people keep saying I want to go to Denmark,” Melania said. “If you want to go, I’ll go with you.”
Trump hung up the phone, then took to Twitter to cancel the trip, blaming it on Frederiksen.
Bolton says that he resigned three weeks later. Trump announced the departure on Twitter, by claiming to have fired him.
In the following months, Trump was impeached by the House for withholding military aid from Ukraine while pressuring its President to open an investigation into the Biden family. During that period, the “Greenland question,” as a senior State Department official referred to it during the impeachment inquiry, appeared dormant. In fact, the discussion had simply moved to secure rooms in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, where, according to the official, it “took up a lot of energy” among Trump’s national-security staff. “Not only did he want to purchase Greenland, he actually said he wanted to see if we could sell Puerto Rico,” Miles Taylor, a former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, later said. “Could we swap Puerto Rico for Greenland? Because, in his words, Puerto Rico was dirty and the people were poor.”
The Senate acquitted Trump in February, 2020, and his acolytes set about purging the White House and the civil service of career officials and replacing them with loyalists. Among the leaders of this effort was a lawyer named Paul Dans. Around that time, Dans’s twin brother, Tom, the former venture capitalist, who was now running a pecan farm in South Texas, got a call, asking if he’d like to be the Treasury Department’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Europe and Eurasia.
Tom Dans had first come into contact with Trump in the early nineties; as a junior investment banker, Dans was part of a small team that was brokering the sale of Madison Square Garden, a deal that included not only the arena and various New York sports teams but also the Miss Universe pageant. As Dans remembers it, Trump and his representatives would call his office once a week and ask if he could purchase Miss Universe separately from the rest of the deal. “We were, like, ‘No, you gotta buy the whole enchilada,’ ” Dans told me. Trump would “hang up, wait a week, and try again.”
In Washington, Dans learned that there was a task force being run out of the National Security Council in which staffers representing each of the relevant U.S. government agencies were deliberating options for the future of Greenland. “Let me get involved, because I’ve got a family connection,” Dans recalled telling his boss. Although Dans had never been to Greenland, his grandfather had served there as a merchant mariner during the Second World War, and had later helped construct Pituffik Space Base. Dans was appointed to the Greenland Policy Coordination Committee.
Much of the work of the Greenland P.C.C. was retroactively classified, but it centered on what the group’s members and their superiors regarded as both the threat and the opportunity of Greenlandic independence. “I want to say it’s an opportunity as long as we are willing and able to position ourselves to have a robust security and economic relationship with an independent Greenland,” Alexander Gray, who was serving as the chief of staff of the National Security Council at the time, told me. But Gray worried that Greenlandic independence would throw into question the security arrangements that were already in place: “Why would a Greenlandic independent government honor a treaty that their colonial masters signed with the United States decades ago?”
Gray had spent the preceding years observing and seeking ways to counter Chinese influence operations in sparsely populated island nations. “I had the portfolio dealing with the Pacific islands in the N.S.C., and we were dealing with this every day,” he told me. State-owned Chinese entities offered loans to such nations for infrastructure projects; if the nations defaulted, the Chinese could take control. A security agreement between China and the Solomon Islands enabled the deployment of Chinese paramilitary forces. “Watching that in real time prompted a lot of people to really have concerns about where an independent Greenland would ultimately end up,” Gray said.
To temper the perceived risks posed by Greenlandic independence, the Trump Administration set about trying to accelerate it in ways that would bring about a greater reliance on the U.S. “There’s nothing secret about the contours of the thing—if you study Greenland at all, you quickly arrive at the point that, you know, they’re asset rich and cash poor,” Dans told me. A major obstacle to Greenlandic independence is the absence of a self-sufficient economy; each year, Denmark doles out a block grant of around six hundred million dollars. “So, like, this is not a toughie, if you come from an investment-banking or dealmaking background, to solve,” Dans continued. “I hate to sound glib about it, but, when we’re shovelling trillions of dollars out of the Treasury for COVID relief—boom, boom, boom—and you’re looking at a number which is a couple hundred million, it’s, like, ‘Guys, let’s get serious here. What’s going on? This is not a difficult thing.’ ”
The U.S. set out on a “charm offensive,” as Greenland’s only private national newspaper, Sermitsiaq, put it at the time. Trump’s Ambassador to Denmark made numerous trips to Greenland, and courted Greenlandic politicians with promises of American business investment, educational opportunities, and development aid. The U.S. reopened its consulate in Nuuk, which had been shuttered since 1953. During the fall of 2019, a delegation of American diplomats and national-security officials arrived in Nuuk to discuss Greenland’s mineral resources, with a particular focus on mining strategic rare-earth minerals. Left undisclosed was the fact that among them were members of the National Security Council who were working to subvert the Kingdom of Denmark; they belonged to the Greenland P.C.C.
