I have been to Greenland.
It is bitterly cold in winter but breathtakingly beautiful. Its 60,000 people are kind, hard-working and stoic. This peaceful land is now in the sights of a US president who has just declared his power has no limits but that of his “own morality.”
In an interview with The New York Times on Thursday, Donald Trump brushed off international and domestic law, announcing that he can do whatever he wants, including looking at territory on a map and declaring “I want it.”
The Times reported that when they asked him if there were any limits on his global powers, Trump said: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” He added, “I don’t need international law. I’m not looking to hurt people.”
Even by Trumpian standards, this is extraordinary. “Unprecedented” doesn’t begin to describe the megalomania required to, first, believe this and, then, to announce it as if it doesn’t violate all that the United States has prized, if not always practiced, for 250 years. We are a long way from “a decent respect for the opinion of mankind.”
Most dismissed Trump’s obsession with Greenland as just weird. But after his illegal, undeclared war with Venezuela, his abduction of Nicolás Maduro, his announcement that he would “run” Venezuela and personally control all the revenues from its oil that he would now seize, and his defense of the murder of unarmed civilians by his ICE troops who appear to answer only to him, this is no longer sufficient. Greenland, Denmark, NATO and the rest of the world now have to take seriously his threats to seize the largest island in the world.
In December, Trump said that he “needs” Greenland and appointed former Governor of Louisiana Jeff Landry as a ‘special envoy” to Greenland for the express purpose of acquiring it, one way or another. Landry said it was an honor to serve in a “position to make Greenland a part of the U.S.” On Friday, Trump snarled, ““I would like to make a deal the easy way, but if we don’t do it the easy way we’re going to do it the hard way.”
But why? There are four possible reasons.
This is the reason Trump most often gives. He claims there are vital US interests that require the stationing of troops and bases to ward off supposed threats from Russia and China. Neither laws, treaties or the desires of the people of other nations should not stop America from asserting its will. “We live in a world, in the real world…that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller told CNN this Monday. “These are the iron laws of the world. We’re a superpower. And under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.”
But the United States, under a 1951 treaty, already has the ability to station whatever forces it wants in Greenland, from Coast Guard cutters to nuclear weapons. The pact allows it to “construct, install, maintain, and operate” military bases across Greenland, “house personnel” and “control landings, takeoffs, anchorages, moorings, movements, and operation of ships, aircraft, and waterborne craft.”
There is no security need that the United States cannot meet in Greenland under existing relations.
It is depressing that one of the active conversations in Washington is that Trump wants Greenland because he doesn’t understand that the Mercator Projection used for most maps make the island look much larger than it actually is. Even in correct projection, though, Greenland is larger than Alaska. Trump appears to operate under the 19th century view that great powers must increase the resources they directly control.
As Trump told The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser in 2021 when asked about Greenland, he seems to be moved by a primitive imperialist impulse:
“I said, ‘Why don’t we have that?’ You take a look at a map. So I’m in real estate. I look at a corner, I say, ‘I gotta get that store for the building that I’m building,’ et cetera. You know, it’s not that different. I love maps. And I always said, ‘Look at the size of this, it’s massive, and that should be part of the United States.’ ” He added, “It’s not different from a real-estate deal. It’s just a little bit larger, to put it mildly.”
This is consistent with a view that the world is divided up between three “great powers” — the United States, Russia and China — who should have absolute, unfettered control over their respective spheres of influence. Accordingly, Trump’s new National Security Strategy of the United States asserts that he will restore “American preeminence” over the entire Western Hemisphere and its “many strategic resources.”
This may be the real reason Trump wants Greenland. He has a gangster view of power that has served him well over the years, but no real, discernible ideology. For Trump, the grift is the point. Everything he has done is consistent with using the presidency to accumulate as much personal wealth as possible.
