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greenland
Denmark Summons Trump Diplomat Over Report of Covert Operations in Greenland
Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen noted that the US has so far not denied the reports by Denmark's public broadcaster.
Aug 27, 2025
The top US official in Denmark arrived at the country's foreign ministry Wednesday after being summoned for talks about a recent report that US citizens with ties to the Trump White House have carried out a covert "influence" campaign in Greenland.
Denmark's foreign minister on Wednesday called upon Mark Stroh, the charge d'affaires in Denmark, after the main Danish public broadcaster reported that at least three people have been attempting to sow discord between Denmark and Greenland, an autonomous territory that is part of the Danish kingdom.
President Donald Trump has long expressed a desire to take control of Greenland, and has suggested he could use military force even though Denmark is a close ally and fellow member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Danish officials and Greenlanders have dismissed the idea, with Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen warning the US that it "cannot annex another country."
"We want to be independent. So we are not for sale," resident Karen Cortsen told NPR earlier this year as the outlet reported that 85% of people in Greenland and Denmark opposed the president's push to "get" the vast, mineral-rich Arctic island.
According to the main Danish public broadcaster, the Trump administration has sought to reverse widespread public opposition to his plan, with at least three people connected to his administration carrying out covert operations to "foment dissent" in Greenland.
The broadcast network, DR, reported that eight government and security sources believe the individuals are working to weaken relations between Greenland and Denmark, compiling lists of Greenlandic citizens who support and oppose Trump's plans, and trying "to cultivate contacts with politicians, businesspeople, and citizens, and the sources' concern is that these contacts could secretly be used to support Donald Trump's desire to take over Greenland."
Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen said in a statement that "any attempt to interfere in the internal affairs of the kingdom will of course be unacceptable."
"We are aware that foreign actors continue to show an interest in Greenland and its position in the Kingdom of Denmark," Rasmussen said, adding that he had "asked the ministry of foreign affairs to summon the US charge d'affaires for a meeting at the ministry."
Trump has not yet confirmed an ambassador to Denmark. PayPal cofounder Kenneth Howery, a close friend of Trump megadonor Elon Musk, has been named as his nominee for the position.
Frederiksen told Danish media that "the Americans are not clearly denying the information presented by DR today, and of course that is serious."
"We have made it very clear that this is unacceptable," said the prime minister. "And it is something we will raise directly with our colleagues in the United States—who, if this were untrue, could very easily dismiss the claims."
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Invading Greenland Won’t Protect Us From the Climate Crisis
It is of course possible that further melting will lead to increased tensions in which Arctic territory becomes an especially valued possession. But other threats are far more urgent, including the one causing the melting.
May 24, 2025
Greenland does not, on the face of it, seem to be the kind of place that a superpower like the United States would regard as a vital component of its security. With fewer than 60,000 inhabitants in an area roughly one-quarter the size of the contiguous United States, it is the least densely populated nation on Earth. Its only industries of note are fishing and, to some extent, tourism, and its northernmost point is as close to the North Pole as Los Angeles is to Denver.
Yet President Donald Trump insists the United States needs Greenland “very badly,” to the extent that he won’t “rule out” using force to attain it.
Such covetousness almost certainly owes at least something to the prospect of access to the mineral resources, including lithium, that Greenland is believed to harbor. But Trump himself has suggested a different motivation, musing in an interview about “Russian boats and… Chinese boats, gunships all over the place… going up and down the coast of Greenland.”
A world that has warmed enough for the Arctic Ocean to be truly ice-free is a world that will be experiencing even more droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, and other extreme weather events, at the potential cost of millions upon millions of dollars in damage and extensive loss of life.
Trump’s obsession with annexing Greenland is a confounding solution to a problem that doesn’t even exist.
Moscow and Beijing undeniably have an increasing number of vessels operating year-round in Arctic waters. In Russia’s case, that’s hardly surprising: Russia accounts for 53% of the region’s coastline. But its interests, and indeed those of China’s, have little to do with Greenland and a lot to do with its own Arctic waters, specifically the seaway along its north coast that Russia refers to as the Northern Sea Route (NSR). As sea ice decreases in thickness and extent as a result of climate change, the NSR is slowly opening up. As a result, Moscow sees this passageway as a potential source of riches and national pride and even a way to reorder international trade.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has declared that the NSR will ultimately “replace the Suez Canal” as the favored transit route between Atlantic and Pacific. It is presently a long way short of that: Just under 40 million tons of goods shipped through the NSR in 2024, almost exclusively on Russian and Chinese vessels, compared to 525 million tons that transited Suez. But it is far more than the 7 million tons that traveled the passage in 1987.
