America Has Wanted Greenland for Over a Century. Trump Isn’t Giving Up.
The insistence that the U.S. must control Greenland is the latest in a string of American flirtations with the Arctic island
President Trump’s renewed push to acquire Greenland has created diplomatic tensions and threatens to splinter the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
The U.S. is seeking to expand its military presence in three areas of Greenland, but Denmark rejects U.S. sovereignty over bases.
Greenlandic officials expressed feeling threatened by the U.S., which previously left abandoned military bases for Denmark to clean up.
IKATEQ, Greenland—Deep in a remote fjord in Greenland, hundreds of rusty fuel drums known locally as “American flowers” litter the icy wilderness.
Vehicles marked as property of the U.S. Army decay in the snow-covered valley near the abandoned remains of an aircraft hangar.
As President Trump seeks to expand U.S. territory with the island, this base, a remnant of World War II, stands as a reminder of the last time the U.S. tried to own Greenland.
Trump’s insistence that the U.S. must control Greenland is the latest in a string of American flirtations with the Arctic island going back over a century. It is, however, the first to threaten to splinter the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
After weeks of closed-door talks between Washington, Copenhagen and Nuuk, Trump reignited public attention on Greenland this past week by putting it front and center of his conflict with NATO ahead of a meeting with the alliance’s secretary-general, Mark Rutte.
“We want Greenland. They don’t want to give it to us. And I said: ‘Bye, bye!’” Trump said.
Fears among Washington’s European allies of a U.S. invasion peaked in January when Danish forces transported explosives to the island to blow up runways and supplies of blood for potential casualties during a multinational exercise, according to a senior Danish official. These actions were first reported by Danish broadcaster DR.
European allies also sent soldiers to show they were willing to help defend Greenland. The French were among the first, sending some 50 elite troops, said Gen. Pierre Schill, commander of the French land army.
In talks with Denmark and Greenland, the U.S. is now seeking to expand its military presence in three areas of Greenland, the commander of the Northern Command, Gen. Gregory Guillot, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last month.
The locations are aimed at securing a presence for special forces and permanent access to Arctic waters, as well as expanding space and submarine monitoring. A senior Danish official confirmed two possible locations at Kangerlussuaq, formerly Sondrestrom, which houses a sizable airstrip, as well as the maritime gateway of Narsarsuaq. A third potential location could be a deep-water port near Pituffik, where the U.S. already has a space base.
The real hitch of the negotiations is ensuring the U.S. respects Danish and Greenlandic sovereignty. The Danish government has said U.S. sovereignty over bases, akin to the British model in Cyprus, is unacceptable. Such a deal might satisfy Trump’s desire for improved security but falls short of his goal of ownership.
“This is not what Trump wants, deep down, but he might accept it if he can sell it as a victory,” said Rasmus Sinding Søndergaard, senior researcher with the Danish Institute for International Studies. The U.S. is already permitted to expand forces under a 1951 treaty that allows virtually unimpeded access. “Trump could have achieved this without triggering a massive international diplomatic crisis,” Søndergaard said.
After meeting Trump, Rutte told reporters that the U.S. is also trying to ensure that any arrangement they reach with the Danes and Greenlanders remains in force if Greenland achieves independence.
The Danish foreign ministry declined to comment beyond saying that Denmark has opened a diplomatic track with the U.S.
The proposed expansion won’t mark a new development, but rather restore parts of the U.S.’s Cold War footprint in Greenland.
A Wall Street Journal team recently traveled across southern Greenland to reach the abandoned U.S. base. The team flew from the capital Nuuk by propjet to Kulusuk, population 200, then traveled by dogsled to the edge of the ice. This was followed by a four-hour trip by fishing boat to the entrance of the fjord, before a final dogsled to the base.
Greenland, the world’s largest island, is bigger than Mexico, but home to fewer than 60,000 people, with no roads connecting settlements. Building new bases here would be costly and logistically challenging.
The base, Bluie East Two, was built in 1942 as part of a network of 17 U.S. bases constructed across Greenland during World War II, partly to prevent Nazi Germany—which occupied Denmark—from taking the island.
