January 18, 2026 05:10 PM IST
First published on: Jan 18, 2026 at 06:56 AM IST
Donald Trump’s insistence on taking over Greenland has unsettled Denmark and its autonomous island, as well as much of Europe. Trump first floated the idea in 2019, but his renewed interest and demonstrated willingness to follow through on what he says — from bombing Iran last year to attacking Venezuela this year — mean that his words cannot be taken lightly. Yet while Trump may be acting with his usual brazenness in a post-War international order whose rules great powers don’t seem to care about, Greenland has actually long featured in Washington’s imagination, illustrated by Arctic Circle scholars like MarcJacobsen and Sara Olsvig.
The first reported expression of official US interest in Greenland dates back nearly 200 years, not long after the dissolution of the 434-year-old political union between the kingdoms of Norway and Denmark, after which, under the 1814 Treaty of Kiel, Greenland came under the latter’s control. In 1832, US President Andrew Jackson floated the idea of buying it, at a time when US territorial acquisitions were not unusual (recall the phrase “Louisiana Purchase”). This interest emerged after the articulation of the Monroe Doctrine, whose broad contours are now familiar, mostly because Trump has crudely rechristened it as the “Donroe Doctrine.”
In 1867, US Secretary of State William Seward recommended that Greenland be purchased alongside Alaska, which he had just negotiated with Russia. Academic consensus suggests that Seward’s plan was to flank Canada and put pressure on it to become part of the US. But any such move would have encountered British resistance.
In the years leading up to WWI, the US again sought to purchase Greenland and the Danish West Indies because it wanted the shipping lanes and also to prevent the Germans from using them as military bases. A few days before the US declared war on Germany, the Danish West Indies were transferred to the US on March 31, 1917. Washington, however, stopped short of recognising Danish sovereignty over Greenland.
As WWII erupted, the White House again debated the merits of acquiring Greenland. After the Nazis occupied Denmark (but not Greenland) in April 1940, the US quickly established a consulate in Nuuk, the capital of Greenland. A 1941 US-Denmark agreement granted the US broad authority to establish military bases in the island to prevent a Nazi takeover. Following Hitler’s defeat, Truman in 1946 made a formal offer to buy Greenland, which Denmark again rejected. By then, however, the Nazi threat had been replaced by a new one: the Soviet Union.
The Cold War, organised around NATO and the Warsaw Pact, again made the Americans look at Greenland as essential to security. Denmark, a founding member of NATO, found itself — and Greenland — bound to US interests. The 1951 defence agreement between the two paved the way for Thule Air Base, now known as Pituffik Space Base. Little surprise that Greenlanders were not consulted. Throughout the Cold War, the US used Greenland as a bulwark against the
Soviets. It was a part of NATO’s northern shield, and as the nuclear race heated up, American nuclear weapons were stored at the base despite Denmark’s 1957 nuclear weapons-free zone policy.
With the disintegration of the USSR and the US’s “unipolar moment”, Greenland shifted from being important for countering Russia to being central to a long-term Arctic strategy around shipping routes and climate change. But the rise of China — now calling itself a “near-Arctic state” — and the deepening China-Russia nexus, have again sparked American military interest, first publicly articulated by Trump 1.0 Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in 2019 at an Arctic Council ministerial meeting. He warned that the Council could no longer afford to focus solely on environment and science because China and Russia were acting against US interests. In Trump’s second term, it is not just rhetoric anymore: Threats are being issued, meetings convened, and troops deployed.
It is true that Russia and China are interested in the Arctic. But it is also true that resisting those interests does not justify overriding the sovereign rights of a democratic country and its right to exercise self-determination — basic values the US has championed since WWII. A better way might be military collaboration to safeguard the region jointly for the US, Greenland, Denmark, and Europe. Does such an alliance already exist? A four-letter acronym comes to mind.
The author is deputy copy editor, The Indian Express
saptarishi.basak@expressindia.com