According to Drew Horn, the senior Administration official who was co-leading the Greenland P.C.C., the group routinely discussed the potential for friction with Denmark, and took “deliberate efforts meant to appease Danish concerns.” The intention, Horn said, “was never to vilify Denmark. It was always to do this as a win for everybody.” (Denmark’s win, as he saw it, was that it could cut loose a financial burden, even as it lost ninety-eight per cent of its territory and its relevance to Arctic geopolitics.) But the Danes were neither informed about the existence of the Greenland P.C.C. nor aware of its plans.
For the final two years of Trump’s first term, the work of the U.S. government in Greenland amounted to overt diplomacy and outreach paired with covert, winking assurances to Greenlandic officials that the U.S. would financially support their pursuit of independence in exchange for total military sovereignty over the island. The concept was hardly different from what Gray had cast as the Chinese approach—only the U.S. was now doing it first.
Still, military annexation was not on the table. The United States military continued to regard its allies and the “rules-based order” as the cornerstone of its Arctic strategy. On the sidelines of the NATO Leaders’ Meeting that winter, Bolton’s replacement, Robert O’Brien, urged his Danish counterparts to make a show of their commitment to Greenland’s security. O’Brien advised them to build a large, permanent air-force base, and to keep frigates on rotation in the Nuuk harbor, as a deterrent to the Russian and Chinese navies. The Danes “wanted to talk about plans and white papers, and that sort of thing,” he told me. “Whereas I’m the kind of guy who—well, I’d just take over a hotel in Nuuk and send a hundred Danish special operators there.”
To the Danes, it was as if the Americans had lost track of their own fantasy. The American argument, O’Brien said, was that “guys with dogsleds aren’t going to stop a naval infantry regiment of the Chinese or the Russians coming on board from an icebreaker.” But neither country had ever threatened Greenland, and the prospect of an imminent invasion made no strategic or tactical sense. After Denmark stepped in to finance the three Greenlandic airports, Chinese investment ground to a halt. Besides, Greenland was NATO territory; any attack would, at least in principle, invoke the possibility of nuclear Armageddon.
“I think the Danes had gotten used to business as usual,” O’Brien told me. “They liked it much better when the U.S. provided all their security, and it didn’t cost them anything, and they could spend their money on social programs and worker programs.” He continued, “In other words, we were supposed to defend it but not have any say in the governance of Greenland, and potentially even have how we defended it questioned by the Danes.”
I asked whether he felt that the Danes had grasped the depth of Trump’s desire to take over the island.
“No, I don’t think they took it seriously,” O’Brien said. “They did when he came back.”
After Trump lost the 2020 election, Tom Dans went back to pecan farming. “We did have a period of exile,” he told me, of the aftermath of the Capitol insurrection. (He was unaware of the attack in real time; he’d spent much of the day inside a secure facility, working with members of the Greenland P.C.C.) But, in the lead-up to Trump’s third run for office, Dans visited Washington as a non-resident fellow at the Heritage Foundation, where his brother, Paul, was leading the effort to draft a blitz of executive actions and policies that became known as Project 2025. As the election approached, Dans spoke with the Greenlandic diplomatic representative in Washington, who mentioned that he knew of a Greenlander who supported Trump: a bricklayer named Jørgen Boassen.
Boassen had been a Trump fan since 2016. “I was so tired of the élites, and of politically correct politicians,” he told me. By reading the news on social media, he had come to believe that Europe was sleepwalking into civil war, owing to the influx of Muslim migrants from Africa and the Middle East. “Denmark cannot even protect Denmark,” he said. “How can they protect us?”
In the fall of 2024, Dans wrote to Boassen on Facebook, and invited him to the U.S. They spent a week campaigning for Trump door to door in Pittsburgh, then travelled to West Palm Beach for Election Night, where Boassen shook hands with senators, billionaires, and several MAGA luminaries. “I also met Don, Jr., there, and I told him, ‘If you want to come to Greenland, just contact me,’ ” he recalled.
After the election, Boassen returned to Nuuk; Dans spent the following weeks pushing his Greenland agenda, in conversations with people he knew on Trump’s transition team, until it became one of Trump’s central fixations. “You have to get meetings with people, you have to coach an idea, and you have to work it and sell it and help people understand why it makes sense,” Dans told me. “Ultimately, it has to become their idea, not yours. There’s no end to what you can accomplish in D.C. if you are willing to give other people the credit.”
In early January, 2025, the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk texted Boassen and asked for help arranging a visit to Nuuk, for himself and Don, Jr. A few days later, the Trump family’s Boeing 757 landed on Nuuk’s new runway. Boassen was there to receive them. “That’s the great irony here,” Dans said, laughing. “The Chinese were the ones who, ten years ago, came and said, ‘Let us build your airports and walk into your mineral deposits.’ And then they got read the riot act by the U.S. side, and the Danes stepped up and found the money and built the airport—and that allowed the 757 to land and get the visuals.”
