“How did you find America?” a reporter asks John Lennon in the first Beatles film A Hard Day’s Night? “Turn left at Greenland,” is Lennon’s deadpan reply. As Elizabeth Buchanan notes in her short, sharp history of the world’s largest island, this frozen wilderness is not a place that many people have a burning desire to visit.
Owning Greenland, however, would be a much more attractive proposition. Vast quantities of natural resources are known to exist under that melting ice sheet, while Greenland’s Arctic Ocean location makes it a powerful piece on the geopolitical chessboard. Addressing the US Congress last March, Donald Trump boasted that he intends to take it from Denmark “one way or the other”.
Buchanan (an Australian defence analyst) frames her 178-page whistlestop tour as “a buyer’s guide”, highlighting the challenges facing Trump or anyone else sizing up Greenland for their property portfolio. She begins with Erik the Red, a 10th-century Norseman who deliberately gave it a misleading name to attract fellow settlers. About 400 years later, Greenland’s Viking population mysteriously vanished, clearing the way for Lutheran missionaries to claim it as a Danish colony in 1721.
Buchanan’s most colourful chapters focus on how Greenland’s strategic importance ramped up during the second World War and the Cold War. When Copenhagen fell to the Nazis, Denmark’s ambassador in Washington went rogue and signed an agreement that turned Greenland into an American protectorate. (This strange episode was depicted in The Good Traitor, a 2020 film starring our own Denise Gough.)
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Even after that custody arrangement ended, the US retained a military base there and increasingly viewed it as vital to national security. John F Kennedy’s administration devised Project Iceworm, a plan to create an underground network of nuclear missiles that remained secret until 1997. More recently, Russia and China’s Arctic activities have been rattling Nato nerves, while native Greenlanders now enjoy a strong measure of home rule.
Buchanan relates all this in surprisingly jaunty prose with lots of pop culture references, including Ed Sheeran, Spider-Man and Sex and the City. Her conclusion is deadly serious, however, sketching four future scenarios for the territory, from “full independence” to “51st US state”.
To use her own estate agent-speak, Greenland has become a much sought-after area – and this intelligent, incisive survey suggests its value is only heading in one direction.