The Northwest Passage—the frequently narrow, shallow, and twisting pathway through the islands of Canada’s High Arctic—tells a similar story on a smaller scale. From the 16th through the 19th centuries, multiple expeditions perished in the ice of the Northwest Passage; after it was finally navigated for the first time in 1906, there were just 67 further transits over the course of the 20th century. Thanks to melting sea ice, there were 41 transits of the Northwest Passage in 2023 alone.
While both the Northwest Passage and NSR are more navigable than in the past, both are still challenging to sail through during all but the very warmest weeks of the year. Even as the Arctic heats up four times faster than the rest of the globe, its seas are unlikely to be consistently ice-free during summer before mid-century at the earliest. The anticipation of such an eventuality, however, has led to a jockeying for position and influence, and a rumbling discord among Arctic powers.
Canada and Russia regard the Northwest Passage and NSR respectively as their national waters, and they intend to dictate who can use them and when. Moscow requires any vessel that wants to transit the NSR to apply for permission up to four months in advance and mandates icebreaker escorts for most ships—often at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars.
The United States chafes at such restrictions, arguing that both waterways are international straits, open to vessels from all nations.
“We’re concerned about Russia’s claims to the international waters of the Northern Sea Route,” said then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in 2019, adding with a swipe at Canada that “we recognize Russia is not the only nation making illegitimate claims.”
Interestingly, China is broadly in accord with the U.S. position; but, as is its wont, the country is playing the long game. Notwithstanding Trump’s talk of Chinese gunships off Greenland, Beijing’s interest in the Arctic thus far appears to be entirely mercantilist. Particularly since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China is the only country whose commercial vessels transit the NSR with some regularity. In 2012 the Chinese icebreaker Xue Long even explored the feasibility of crossing from Atlantic to Pacific across the Arctic Ocean via the North Pole.
It is of course possible that further melting will lead to increased tensions in which Arctic territory becomes an especially valued possession. But other threats are far more urgent. While the rest of the world is not heating up as rapidly as the Arctic, it is still warming. And a world that has warmed enough for the Arctic Ocean to be truly ice-free is a world that will be experiencing even more droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, and other extreme weather events, at the potential cost of millions upon millions of dollars in damage and extensive loss of life.
It is, to put it mildly, unfortunate that Donald Trump continues to insist that climate change is a “hoax.” Because reducing emissions rapidly is a far better way to protect Americans than idle threats to invade an ice-covered island.
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Greenland Will Never Be for Sale
My brief but deep immersion into Inughuit culture leaves me profoundly hopeful—believing that it will not come to pass that Trump’s rapacious nature shall determine the eventual fate of Greenland.
May 06, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump, casting a covetous eye on Greenland, has my attention. I have a history in that place, so little known to Americans in general, having spent the entire year of 1964 at Thule Air Force Base, now Pitufik Space Station, 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle. The road I’ve traveled since has me deeply concerned about Trump in every respect—believing that everything he represents and wants is contrary to the best interests of our country, the world, and mankind altogether, excepting perhaps oligarchs.
At Thule I was responsible for overseeing the maintenance of our air-to-air missiles and for supervising the loading of those missiles on board our F-102 fighter jets in the event of declared hostilities with our great “bugaboo,” the Soviet Union.
Many years later, after volunteering for and spending a year in Vietnam, I became a full-fledged “peacenik,” an adjunct professor of peace studies at the University of Maine, angry and in despair about this country’s militarism and particularly agitated about our vast empire of military bases on foreign lands. My experiences in Greenland and Vietnam were surely foundational to my conversion. I had become well-aware of the wide-spread, anti-base movement and sympathetic with the neighbors of these bases who, so often, experienced profound environmental degradation, noise pollution, and violence.