An advance team came to Nuuk with a stack of MAGA hats. Boassen assembled a small group of people to cheer Don, Jr.,’s arrival, and to join him for lunch at Nuuk’s most expensive hotel. It was only after the plane left, that evening, that local journalists discovered the supporters included homeless people who had been recruited with the promise of a free meal.
“They told us that they would welcome us as part of the United States,” a high-school student named Malik Dollerup-Scheibel, who ran into Don, Jr., and Kirk at a pool bar called Daddy’s, told me. “And we were just, like, ‘Yeah, well, it would be really strange to say that we’re not welcome, since you just came here.’ ” He was handed a MAGA hat and photographed with Kirk and Don, Jr. “But what we didn’t know was that, at the same time as we were being photographed, Donald Trump, Sr., was saying that he would take Greenland by force,” Dollerup-Scheibel said. “So we were kind of manipulated. When they posted the pictures, it looked like there were so many people who liked him. But we were just friendly, and people got free beer.”
Back in the U.S., Kirk went to his broadcast studio and gave an account of his few hours in Greenland. “There’s polar bears that walk around Nuuk,” he said. (There are no polar bears walking around Nuuk.) He recounted a tale of a young boy coming to him and telling him about rubies the size of baseballs. “And he says, ‘The Danes don’t let us mine our rubies, our gold, our lithium, or our gas,’ ” Kirk claimed. (Greenland has total autonomy and ownership over its natural resources.) “He said, ‘It’s time for a rebellion against the Danes.’ The younger people of Nuuk, the younger people of Greenland—they want to be rich, and, oh, my goodness, do they have wealth in Greenland. Incomprehensible amounts of wealth. We are talking that Greenland could be the new Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Russia, Permian Basin, Marcellus Shale, and the Balkan, all mixed into one. America should want those resources for our country, and Greenland should want them for their country. We’d be far more willing and able to develop them than Denmark and the socialist Greta Thunberg environmentalists from Copenhagen.”
Kirk framed the question of annexation as a matter of dignity. “They want to be part of a country that respects them, that gives them human rights,” he said. “It is the return of Manifest Destiny. Gulf of America. We’re taking back the Panama Canal, and we’re gonna do whatever it takes to have Greenland be part of the United States of America.”
In the next week or so, several Trump-friendly influencers began arriving in Nuuk. Nick Shirley asked Greenlanders what they thought about annexation on camera; the Nelk Boys handed out hundred-dollar bills to children, prompting locals to call the police. When Chris Cox showed up, Boassen served as his fixer.
Most of the propaganda wasn’t aimed at persuading Greenlanders to call for closer ties with the United States—it was focussed on convincing conservative Americans that the Greenlanders would welcome U.S. forces as liberators. An organization called Patriot Polling reported that fifty-seven per cent of Greenlanders supported joining the United States; Kirk shared the poll on X. But a Danish-Greenlandic poll found that the figure was around six per cent.
“Charlie Kirk said that there were a hundred people waiting for him at the airport with MAGA hats on,” Dollerup-Scheibel recalled. “I have seen pictures from the airport. There were three.”
Trump’s territorial ambitions emboldened those of America’s adversaries. Days after Don, Jr., returned from Greenland, a Russian lawmaker and former senior military officer argued on state television that, for defensive reasons, Russia should now annex Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, where it has maintained two coal-mining settlements for almost a century. “A war has begun in the Arctic,” he said. “Trump is declaring his claims to Greenland. Why shouldn’t we look at Greenland? We need Greenland! This is not a joke. We absolutely need it!” But it was impossible to tell whether he was serious, trolling, or just revelling in the end of the rules-based international order. There was no point in dealing with the Greenlandic or Danish authorities, he said; the best way forward was to “reach an agreement with Trump, and divide Greenland into a couple of parts.”
Some Greenlandic politicians also saw the MAGA incursion as an opportunity for leverage. “People are beginning to understand that independence is not a question of the block grant,” Pele Broberg, the chairman of the hard-line-nationalist Naleraq Party, said. “It is only a question of whether we want independence.” He brushed off Trump’s annexation rhetoric as a negotiating tactic. “They are showing good will by saying, ‘Forget the economic side. We will figure that out,’ ” he said.
A young Greenlandic parliamentarian named Kuno Fencker announced his openness to entering into a defense pact with the United States, cutting Denmark out of the picture. He had read about the concept in an essay published shortly before the 2024 U.S. election, unaware that two of its authors—Tom Dans and Alexander Gray—had previously worked on covert plans for Greenland at the National Security Council. Dans seized upon Fencker’s interest, and invited him to Trump’s Inauguration. Kirk arranged tickets for Fencker and Boassen to attend the Turning Point USA Inauguration ball.
“We met many people there—Kid Rock, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Trump’s lawyer,” Boassen recalled. By then, Boassen had started introducing himself as “Trump’s Greenlandic son.” Fencker met with White House lawyers and other Administration officials, and candidly discussed his grievances with Denmark and possible paths forward for Greenland and the United States. Although he was travelling as a private citizen, he was apparently received and treated as a representative of the Greenlandic legislature. “It’s easy to meet people in the government or State Department or whatever,” he told me. “I met with almost three hundred people.”