The bases were built without Copenhagen’s official consent but with the help of a rogue Danish diplomat. In 1941, Denmark’s ambassador to Washington, Henrik Kauffmann, signed an agreement behind his government’s back that allowed the U.S. to establish defense bases in Greenland, effectively turning the island into an American protectorate. Copenhagen dismissed and charged Kauffmann with high treason, which he ignored. The charge was rescinded after Denmark was liberated from Nazi Germany after WWII.
During the war, bases like Bluie East Two served as midway points for bombers and transport planes flying between North America and Europe. Bluie East Two was abandoned in 1947. Until recently, the remains of the buildings on the base were riddled with asbestos and fuel barrels leaked jet fuel into the surrounding waterways.
After the war, U.S. Secretary of State James Byrnes secretly offered Denmark $100 million for Greenland, roughly $1.6 billion today. Previous administrations also advocated purchasing the island in 1867 and 1910. The U.S. formally recognized Danish sovereignty in 1916 as a condition for its purchase of the Danish West Indies.
A 1951 defense treaty gave the U.S. the right to establish an indefinite number of bases in perpetuity, provided it informed Denmark and Greenland. That year, President Truman approved construction of Thule Air Base, 750 miles from the North Pole—today it is called Pituffik and is the northernmost American military base on the planet. At the height of the Cold War, some 10,000 U.S. soldiers were stationed on the island. Pituffik today houses some 150 U.S. troops.
During the Cold War, the U.S. stationed long-range bombers in Greenland, some loaded with nuclear weapons. It deployed early-warning radar systems and built weather stations to assert sovereignty and get reliable forecasts for military operations.
Jay Huggins, a retired telecommunications technician who worked on several Greenlandic radar stations from 1988 to 1990, including near the Bluie East Two base, said the remoteness and brutal winters challenged young soldiers.
“Some people would only be up there for a year, and they really couldn’t deal with the isolation,” Huggins said. “But then you had other people that had been up there 18, 19, 20 years. We called those guys ‘the land of misfit toys.’ Their personalities had, I would say, altered over their time there.”
The influx of American goods and soldiers after the construction of bases began in 1941 brought economic development to remote Greenlandic settlements, which until then had lived under a Danish trade monopoly aimed at preventing foreign influence.
“There was a lot of nation-building happening during World War II,” said Ujammiugaq Engell, leader of Nuuk Local Museum. “There was a feeling of self-determination due to free trade that made people’s lives easier.”
Peter Bosold, a dogsled musher who traveled with the Journal to Bluie East Two, said he would like the Americans to return to his village where they used to operate a radar station.
“I think it would benefit the village if they built a base in Kulusuk again,” he said.
When the U.S. abandoned its bases in Greenland, it left the cleanup to Denmark despite the treaty obliging Washington to do it. Copenhagen paid nearly $30m in 2018 to clean up chemical spills in Ikateq and another base, but it wasn’t enough to cover larger installations elsewhere.
Naaja Nathanielsen, a former Greenlandic minister of business and natural resources, said the existing agreement allows the U.S. to build more bases.
“But they could begin by cleaning up their old waste,” she said.
Trump has suggested Greenland as a piece of his proposed $185 million Golden Dome missile-defense system, which is intended to create a shield over the U.S. against ballistic, hypersonic and cruise missiles using sensors and interceptors. The growing use of hypersonic weapons that can maneuver during flight, often at low altitudes, has pushed the U.S. to improve space monitoring, said Charles Galbreath, director for space studies at the Washington-based Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.
“I do believe Greenland can play a role in that,” he said. “Having the combination of assets in Greenland and Alaska, that does help monitor the North Polar region very well.”
Greenlandic officials say that despite U.S. rights to operate on the island, Greenlandic sovereignty must be respected.
“We have never felt this threatened before and it is by our ally,” said Pipaluk Lynge, chairperson of the Greenlandic Parliament’s foreign and security policy committee. “The White House has a lot of work to do to regain our trust in Americans.”