A Streetcar Named Greenland

Trump wants to wrest control of Greenland from Denmark. But replacing a former colonizer with a global hegemon is only a recipe for deeper subjugation, not freedom.

BLANCHE: What you are talking about is brutal desire—just—Desire!—the name of that rattle-trap street-car that bangs through the Quarter, up one old narrow street and down another...

Arthur Miller, A Streetcar Named Desire

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One of the strangest episodes in the still-unfolding Trump saga is the 42nd/44th president’s growing interest in Greenland, a territory controlled by Denmark, which Trump has said he wants to incorporate into the United States.

Trump has had his sights on Greenland since at least 2019. He first floated the idea of “buying” the autonomous Danish territory five years ago, which the president, in typical property-developer fashion, described as “essentially a real estate deal”:

Denmark essentially owns it…We’re very good allies with Denmark, we protect Denmark like we protect large portions of the world. So the concept came up and I said, ‘Certainly I’d be.’ Strategically it’s interesting and we’d be interested but we’ll talk to them a little bit.

Then things died down, and Trump, as is his wont, appeared to forget the whole affair.

But in the weeks leading up to his second term, things began heating up again. Posting on Truth Social in December, Trump stated that 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.” In early January, Trump said he would “not rule out the use of military force to seize control” of Greenland, and he “declared U.S. control” of the territory to be “vital to American national security.”

The Siren Song of the North

In purely geostrategic terms, of course, Trump is right: Greenland’s position in the polar north, hugging the eastern part of the Northwest Passage, makes it highly attractive; with thinning ice cover, the passage’s potential as a route for international shipping will only heighten Greenland’s attractiveness.

It hasn’t gone unnoticed by China. One-quarter of Greenland’s exports went to China in 2022 (nearly ten times greater than the value of U.S. exports), but in recent years the U.S. has attempted to counter China’s moves in the area, with some describing China’s “Polar Silk Road” ambitions in Greenland as “failed.”

Greenland is also solidly planted in the Western Hemisphere. Nuuk, its capital, is about 550 km (330 miles) closer to New York City than to Copenhagen. And while Trump’s recent moves have certainly been rhetorically exceptional—no other Western leader in living memory has spoken of “buying” another sovereign country’s territory—there’s also a fair amount of continuity with past U.S. behavior: Trump’s interest in Greenland could be seen as a belated application of the Monroe Doctrine, which holds that the political affairs of the Western Hemisphere fall under the purview of the region’s sole hegemon—and it alone.

Moreover, the U.S. military already has a significant presence in Greenland, including the now-renamed Thule Air Base, the Pentagon’s northernmost military installation and an integral part of the U.S. nuclear missile warning system, smartly rebranded the Pituffik Space Base in 2023 to “recognize Greenlandic cultural heritage and better reflect its role in the U.S. Space Force.”

U.S.-Greenland relations have a long history. During the Second World War, Greenland, or “Bluie” as was its U.S. military code name, became the site of a network of U.S. airfields and radio and weather stations. One source tells of the onset of “American efficiency” in Narsarssuak, or Bluie West 1:

Immediately after they arrived, the Americans started constructing the airfield and building houses. They had cleared the entire plain in a matter of days…We were a little concerned when they arrived but also happy, since we feared the Germans.

But Greenlanders’ pro-American sentiments were not met with much enthusiasm by local Danes:

When American planes appeared in the sky over Godthaab [modern-day Nuuk], the Greenlanders would emerge out of their houses, waving and shouting “America, America!”…Christian Vibe, the young polar explorer who had now found a job as a journalist in Godthaab, wrote to an acquaintance. “It does hurt to see young Greenlanders flashing American flag lapel buttons or using the flags to decorate their homes, because to the Greenlanders it is something special, and the Americans have little tact and hand them out by the hundreds.”

Greenland broke away from Denmark at the start of World War II, but was after the war granted coequal status within the Kingdom of Denmark. And yet Greenland remains hamstrung by a checkered colonial past, still-ongoing racial discrimination, and a structural economic dependency on Danish governmental cash transfers—the so-called block grant, totaling around 4.6 billion DKK ($630 million) in 2023, according to Statistics Denmark.

Trumpist Pseudo-Postcolonialism

But some feel the Danish state hasn’t been funding the local government as well as it could have been. Trump’s cynicism lies in his exploitation of this and related postcolonial grievances in Greenlandic society.