In the days before the Inauguration, a group of Republican lawmakers had introduced a bill to authorize the acquisition of Greenland. “We are, quite frankly, the dominant predator,” its lead author, Representative Andy Ogles, of Tennessee, said on Fox News. Dans arranged for Fencker and Boassen to join Ogles for an interview on his social-media channels. The two Greenlanders sat in silence on either side of Ogles as he rejoiced in the prospect of more deportations and fewer rights for transgender people. “The liberal crazies are crying, and the righteous Republicans are rejoicing,” Ogles said. Then he turned to the Greenlanders and cited the dubious poll that said a majority of their compatriots supported their country being acquired by the United States.
“Our philosophy here is very American. We want to be independent,” Fencker said. But Ogles framed the affiliation with the U.S. as a foregone conclusion, and his guests did not disagree. Once Greenland joined the U.S., Ogles said, they could expect “a new tourism industry from Americans who suddenly see this as part of their homeland, as part of our territory.” Fencker shifted uncomfortably. When I met him in his office, in Nuuk, last fall, he defended his appearance as an act of unofficial diplomacy. “If you listen closely to what I say and try to have a legal hat on, you will realize that I am saying that Greenland wants to be a sovereign country,” he told me. “But we are on a diplomatic mission. How do you think that attacking the greatest power on earth, military-wise, and having a bad relationship with them—how would that go down?”
Before leaving Washington, Fencker posed for photographs with Dans and Boassen on the White House grounds. I asked him whether he was using Trump’s desire for Greenland as a cudgel against Denmark, to extract more concessions. “Of course,” he said. He added that he doesn’t necessarily want Greenland to fully break from the Kingdom of Denmark—only to be an equal partner in shaping all aspects of its future. “My visit to the White House was just a stunt. It was just to make Denmark afraid,” he said. “I was just there as a visitor, sitting in the West Wing to get a picture.”
Shortly after Fencker and Boassen left, a congressman from Georgia introduced a bill to change Greenland’s name on all federal documents and maps to “Red, White, and Blueland.” Alexander Gray, meanwhile, made it clear in a congressional hearing titled “Nuuk and Cranny” that he had no interest in Greenlandic self-determination on its own terms. “The security stakes are simply too high to allow Greenland to obtain independence without a plan in place for the U.S. to insure our core strategic interests are assured,” he said.
Drew Horn—the former Special Forces commander who had co-led the Greenland P.C.C.—set out to become a conduit between American financing and struggling Greenlandic businesses. He had left the public sector in early 2021, after Trump failed to overturn the election, and had formed a strategic-minerals advisory firm with the intermittent backing and guidance of former senior defense and intelligence officials, as well as from Trump’s former head of security and one of Trump’s lawyers. Horn announced that he would travel to Greenland on behalf of his investors, and that he planned to “support the country’s pursuit of independence.” “If Greenland wants independence and inclusion in North America, the private funding exists to make it a reality,” he wrote on LinkedIn.
In Nuuk, Horn dined multiple times with Pele Broberg, the head of the Naleraq Party. Horn—whose résumé notes his training and expertise in “Unconventional Warfare”—insisted that he was just acting as a businessman. But his background aroused suspicion in Nuuk, though Danish and Greenlandic officials were still unaware of the Greenland P.C.C.’s existence, and of his role as its leader. “We call him Rambo,” a senior Greenlandic official told me. In 2024, a documentary about a botched mercenary coup in Venezuela revealed that, while serving in Trump’s first Administration, Horn had dined with the leader of the operation—a fellow former U.S. Special Forces soldier—and remained abreast of its progress. In messages with the lead mercenary, Horn repeatedly claimed to be engaging U.S. government departments on the man’s behalf. The coup ended with the slaughter or imprisonment of most of its participants. (Horn declined to comment about this.)
In Nuuk, Horn appeared to be positioning himself to profit in the event of an American annexation. “He is trying to make himself the center of whatever happens,” the senior Greenlandic official told me. “Everybody is trying to find out what he is doing, what he is saying. And then he just changes the subject.”
In March, 2025, as Greenlanders prepared to vote in their parliamentary elections, Horn’s firm put out a press release for “stakeholders” that laid out a path to Greenlandic independence. “The majority of the Greenlandic Parliament today is controlled by pro-independence parties,” the press release noted. Horn anticipated a landslide for those parties, followed by a rapid break from Denmark, with an initial referendum triggered within a month. Trump assured Greenlanders that, if they became independent, his government stood “ready to INVEST BILLIONS OF DOLLARS to create new jobs and MAKE YOU RICH.”