Speaking of Trump and his eye on Greenland, the senior statesman Aqqaluk Lynge had this to say on “60 Minutes”: “He mentioned Greenland like it was a toy or something. It was ugly!”
The heartless displacement of the Inughuit people of Thule, done without forenotice to enable the construction of a military base in 1951, 13 years prior to my assignment there, offers a good case in point. The place they called Uummannaq had been their home for centuries, and was the sacred burial grounds of their ancestors. In May of 1953, 300 men, women, and children, having been given four days to vacate their modest sod homes, set off by dogsled for a place called Qaanaaq, 150 kilometers across the icecap. No promised houses awaited them, and they were forced to live through the cold, wet summer in the tents they’d been given. They were denied the right to return to or hunt in their ancestral homelands.
I’d also learned that in 1968, a B52 had crashed on the icecap while attempting to make an emergency landing at Thule, spreading radioactive debris across the land. Four nuclear weapons were on board; one, never to be recovered.
This history and my developing curiosity about the real stories behind our military empire inspired my quest to visit Qaanaaq, a trip I was able to realize in 2008. That journey, and the people I met, provide the basis for my perspectives on Trump’s covetous ambitions.
The Principals
Aqqaluk Lynge: Former member of the Greenland Parliament, former chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council (1995-2002), member of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, honorary doctorate in humane letters—Dartmouth College (2012), and uthor ofThe Right to Return: 50 Years of Struggle by Relocated Inughuit in Greenland.
I had the good fortune to meet and to interview Mr Lynge, who at the time was a visiting scholar at Dartmouth College. He enabled my subsequent meetings with Qaanaaq people who had been among those evicted.
Uusaqqak Qujaukitsoq: Hunter, fisherman, and leader of the so-called Hingitaq 53, the group of nearly 500 Inughuits who launched legal proceedings against Denmark seeking their right to return. Uusaqqak had been a 12-year-old boy, living at Uummannaq, at the time of the eviction.
Tautianguaq Simigaq: Simigaq, a hunter, had been one of 13 Inuit who worked on the B52 crash site, 11 of whom had died by the time of my visit. He was among several hunters who reported seeing deformed walrus, seals, and foxes in the area of the crash in the years since.
It is no exaggeration that my visit with the people I met in Qaanaaq and Siorapaluk, the northernmost year-round inhabited settlement in Greenland, remain in my soul all these years later. Uusaqqak and his wife, Inger, invited me into their modest home and, though their English was limited, we spent many comfortable hours together, he sharing his life story to include the trauma of the dislocation, hunting and fishing, and education in Copenhagen. His travels had taken him far and wide. As a representative of the Inughuit people he had proudly once met Nelson Mandela. Their 30-year-old son, Magssanguaq, a virtual renaissance man, spoke English and Danish, and was a teacher, a musician, a poet, and an accomplished photographer. He had a keen sense of the injustices his people had suffered as victims of colonialism and would become my interpreter and guide.
Mags and I devoted much of our time in Qaanaaq to visiting and interviewing elders who had been victims of the displacement. Those sessions were, without exception, emotional in the telling and the listening.
My immersion into Inughuit culture, a deep one during my brief visit, but a lasting one of reflection, leaves me profoundly hopeful—believing that it will not come to pass that Trump’s rapacious nature shall determine the eventual fate of Greenland. I was made mindful of Syracuse University Scholar Philip Arnold’s The Urgency of Indigenous Values, in which he argues that the very future of the world is dependent upon the ascendency of “green values” of Indigenous populations everywhere, as opposed to the “raider” values of our dominant culture. The history of the Inughuits who had lived on their sacred lands at Uummannaq for centuries is known by all Greenlanders, 89% of whom are of Inuit descent. I would assert that Trump represents, even personifies, “raider” values, and is seen that way by a large majority of all people of Greenland.
I have recently read that Trump is bringing Columbus Day “back from the ashes.” Hmmm! How might that play with Indigenous people?
Speaking of Trump and his eye on Greenland, the senior statesman Aqqaluk Lynge had this to say on “60 Minutes”: “He mentioned Greenland like it was a toy or something. It was ugly!”
Watch it. They’re not words of casual sentiment.
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