The appointment of a United States special envoy to Greenland shows that Donald Trump has not given up on his ambition to take the island from Denmark. It is part of a new strategy that should worry Denmark’s European partners.
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Donald Trump’s appointment of Louisiana governor Jeff Landry as his special envoy to Greenland on Monday night came as a bolt out of the blue to the Danish and Greenlandic governments. In a joint statement, prime ministers Mette Frederiksen of Denmark and Jens Frederik Nielsen of Greenland told the United States president to get lost.
“Land borders and the sovereignty of states are rooted in international law. These are fundamental principles. You cannot annex other countries. Not even with an argument about international security,” they said.
Trump’s announcement came exactly a year after he declared that US ownership and control of Greenland was essential for national security and global freedom. A few weeks later, he declined to rule out the use of force. Announcing Landry’s appointment on Monday, he restated his determination to take it.
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“If you take a look at Greenland, you look up and down the coast, you have Russian and Chinese ships all over the place. We need it for national security. We have to have it,” Trump said.
Greenland’s strategic position between Europe and North America makes it an important site for the US ballistic missile defence system and it is home to vast, largely untapped deposits of critical minerals. The melting of Greenland’s ice sheet has made these resources more accessible and increases the commercial potential of the Northwest Passage and the Transpolar Sea Route, which it straddles.
A former Danish colony with a population of about 57,000, Greenland now enjoys self-government over almost everything apart from monetary policy, foreign policy and defence. Since 2009, it has had the right to declare independence and a poll this year found that 84 per cent of Greenlanders want to go it alone, although 45 per cent said they would oppose independence if it meant a lower standard of living.
During the early months of this year, Trump’s campaign to take Greenland mostly took the form of braggadocio and swagger, including trolling visits to the island by his son Donald Trump Jr and vice-president JD Vance. But the US strategy has shifted recently to one of driving a wedge between Denmark and Greenland and seeking to exploit discontent on the island towards Copenhagen.
The Danish daily Politiken reported last month that Washington has tried repeatedly to arrange high-level political meetings with Greenland without Denmark. This is in breach of the diplomatic practice that both Denmark and Greenland must be present when discussing overarching foreign, security and defence policy matters affecting Greenland.
During his second term as president Trump has made greater use of special envoys, most notably New York property developer Steve Witkoff, to pursue foreign policy independently of the state department. Landry’s appointment as special envoy to Greenland could signal Washington’s intention to intensify its grey zone activity against Copenhagen.
Denmark has been one of the United States’s most loyal allies and sacrificed its soldiers’ lives in America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a proportion of its population of six million, the 44 Danish soldiers who died in Afghanistan was greater than that of any of Washington’s Nato allies.
In Brussels, commission president Ursula von der Leyen, European Council president António Costa and foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas expressed solidarity with Denmark on Monday night but declined to mention the US by name. To be fair, Kallas got through an entire speech to the European Parliament last May on the subject of Greenland’s right to decide its own future without once allowing the words United States, Washington or Trump to escape her lips.
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