Horn’s assessment wasn’t unreasonable; it was based on recent statements by Greenlandic politicians. But he had misjudged the effects of Trump’s rhetoric, and perhaps of his own. When Greenlanders went to the polls, a plurality of the votes went to a center-right party that had never previously won a Greenlandic election and, in light of ongoing threats, favored the status quo. In the following weeks, it formed a coalition government whose organizing principle was its opposition to American aggression. Only Naleraq, whose leadership wanted to initiate the independence process immediately, was excluded from the coalition. “We shall choose our partners ourselves,” the coalition agreement read. “It is we who dictate the pace.”
In MAGA circles, the elections were falsely framed as a victory for Trump. “The pro-Denmark party got first, but the pro-United States party got its best-ever result,” Charlie Kirk said on his broadcast, the following day. “This election shows that the pro-American forces are ascendant in Greenland, and it should be partnered with America, not the Old World,” Kirk added. “This would be nothing but upside for the great people of Greenland.” Like Trump, he focussed on money: “You will be wealthier. You will be richer. You will have the U.S. dollar. You will have more purchasing power.”
Each spring, Greenland’s dogsledding association hosts a national race. “This is somewhere between Nascar’s Daytona 500 and Super Bowl Sunday,” Tom Dans told me. “It’s a massive logistical undertaking. You’ve got three hundred-plus dogs, you’ve got mushers, and you’ve got their support people coming in from nineteen remote locations in northern Greenland, all in the dead of winter. So we thought, Why don’t we make a little Arctic exercise out of this, and get some Chinooks, and help them bring the dogs in?”
Dans pitched his idea to the White House and the Pentagon: part influence operation, part military exercise. “Nobody was saying no,” he told me. The plan was to deploy Chinook helicopters from the Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, the top airborne unit for high-risk Special Operations Forces raids. The use of the Night Stalkers, as the unit is known, to shuttle dogsleds around Greenland would demonstrate, as Dans put it, “the capability that the U.S. had to really help this, in a kind of exciting, peacetime format.” Dans suggested that the dogsledding association invite the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, to the race. But to Mikkel Jeremiassen, the head of the association, the invitation seemed like a condition that would “grant us access,” as he later put it, to helicopter support from the Night Stalkers. Jeremiassen drafted a letter to Hegseth, and sought assistance from the Greenlandic ministry of culture in getting it to Hegseth through official channels. But the ministry declined the request on technical grounds, since the island’s political parties had not yet formed their coalition.
Instead, the White House announced that Usha Vance, Vice-President J. D. Vance’s wife, would attend the dogsled race with one of her sons, and visit Nuuk as a tourist. “She’s a very nice woman, and she loves the concept of Greenland, so she is going there,” Trump said. Two U.S. military-transport planes delivered an advance security team, which drove around Nuuk in armored black S.U.V.s, and Denmark deployed around seventy police officers to maintain public order. But the Second Lady’s visit was abruptly cancelled. “American representatives have been walking around, practically knocking on one door after another in the past few days, to ask if people might be interested in a visit from the Vice-President’s wife,” a Danish TV correspondent in Nuuk reported. “Everywhere, the answer was the same: ‘No, thanks.’ ”
The Administration framed it differently. “There was so much excitement around Usha’s visit to Greenland this Friday that I decided that I didn’t want her to have all that fun by herself,” J. D. Vance said, in a video announcing the change of plans. He added that he and Usha would visit Pituffik Space Base, alongside Trump’s national-security adviser and the U.S. Energy Secretary. (Usha’s touristic visits were cancelled.) “A lot of other countries have threatened Greenland, have threatened to use its territories and its waterways to threaten the United States, to threaten Canada, and, of course, to threaten the people of Greenland, so we’re going to check out how things are going there,” Vance said.
By then, European leaders were losing faith in the transatlantic alliance. No other countries were threatening to take over Greenland—only the United States. Jarlov, who was serving as the head of the Danish parliament’s defense committee, raised concerns about Europe’s reliance on U.S.-manufactured weapons systems and fighter jets. “I don’t know if there is a kill switch in the F35’s or not,” he wrote on X, in response to the Pentagon’s claim that there was no such thing. “We obviously can not take your word for it. As one of the decision makers behind Denmark’s purchase of F35’s, I regret it.” He added, “I can easily imagine a situation where the USA will demand Greenland from Denmark and will threaten to deactivate our weapons and let Russia attack us when we refuse.”
On March 28, 2025, Vance landed at Pituffik Space Base, where he repeated the fantasy that Russia and China were attempting “a lot of very aggressive incursions” in Greenland. He also berated Denmark. “The President said we have to have Greenland,” he said. “We can’t just ignore the President’s desires!”
Spring turned to summer. The White House appeared to focus on other matters, and the ice began to melt. But, for a former senior Danish defense-intelligence officer named Jacob Kaarsbo, the good weather carried with it a deeper concern: the easiest time to annex Greenland would be in the summer.
