{"id":108091,"date":"2026-06-15T10:19:08","date_gmt":"2026-06-15T10:19:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/108091\/"},"modified":"2026-06-15T10:19:08","modified_gmt":"2026-06-15T10:19:08","slug":"inside-the-ludicrous-deadly-serious-plan-to-take-over-greenland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/108091\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside the Ludicrous, Deadly Serious Plan to Take Over Greenland"},"content":{"rendered":"

The transatlantic alliance reflected a world that was designed and largely enforced by American power. Now, as American primacy fades, the U.S. government has embraced the predatory world view of its traditional opponents. Firepower matters more than values or alliances, and everything is in play. In December, the Danish Defence Intelligence Service noted that the U.S. has transformed into a nation that \u201cuses economic power, including threats of high tariffs, to enforce its will, and no longer rules out the use of military force, even against allies.\u201d Weeks later, Danish soldiers prepared to blow up Greenlandic runways, in case of a U.S. invasion.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf the United States chooses to attack another NATO country militarily, then everything comes to an end\u2014including NATO and, with it, the security that has been provided since the end of the Second World War,\u201d Denmark\u2019s Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, warned. She later added, \u201cThe world order as we know it\u2014that we have been fighting for, for eighty years\u2014is over, and I don\u2019t think it will return.\u201d<\/p>\n

Around that time, Trump texted the Prime Minister of Norway, Jonas Gahr St\u00f8re; since he had not received the Nobel Peace Prize, he wrote, \u201cI no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace.\u201d He then pivoted to Denmark\u2019s claim to Greenland, which predates the founding of the U.S.: \u201cWhy do they have a \u2018right of ownership\u2019 anyway? There are no written documents, it\u2019s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also.\u201d The message concluded, \u201cThe World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Noah<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cSorry, but it\u2019s gonna be much better this way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cartoon by Maddie Dai<\/p>\n

During Trump\u2019s first term, \u201cMake America Great Again\u201d primarily meant that the U.S. would withdraw from the world and shield against what he and his supporters perceived as external threats. But in his second term Trump has looked outward. In his Inaugural Address, he pledged to expand U.S. territory and to carry \u201cour flag into new and beautiful horizons.\u201d It is harder to remake what is already America into Trump\u2019s vision of \u201cgreatness\u201d than it is to make America merely bigger.<\/p>\n

Greenland is the largest island in the world, but it has fewer than fifty-seven thousand residents, who are mostly scattered among settlements and towns along its western coast. Although it belongs to the Kingdom of Denmark, it lies to the west of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and is part of North America. The latest articulation of the U.S.\u2019s National Security Strategy, published in November, frames Trump\u2019s imperial ambitions as an extension of the Monroe Doctrine, the assertion by President James Monroe, in 1823, that any attempt by European powers to further colonize the Americas would be treated as \u201cdangerous to our peace and safety.\u201d Under Trump\u2019s leadership, the N.S.S. says, \u201cwe will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the elevated language of the N.S.S. obscures the fact that Trump\u2019s pursuit of Greenland has always been in the hands of a few ideologues and opportunists. Along with Cox, the Danish government has identified two other Americans as running private \u201cinfluence operations\u201d in Greenland: a former venture capitalist and pecan farmer named Tom Dans and a former Army Special Forces commander named Drew Horn, who has sought to dominate Greenland\u2019s rare-earth-mining sector. Both men served in Trump\u2019s first Administration\u2014Dans at the Treasury, Horn in the Office of the Vice-President, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Departments of Energy and Defense. But the Danish and Greenlandic governments were unaware that, during Trump\u2019s first term, they had also represented their respective agencies on a secret National Security Council task force whose focus was the acquisition of Greenland.<\/p>\n

A fourth man, J\u00f8rgen Boassen, is one of the very few Greenlanders who loudly support Trump; he spent much of the past year in self-imposed exile, floating between far-right American and European political gatherings, his travel and living expenses covered by American benefactors whom he refuses to identify. And then there is Trump himself, whose stated reasons for coveting Greenland do not stand up to scrutiny\u2014except that he considers it \u201cpsychologically important,\u201d as he recently put it to the New York Times, to own the territory rather than merely have military access to it, as the U.S. has had continuously, under a treaty with Denmark, since 1951.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The transatlantic alliance reflected a world that was designed and largely enforced by American power. Now, as American…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":108092,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5],"tags":[54768,57,4399,5008,5009],"class_list":["post-108091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-greenland","tag-a-reporter-at-large","tag-greenland","tag-magazine","tag-onecolumnnarrow","tag-splitscreenimagerightfullbleed"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@dk\/116753620778872368","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108091"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108091\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/108092"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}