Greenland chef Miki Siegstad fell in love with Ireland at first sight. He visits four times a year now and, sooner rather than later, plans to move from his Arctic island to ours.
But he won’t be rushed – and certainly not by Donald Trump.
Sitting in a cafe in Nuuk, the 31-year-old’s eyes shine as he talks about flat- and job-hunting in Dublin. Rents seem slightly cheaper there than Greenland’s pretty but expensive capital, he says, where roughly one third of the country’s population of 56,000 live.
Siegstad’s culinary dream is to introduce Ireland to the tangy tastes of his homeland – muskox and wild birds – in his own restaurant. Sometime soon, hopefully.
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“The plan is still there but, if something should happen here, I don’t want to abandon my family,” says Siegstad, a veiled reference to the turmoil gripping his homeland.
Like many here, Siegstad smiled six years ago when the US president began his on-off obsession with snatching from the Kingdom of Denmark an island that is larger than Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Britain combined.
Such a takeover, the biggest expansion of US territory since the 1867 acquisition of Alaska from imperial Russia, would be a next-level move in this 250th anniversary year of the US declaration of independence.
When Trump threatened this week to take the island “the easy way or the hard way”, the message from Greenland was: no way.
Siegstad grew up in Sisimiut, Greenland’s second city, and says his family are watchful and alert rather than panicked. But he admits having quiet, concerned chats with his two older brothers while trying to shield their concern from their younger sister and widowed mother.
“We feel united against this right now, but it has complicated things too,” he says, a nod to the island’s burgeoning hopes of full independence from Denmark. “If Donald Trump decides to invade or annex Greenland, I’m pretty sure Denmark and the rest of Nato will defend us – but Nato will be broken.”
Trudging around Nuuk this week, in shin-high snow and just six hours of daylight, Greenland felt like a lonely, beautiful and vulnerable place.
Away from the geopolitical chatter in far-off capitals – the US fears Russia and China have Arctic ambitions towards Greenland – the takeover talk is deeply triggering for a people familiar with the human cost of colonisation.
Norseman Eric the Red landed here in 986 with a group of Icelandic settlers and, a millennium later in 1931, Norwegians tried but failed to reclaim part of the island. The precursor to the International Court of Justice dismissed the claim on an island that has been in Danish hands for three centuries.
In 1721 the Lutheran missionary Hans Egede arrived here with a boat of future colonisers, eventually founding what became Nuuk and converting locals with an inventive adaption of key Christian texts: “Give us this day our daily seal.”
The colonisers brought trade and opportunity but also, in 1733, a smallpox epidemic that decimated the local population. Only in 1953 did Denmark open Greenland to the world; in the last half century it has dramatic shifted from colonial to home rule and, since 2009, self-governance in almost all areas.
But resentment of Denmark – hatred, in some quarters – runs deep, drawing on dark revelations from colonial days, from obligatory birth control for Inuit women to forced adoption of their children to couples in Denmark.
A century after the telegraph arrived in 1925, locals opened their smartphones this week to AI-generated videos declaring “Donald Trump will take Greenland imminently”.
The last time someone tried that, the Nazis in 1940, the US pushed them back. The US remained throughout the cold war era, operating 17 military bases here under an agreement struck with Copenhagen in 1951. That agreement remains in place but, apart from one base with about 200 permanent officers, the rest are rusting ruins in the snowy tundra. What is lacking in US regional security infrastructure, Danish officials say, is not a way but a will.
If, that is, the US interest is about security at all. Fly over the barren, snowy Greenland landscape, and where some see mountains, others see opportunity – in particular to extract the rare earth minerals found in every modern smartphone.
US billionaires have lined up to bankroll next-generation mapping and mining companies. They promise AI-backed methods to extract the valuable minerals from Greenland – and give China a run for its money.
But locals in Greenland say this modern gold rush – some call it the ‘cold rush’ – is more talk than action. Of nine companies with commercial mining permits, there are just two active mines. One is operated by the Danish-backed Lumina and extracts the gleaming mineral anorthosite from an open pit on Greenland’s west coast.
In his office just outside Nuuk, Lumina chief executive Bent Jensen hefts on to his desk a chunk of the rock that, ground down, is used as a greener mineral replacement for glass fibre.
It can be used as filler in paints, too, and to change the consistency of plastics and polymers. Anorthosite is 30 per cent aluminium and, for Lumina, finding an economical and effective extraction method would be a big payback on its considerable investment here.
Ask Jensen about US rare earth speculation on Greenland and he takes a deep breath. He’s clearly heard it all before.
“This is frontier country and those minerals are not just going to pop up out of the ground, it takes a lot of effort and a lot more investment,” he says.
Lumina’s mine is so remote it is cut off for five months of the year. To house workers, Lumina built an entire live-in settlement, with homes, shops, healthcare and even a fire brigade. And while Jensen doesn’t doubt US investors are serious and determined – and operating in a changing market – he has yet to see any make a serious effort to get to work in Greenland.
Some sort of new equivalent to fracking for rare earth minerals in Greenland is still somewhere in the future, while the costs and challenges remain firmly in the present. Anyone who wants to invest is welcome, he says, and they don’t have to take over the country to make money. Showing up would be a start.
“Even if a rare earth becomes available here,” he says, “most likely the Chinese will simply lower their price to disrupt the market.”
Siegstad knows all about the Lumina mine: he worked there in its early days for almost two years as a chef. Back in the Nuuk cafe, he admits his family and friends get caught up in the talk of an independent Greenland finally harnessing its resources to get rich.
The US agitation has both united and divided Greenland, he says, triggering a uniting flush of Greenlandic nationalism while deepening further divisions on the path ahead.
One of his older brothers is a fisherman, he says, and wonders if closer ties to the US would be good for business – and catch prices.
But when his friends dream about Greenland achieving independence, Siegstad reminds them how one fifth of the island’s budget is a financial transfer from Denmark. And so far no one in Washington is promising them a replacement for socialised Danish healthcare.
After Wednesday’s crunch meeting in Washington, Danish and US officials agreed to disagree, according to Danish foreign minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, but set up a high-level working group to at least discuss US security concerns and Danish red lines.
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Greenland’s foreign minister Vivan Motzfeldt, who also attended the meeting, welcomes the prospect of talks and described the US as a welcome security ally. “But that doesn’t mean we want to be owned by the United States,” she adds.
In a semi-literate social media post, Trump urged Nato to “tell Denmark to get them out of here”.
For many in Nuuk, disaster has been averted – at least for now. Many here breathed a sigh of relief with the arrival on Thursday of military officers from Denmark, Sweden and Germany on a brief but welcome security visit.
“To believe you can negotiate something with Trump you have to be brain dead,” says one leading businessman, who asked not to be named. “But after Venezuela we know: that f*cker might actually do something.”
Back in the Nuuk cafe, Siegstad compiles dream menus for his future Irish restaurant and consoles himself with memories of pub conversations in Dublin, his future home.
“When I meet Irish people I feel understood, a connection, because you’ve been through all this: you were colonised and you had the fight to become independent,” he says. “Yet we are not there yet. It may be an unpopular opinion here in Greenland but we have to look at independence in a realistic way.”