In May, 2025, I met Kaarsbo for a walk along a pier near Copenhagen. A few days earlier, the Wall Street Journal had reported that Trump’s director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, had tasked America’s spy agencies—including the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the Defense Intelligence Agency—with identifying people in Greenland and Denmark who supported Trump’s aims. The staff of Sermitsiaq had taken to leaving their phones outside editorial meetings, for fear of eavesdropping by the United States. A recent survey by the Center for Public Health in Greenland noted a more than fourfold increase, in the past year, in the percentage of Greenlanders who show symptoms of psychological distress. Eighty-two per cent of respondents reported that Trump’s annexation rhetoric negatively affects their everyday lives. One in four said that they have difficulty sleeping.
Most Danish and Greenlandic contacts I met with were reluctant to speak publicly. Some asked me to leave my phone at my hotel. A prominent Danish historian told me his thoughts, then asked me to not report them, lest he be perceived as speaking for Greenlanders. One of his Greenlandic colleagues offered his own thoughts, then similarly retracted, lest his assertions affect Greenland’s new position of leverage.
Kaarsbo—who had spent fifteen years working alongside Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan—was not too concerned about professional spies. Most Greenlandic political discourse takes place on Facebook, among small groups of people who write in Greenlandic and know one another by family and name; when, in the spring of 2025, a new Facebook account appeared and started polling Greenlanders on their opinions about the United States, it was instantly identified by locals as a likely influence operation. “The Administration may put pressure on the rank and file, but I would assume that a lot of them will try to do their job to a bare minimum,” Kaarsbo told me. “And some of them will just quit. The problem is that they will be able to find some idiots who will do anything to get ahead.” Although the U.S. diplomatic mission in Nuuk operated out of the small red cabin that served as the consulate, the American government was preparing to move it to a thirty-thousand-square-foot office space in one of Nuuk’s largest buildings, right in the center of town. “The new consulate could hold three hundred” staffers, Kaarsbo said. “What the fuck is that all about? In a community of fifty-seven thousand people, there should be a maximum of ten.”
Last spring, Hegseth was asked in a congressional hearing whether the Department of Defense had a plan “to take Greenland and Panama by force, if necessary.”
“Our job at the Defense Department is to have plans for any particular contingency,” Hegseth replied.
“Including the contingency of basically invading Denmark?”
“Any contingency you need, we’ve got it.”
To Kaarsbo, the absurdity was partly reassuring. “People just think, Oh, they’ll take it over, there’s nothing we can do,” he said. “But I think it’s unlikely that the Trump Administration could carry out a large plan for an amphibious assault without it getting leaked,” and thus becoming a catastrophic political scandal in the United States before the first ships reached Nuuk. Instead, Kaarsbo worried about a “quick-and-dirty takeover,” as he put it—“the 2 A.M. version, where a couple of planes with a flight plan that says ‘Pituffik’ suddenly veer toward Nuuk. A couple of hundred Special Forces take over the capital, take over the airport, take over parliament, and so on.” But such a scenario is not impossible to deter. “If we get a small European force up there under the pretext of military exercises—and say to Trump, ‘You’re right, we should take Arctic security very seriously, and so we’ve decided to start these exercises to deter China and Russia’—then, suddenly, the quick-and-dirty annexation is not so easy.”
It was against this backdrop that Drew Horn returned to Nuuk to visit a mining prospect in southern Greenland called Tanbreez. “As the only shovel ready rare earth project in Greenland, Tanbreez represents a game-changing opportunity for both the Greenlandic economy and the critical minerals supply chain in North America and Europe,” he said, in a press release. But the story didn’t quite add up. Horn named Naaja Nathanielsen, then Greenland’s mining minister, as one of his recent points of contact—but she insists that they have never spoken.
“Drew Horn came into our office and said that he was representing the Tanbreez mine,” the senior Greenlandic official told me. But, since Horn’s name wasn’t on the license, the official called the mine’s owner at the time, an Australian named Greg Barnes. “And Greg Barnes said, ‘No, he’s got nothing to do with us,’ ” the official recalled.
Horn has visited Greenland four times since Trump’s second Inauguration. In some ways, he appears highly connected; his former business partner and chief geologist is now the director of the U.S. Geological Survey. But in Nuuk his self-presentation frequently collided with reality. “He said that he was representing all kinds of people and organizations,” the senior Greenlandic official told me. “We called the U.S. State Department and said, ‘We’ve had this guy fooling around here in Greenland, saying this and that,’ and they said that they had nothing to do with him.”
Horn told Markus Valentin, a Danish reporter at the Greenlandic public broadcaster, that he and his colleagues in the private sector wanted to invest ten billion dollars in Greenlandic businesses “as soon as possible.” Reuters recently reported that, while pitching a prominent Greenlandic businessman on investment, Horn repeatedly paused “to respond to e-mails he said were from Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Commerce Secretary Lutnick.” Horn denies this, though it’s unclear whether he was inflating his connections to impress the Greenlandic businessman or is now downplaying them to protect senior White House officials. He told me and other journalists that, after each trip, he briefed members of the Administration on what he’d found.