Since returning to office, Donald Trump’s net worth has jumped to $7.3 billion, up from $3.9 billion in 2024, reports Time magazine. That fortune is certain to grow as he, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, his sons and his business partner, Steve Witkoff, troll the world for new investments, partnerships and crypto cons. Greenland could be a key source of personal profit. It is believed to be rich in mineral deposits, including iron ore, graphite, tungsten, palladium, vanadium, zinc, gold, uranium, copper, and oil. Under existing agreements, US companies can negotiate with Greenland to explore and mine its minerals. But an inside track to exploiting those resources could be worth billions.
Finally, and sadly, Trump may want Greenland because he has an insatiable psychological need for approval. MS NOW producer Steve Benen picked up on this from Trump’s New York Times interview. When pressed about his Greenland compulsion, Trump replied, in effect, that he needed to own Greenland to make himself feel better.
“Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success,” Trump said. “I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do, whether you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document.”
Whatever the combination of reasons behind Trump’s obsession, however much this is intended to distract from his refusal to release the Epstein files, two things are clear. If Trump declared tomorrow that he now owns Greenland, there isn’t anything that Greenland or Denmark could do. The United States military has the unchallenged ability to seize the island.
The seizure, however, would also be the end of the most effective defense alliance in the history of the world. For as long as I have been alive, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has kept the peace in Europe. No one worries that France and Germany will go to war, though that is exactly what they did repeatedly even before there was a Germany or a France and it was Franks and Gauls. After centuries of bloody conflict and two world wars that killed tens of millions, Europe has been at peace. It has prospered through its unity, enshrined in NATO and the European Economic Union.
Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was the first time since the end of World War II that one European nation tried to forcibly change the borders of another European nation. That is one reason Europe is united in supporting Ukraine in its fight to repel the Russian invaders.
It is why Europeans are united now is resisting Trump. Another is Arctic security. Seven of the eight Arctic nations are members of NATO (all but Russia). In a joint statement this week, the leaders of France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, the United Kingdom and Denmark said: “Security in the Arctic must therefore be achieved collectively…by upholding the principles of the UN Charter, including sovereignty, territorial integrity and the inviolability of borders. These are universal principles, and we will not stop defending them.”
If the United States now violates these principles by seizing the territory of a NATO ally, the alliance would end. Greenland is a semi-autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark. It is part of NATO. If it is seized or attacked, the other members of NATO are pledged to defend it under Article Five of the NATO treaty. But all the members have to agree. Trump would veto a defense, collapsing the alliance.
It should not be necessary to say that the collapse of NATO has been one of Putin’s top goals. If Trump were a paid Russian agent, he could do for Putin no greater service than this.
Aside from starting a nuclear war — which is also part of the unfettered ability of any US president, even an insane one — there is nothing more damaging to the security of the West and to the international rules-based order than the end of NATO at this time, in this way.
Trump has now attacked seven different nations in his first year back in office. Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen. There is no reason to think that he will not attack others. “The use of force is, for this President, not so much a means of achieving American national-security goals,” says Glasser, “as an end in itself.”
Many agree and go further. “The events of the past week have shown with disturbing clarity the Trump administration’s contempt for the democratic process and the public good, with the intention to use fear and force both at home and abroad to achieve their aims,” said Gretchen Goldman, the president of the Union of Concerned Scientists.
“Let us state it plainly,” former White House Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes writes in The New York Times, “We have an autocratic leader seeking power and aggrandizement through the conquest of territory and resources.” Over the next three years, “we face the danger of both an end to the democratic transfer of power and a global war.”
Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, was more direct: “I would challenge someone to tell me why this isn’t an authoritarian, fascist approach to governing,” he told MS NOW on Friday.
As beautiful and peaceful as Greenland is, it may now be, even more than Venezuela, the center of a potentially world-shattering earthquake.
BONUS: For having gotten this far, and to provide 40 seconds of serenity, please enjoy this dog-sled ride across a glacier in the Kitaa region of Greenland.