One good way of categorising US overtures on Greenland – and Danish pushback – is deja vu all over again.
For two of its three centuries inside the Danish kingdom, the Arctic island has been coveted from Washington, DC.
In 1832, US president Andrew Jackson’s administration made the first pitch to buy the island from Denmark, following the acquisition of Louisiana and Florida from France and Spain respectively in 1803 and 1819.
It was a No then and a No a century later, when this news brief appeared in the Financial Times: “In reply to repeated rumours in the foreign Press the Danish Premier, M. Staunin, again categorically states, ‘Greenland is not for sale.’”
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Today’s more energetic overtures from Donald Trump, though, have revived a controversial question: what has Greenland ever brought Denmark?
Even in its days as a colony, most Danes agree there was no bounty of resources from Greenland. Today, many admit quietly that Danish perceptions of the island have parallels to how many English view Northern Ireland: a territory few have visited, to which few feel attached, a place they would happily see go away.
Others in Copenhagen, asked about Greenland, recall a now-deceased Danish politician’s description of the island as “Africa on ice”: full of potential, never fully realised.
In particular Greenland’s undisputed mineral riches – now an obsession of US billionaires – is a century-old Fata Morgana.
On August 29th, 1924, an unnamed Irish Times correspondent in Copenhagen wrote that the government there “is planning a systematic investigation of the mineral riches of Greenland, in the hope of being able to locate quantities of copper, coal and black lead in sufficient bulk to make mining profitable”.
A century on, the mineral riches remain in the ground because no one has yet found a way to get them out easily or profitably.
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Even if the mineral wealth remains out of reach, Danish officials argue that its colonial history gives Copenhagen a sense of responsibility for Greenland – reflected in bankrolling a fifth of the annual budget.
Besides that, Danish analysts see the island, larger than western Europe, as an outsize equivalent to Ireland’s bowl of shamrock every St Patrick’s Day.
“Greenland has never been a source of economic wealth but has been a way to get attention in the White House,” said Rasmus Sinding Søndergaard, senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies.
In recent years, amid growing overtures from Washington, Søndergaard urged Danish politicians to revisit arrangements with the US, in particular security concerns. Offer military concessions to Trump, he suggested, maybe even a flashy visit with King Frederik to seal the deal. None of that happened. Why not?
Søndergaard thinks his rational arguments were eclipsed by emotion and sentiment, in particular a “Danish self-perception of being this tiny country but having a larger role in the world through Greenland”.
What Danish officials are learning now, he says, is what happens when good attention goes bad.
To be fair, Greenland has always been an ambivalent attention-getter in Washington.
In 1868, three decades after the first No from Copenhagen, US secretary of state William Seward – who had negotiated the purchase of Alaska from imperial Russia a year previously – urged a move on Greenland to secure its “vast fisheries and extensive coasts and numerous harbours, especially with abundant good coal”. Again: No.
In 1903, president Theodore Roosevelt instructed his ambassador in Copenhagen to tell the government of his interest in taking Greenland, because “Prussianised Germany might at any moment seize that little country”. The Danes said no.
But US fears were realised three decades later and the US descended on Greenland to drive back Nazi Germany.
Postwar agreements between Washington and Copenhagen gave the US huge freedom to establish a military and strategic foothold on Greenland. It did so during the cold war, before winding down all but one of its 17 bases.
Today’s Trump security demands, for some, echo the refrain of Arctic explorer and US navy officer Robert E Peary 110 years ago: “Greenland belongs to North America and the Western Hemisphere, over which we have formally claimed a sphere of influence”.
When it comes to Greenland, Danish analyst Ulrik Pram Gad, senior researcher, Danish Institute for International Studies, his home land’s self-regard may, in hindsight, have been a blind spot in the growing stand-off with Washington.
Having Greenland allows Denmark “reaffirm its self-understanding and international image as a good global citizen”, argues Gad, “a perfect coloniser selflessly building a welfare state for the indigenous Greenlander without killing anyone”.
For analyst Søndergaard the question of what Denmark gets out of Greenland is one for another day and of secondary concern now.
“This is no longer about Greenland and Denmark but our rules-based order and the principle that might doesn’t make right and that small countries can stand up for themselves in a conflict,” said Søndergaard. “It is no longer about what Denmark stands to lose if Greenland moves away but what would that signal for the world we live in and our alliance. Now this is a much bigger fight.”