Greenlandic mining concessions are open to international investment; there is no need to annex the island to pursue its natural resources. The problem is that the costs of logistics, infrastructure, poor weather, and bureaucracy, in this remote Arctic environment, exceed the value of whatever can be pulled from the ground. “We have looked at Greenland—we have been exploring it for fifteen years,” a mining executive told CNBC last year. “We have never been able to come up with a profitable project.”
I asked Horn whether the Trump Administration sees Greenland’s rare-earth sites like the Russians see their two coal-mining towns in Svalbard: something to maintain at a perpetual loss—the cost of strategic presence. Each unprofitable Greenlandic mining concession that is bought up by an American entity is one that is no longer susceptible to such an investment by the Chinese. “No, they’re looking to turn a profit,” Horn said. But, in a recent podcast interview, he acknowledged that the United States has more rare-earth minerals than it could ever need. “We’ve just tied our hands to permitting,” he said. If the United States simply extracted and processed the contents of its own deposits, he added, “we could be, like, a net exporter for forever.”
At around 1 A.M. on January 3, 2026, Chinook helicopters and pilots from the Special Operations aviation regiment that Tom Dans had tried to deploy to Greenland flew Delta Force soldiers into Caracas and kidnapped the Venezuelan President. “He got bum-rushed so fast,” Trump, who’d watched the raid from Mar-a-Lago, said. He added that the U.S. would now “run the country” and take its oil. “We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground,” he said. “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again.” Hours after the strike, Katie Miller—a former White House official who is married to Stephen Miller, Trump’s homeland-security adviser—posted to X a map of Greenland overlaid with the American flag, with a one-word caption: “SOON.”
“We do need Greenland, absolutely,” Trump said the next day. He and his acolytes were practically giddy from the success of the Caracas raid, and started listing other places they’d like to invade: Cuba, Colombia, Iran. “By what right does Denmark assert control over Greenland?” Stephen Miller asked on CNN. “Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.”
In the following days, Denmark and seven other European nations deployed troops to Greenland. The Danes carried live ammunition and explosives, and prepared to blow up Greenland’s runways to slow any possible invasion. They also carried fresh blood packs, in case of casualties, and were operating under standing orders to shoot at any invading forces. There was no concrete evidence of a planned U.S. attack, or any expectation that Denmark and its allies could fend one off for very long. The idea, as one European source involved with the planning told me, was merely “to raise the cost.”
Greenlanders were terrified; some have since moved to Denmark. The Greenlandic government scrambled to reassure locals, informing them that Danish and other European troops would now be a permanent fixture on the island. “If we have to choose between the United States and Denmark, here and now, we choose Denmark,” the Greenlandic Prime Minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, said. “We choose NATO. We choose the Kingdom of Denmark. We choose the E.U.”
Later that day, Trump was asked about Nielsen’s remarks. “I don’t know who he is,” Trump said. “Don’t know anything about him. But that’s going to be a big problem for him.”
Trump understood the message of force, however. He announced that every European nation that had deployed troops to Greenland would face new ten-per-cent tariffs—and that the tariffs would rise to twenty-five per cent on June 1st if the United States had not reached a deal “for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland” by that date. “It is time for Denmark to give back,” he posted on Truth Social. “World Peace is at stake!”
Four days later, at the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, Mark Rutte, a Dutch politician who serves as the secretary-general of NATO, spoke to Trump and defused the situation. Trump claimed that they had reached a “framework of a future deal.” Greenlandic and Danish politicians noted that Rutte has no authority to negotiate on their behalf. But, whatever Rutte said to Trump, the President dropped the tariffs and the threatening rhetoric, for the time being, and then tied up the U.S. military by going to war with Iran.
“Greenland is behind us,” Senator Lindsey Graham said, at the Munich Security Conference, in mid-February. “Who gives a shit who owns Greenland? I don’t. So, the point is, Greenland is going to be more fortified, because Donald Trump—once he feels like it’s his brand, or he has some buy-in—is going to go big.” The next day, in a bizarre closed-door meeting with the Danish and Greenlandic premiers, Graham addressed Mette Frederiksen, Denmark’s Prime Minister, as “little lady,” and loudly yawned in Nielsen’s face.
Chris Cox, the founder of Bikers for Trump, has not returned to Greenland since his visit last March. But he has made a couple of appearances as a Greenland expert on One America News Network, where he spews inaccurate anti-Danish propaganda and has been falsely presented to viewers as having lived in Nuuk for most of last year.
Drew Horn returned to Greenland in February—just after the talk of invasion died down. He appears to have shelved his interest in mining there, and is now hoping to build a large data center in the sparsely populated settlement of Kangerlussuaq, where there is a Danish military station and the longest commercial runway in Greenland.
Tom Dans was appointed by Trump as the chair of the United States Arctic Research Commission in December. When I met him for lunch in Washington, earlier this year, he declined to speak further on the record, except to articulate a narrow, symbiotic vision for the future: “My view is that the United States could take all the seafood Greenland could produce, and cut out the middleman, and keep it from China—and you could bring back all-you-can-eat shrimp at Red Lobster.”