As the Danish-Greenlandic politician Aki-Matilda Høegh-Dam pointed out in 2022, “Due to its geopolitical location, Greenland is worth much more than the Danish block grant.” The grant’s size has been frozen by law since 2009, adjusted only for inflation.

Further grievances aren’t hard to come by. In the 1960s and 1970s, thousands of Inuit women were fitted with intrauterine devices (IUD)—by some estimates up to half of Greenland’s women of childbearing age between 1966 and 1975 were fitted with such devices, many if not most without consent. By 2023, 67 Greenlandic women decided to sue the Danish state over policy after they learned a governmental inquiry wouldn’t complete its work until mid-2025.

The purpose of the IUD policy was to “limit the number of Greenlandic children,” Danish radio reported in 2023, “and thus the costs for, for example, daycare centers, schools and health facilities for the Danish state.” But one purpose was also surely to limit population growth among what were viewed as inherently inferior members of a society dominated by a former colonial power—a classic biopolitical move, similar in logic to that employed by Israeli health authorities toward Ethiopian immigrant women, uncovered in the 2010s.

Racism also remains a problem for Greenlanders who move to mainland Denmark for study and work. A 2023 report from the Danish Institute for Human Rights documented discrimination faced by Greenlanders studying in mainland Denmark, with 73 percent reporting “having been met with prejudices” in the past 12 months, and one in five reported outright discrimination, “for example in connection with an internship or job search or by being excluded from group work” in the higher education system.

Moreover, there has long been a perception on the right of Denmark’s political spectrum that Greenland’s population is backward, beset by social problems and incapable of self-governance. In 2022, the conservative politician Søren Pape Poulsen reportedly described Greenland as “Africa on ice,” presumably alluding to the African continent’s continued economic underdevelopment; the remarks were said to have fallen at a U.S. embassy reception in Copenhagen. While denying having made the comments in a later interview with the newspaper Berlingske Tidende, Poulsen reiterated:

I’m not one to mince words…In some areas, Greenland resembles a developing country. When I say that, it’s about…violence, sex and drinking.

But while it’s true that Greenland was once addled with high rates of alcohol consumption, public-health efforts, economic development, and broader cultural trends have significantly reduced alcohol consumption in Greenland from a peak of nearly 19 liters of pure alcohol per person to a far lower level in the present day, to reach the broader European average for alcohol consumption.

Ironically, against Poulsen’s racially charged comments, public health researchers have also shown that a significant contributor to excess alcohol consumption was likely due to an influx of hard-drinking Danish residents in the 1960s and 1970s:

From 1988 to 1993 the percentage of Danes in Greenland decreased from 17.6% to 13.7% and these have been shown to have a 42% higher average consumption of alcohol than the Greenlanders. It was further estimated that around 1970 about half of the excess consumption of alcohol in Greenland compared with Denmark was due to the higher consumption among Danish men in Greenland.

Tapping Into Grievances

Against this backdrop, in a move no doubt designed to rattle Denmark’s government, Trump sent his eldest son, Donald Jr., to Nuuk in early January “with a message from his dad” to Greenlanders: “We’re going to treat you well.”

Donald Trump Jr. in Greenland on January 7, 2025 (from Donald Trump Jr/X)

As Donald Jr. said to Fox’s Sean Hannity that same week, presumably in coordination with his father:

They’re obviously part of Denmark, but Denmark doesn't allow them to utilize their natural resources. So many of these young kids coming up and telling us on a daily basis 'when we go to Denmark, we're treated like second and third-class citizens. They tell us to go home.' There seems to be quite a bit of racism there.

This is rich coming from a political leader who has turned white supremacy and hard ethonationalism into fundamental pillars of the MAGA movement. And it is pure hypocrisy: There is no reason to believe that Greenland’s people would face better conditions under U.S. governance. For insight into how the country treats its territories, look no farther than to Puerto Rico, where the power grid collapsed on New Year’s Eve of 2024, a result of years-long neglect and underdevelopment.

Greenland’s economy, too, is in relatively good shape. By 2023, its unemployment rate was at a historic low of 2.9 percent after strong and steady growth over a decade. Seafood exports combined with Danish government transfers have netted Greenland a reasonably robust, if state-dependent, single-sector economy: Its GDP per capita in 2021, exceeding $57,000, was higher than that of countries such as Canada, Germany, the UK, and France.