Jørgen Boassen joined us a few minutes later. He had left Greenland for the U.S. last fall, his life style funded by anonymous American benefactors. When I was in Nuuk, I was told by several people that Boassen was known for groping women and getting into drunken fights. (Boassen denies any such acts.) He has been banned from several venues, including a swimming pool, a martial-arts club, and the hotel where he’d brought Don, Jr. “I am the last revolutionary fighter,” Boassen told me. While Danish troops were preparing to defend Greenland, he attended a gathering at the Kennedy Center, at which Andy Ogles and other Republican lawmakers sliced into a Greenland-shaped cake.
In Washington, the Danish and Greenlandic governments are quietly engaged in a process of negotiation with the White House. The U.S. plans to reopen some of its long-abandoned bases in Greenland—an outcome that would have been welcomed by both Greenland and Denmark until recently, and that could have been achieved under the existing 1951 treaty. But there are new points of contention. According to the Times, the Americans want veto power over foreign investment interest in Greenland. Another disagreement appears to be over the matter of territorial sovereignty. “We can’t be constrained by notions of leasing bases and that sort of thing,” Robert O’Brien, the former national-security adviser, told me. “We can’t have a situation like we’ve seen during this Iran operation, where certain governments aren’t giving permission to use bases. We can’t have that in Greenland. It’s just too essential to the defense of the homeland.”
I pointed out that no one in Greenland owns land: individuals merely apply for permission to build homes and businesses. If the United States took sovereignty over its bases, its military would be the only entity that owns land in the country, a matter that Jens-Frederik Nielsen has called a red line. “To give up territory, to give up self-determination, to give up the right to one’s own land—whether it is only the size of a postage stamp or more—we cannot do that,” Nielsen said. “We will not do that.”
But O’Brien, like his former boss, was unconcerned by the opinions of the people who live in Greenland. “They may understand the cycle of life better,” he told me. “But the lawyers will work out how the territory gets titled.”
In February, Boassen travelled to Louisiana, where he was hosted by the governor, Jeff Landry, whom Trump had recently named on Truth Social as his special envoy to Greenland. (Landry’s appointment came as a surprise to Denmark, Greenland, and the State Department, and circumvented congressional confirmation requirements.) At dinner, Boassen complained to Landry about the state of the Greenlandic health-care system. “It is a death sentence to get sick in Greenland,” he said.
In the following days, Landry dined with Trump, who took to Truth Social to announce that he was sending “a great hospital boat to Greenland to take care of the many people who are sick, and not being taken care of there.” The post was accompanied by an illustration of a U.S. Navy hospital ship, the Mercy. “It’s on the way!!!”
Danish and Greenlandic officials quickly rejected the offer. “We have a public health-care system where treatment is free for citizens,” Nielsen said. “Please talk to us instead of just making more or less random statements on social media.”
Landry was incensed. “Shame on Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen!” he wrote on X. “President @realDonaldTrump and America care.” But the Navy didn’t deploy the Mercy; the ship was undergoing scheduled maintenance, alongside the Navy’s only other hospital ship, at an Alabama shipyard.
Last month, Landry showed up at a business conference in Nuuk. Upon his arrival, he shared with reporters his instructions from the President: “He said, ‘Go over there and make a bunch of friends—as many friends as we can.’ ” He also brought along a doctor who claimed to have come to “assess the medical needs” in Greenland—though this doctor had not reached out to the health ministry.
For the next three days, Landry wandered around Nuuk, with Boassen as his fixer, and tried to hand out MAGA hats. “If you come to Louisiana and you come to the governor’s mansion? All the chocolate-chip cookies you could eat,” he told a group of boys. Another boy apparently asked if Landry was famous.
“I don’t know if he’s famous, but he’s the governor of Louisiana,” Landry’s wife, Sharon, said.
“Do you want to take a picture?” Landry asked.
“No,” the boy replied.
Landry abandoned the business conference within half an hour of its start. “We have our red lines,” Nielsen, who looked exhausted, told the Danish national broadcaster. “No matter how many chocolate cookies we get, we are not going to change them.”
The day after Landry left Greenland, the new U.S. consulate opened in the center of Nuuk. American officials and businessmen ate musk-ox hot dogs and discussed their ambitions for Greenland’s future. Hundreds of Greenlanders protested outside.
Rasmus Jarlov, whose term in parliament had just ended, called for the consulate to be shut down immediately. “It is utterly insane that we allow their presence,” he wrote on X. “The new, very large American consulate in Nuuk has one clear mission and task, and that is to pave the way for an American takeover.” The policy of treating the United States as the ally it once was has merely paved the way for more subversion. “The only thing that has worked,” Jarlov emphasized, “was when we, along with our allies, made it clear that we would rather go to war with the United States than let them have Greenland.” ♦