Of course, it would hardly be difficult for the U.S. to match and outspend the Danish state given that its economy is more than 50 times larger than Denmark’s. But it seems highly unlikely that American neoliberalism could offer a higher living standard than Scandinavian social democracy. And yet there are, as noted, real historical and contemporary complaints to be made against the Danish state and society in Greenland. Combine that with Trump’s threats to put tariffs on trade with Denmark if he doesn’t get his way, and who can tell which way the wind might finally blow in the Arctic north?

Madman—or Imperial Reason?

There is, of course, something so fundamentally bizarre about the prospect of one NATO member state appropriating the terrain of another NATO member state. Didn’t the Western world just spend hundreds of billions of dollars funding a major war effort in Ukraine in support of the principle of territorial inviolability?

It would be a mistake to reduce Trump’s desire for Greenland to purely rational geopolitical terms. This is not how his mind works or political instincts function. In Fear: Trump in the White House, Bob Woodward recounts how Trump’s short attention span meant that advisors could routinely pull documents from his desk to distract him from irrational policy ideas, such as annulling the U.S.-South Korea free-trade agreement, KORUS, which most agreed was a terrible idea. Trump is at times a creature of such short-lived fixations and cravings.

Still, there is an element of functional performance to his ravings. Trump’s single greatest foreign policy influence is surely Nixon’s madman theory, by which the nuttier the performance, the greater the chance of success. To rationally maximize profits you sometimes have to play the lunatic king, on Nixon’s, and now Trump’s, view.

To his real-estate developer’s eye on the world, Greenland makes just as much good sense as the Panama Canal and Canada, which Trump now also covets:

Canada and the United States, that would really be something. You get rid of that artificially drawn line and you take a look at what that looks like, and it would also be much better for national security. Don’t forget, we basically protect Canada.

Imperialists build empires. If you have the world’s best-funded military force ($824 billion in 2024) and the world’s biggest economy ($29 trillion), what’s the point if you can’t use them to advance your interests? In this regard, Trump is simply playing the straightforward colonial/imperial power game of absorbing or dominating proximate terrains, from Canada to Greenland to the Panama Canal. Don’t be surprised if tomorrow Trump begins to rave about the desirability of northern Mexico—say, as a “buffer zone” against drug cartels.

What is new is the appeal to the once-colonized population and the deployment of decolonial tropes. George Bush, too, spoke of conquering the “hearts and minds” of Iraqis—but they had, after all, been dominated by a decades-long brutal dictator, and so the rhetoric contained much more of a standard liberal-democratic emphasis on freedom over authoritarianism. What’s different here is that Trump and his envoys are deploying the language of decolonialism: As Donald Jr. said to Hannity, Greenlanders are purportedly treated as “second- and third-class citizens” by Denmark. At a Mar-a-Lago press conference, President-Elect Trump questioned the legitimacy of Danish rule: “People really don’t even know if Denmark has any legal right to it.”

This rhetorical strategy is similar to Putin’s recent appeals to countries in the Global South. Like Trump, Putin is a hardline conservative ethnonationalist; unlike Trump he has decades of experience as an authoritarian strongman, but he has also started branching out into what we might call a vaguely “solidaristic” discourse vis-à-vis the poorer, downtrodden elements of the global order: “The Kremlin has adopted this trend of misappropriating the language of decolonization for its own colonial ends.” As Benjamin Young wrote in Foreign Policy,

Unlike the decolonization movements of the Cold War era, this wave is being driven by opportunistic illiberal regimes that exploit anti-colonial rhetoric to advance their own geopolitical agendas.

This solidaristic diagonalism—appropriating leftist decolonial tropes for the purposes of global imperial ambitions—is in many ways the new preferred language of late-modern imperialism. It shows the fundamental rhetorical malleability and strategic flexibility of both Putinism and Trumpism.

Clearly, the people of Greenland would be wise to rebuff Trump’s latest advances. After all, it’s just Trump’s desire, his brutal desire, to borrow the words of Arthur Miller’s Blanche, only this time dressed up in quasi-decolonial terms to appear to be looking out for their best interests. But Trump’s latest offensive is a simulacra of postcolonialism, pretending to take seriously Greenland’s real concerns about its future, while coveting its resources and geostrategic location.

Replacing a minor (former) colonizer with a formidable global hegemon doesn’t sound much like freedom at all—only further, and perhaps deeper, subjugation.

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