ON GREENLAND, NOT JUST OVER IT PART 1

JAMES MEEK IS A CONTRIBUTING EDITOR at the London Review of Books and, by my modest standards, something of an adventurous traveler: He recently visited Greenland, a place I’ve experienced only as a Great Circle flyover. Meek’s “Everything is Possible,” London Review of Books, April 17, 2025, is a fascinating piece, extensive (10,563 words!) even by LRB page counts. These tidbits in Parts 1 and 2 today and tomorrow are gleaned from his article. 

The U.S. “Getting Greenland.” Meek observes, “Most of Europe and the wider world take Donald Trump’s insistent demands for the United States to ‘get’ Greenland (‘one way or the other, we’re going to get it,’ he told Congress) as the sign of a new era of American aggression, when the US will seize other people’s territory by force and intimidation, alone or in co-operation with other powerful, like-minded tyrants and satraps.” 

“It’s a reasonable fear,” Meek says, “Trump’s lust for Greenland is of a piece with his demand to ‘get back’ the Panama Canal; to absorb Canada as America’s 51st state; to build, with Benjamin Netanyahu’s blessing, a beach resort on the corpses and ruined cities of Gaza; to partition Ukraine with Vladimir Putin and plunder it in perpetuity. It also fits with Trump’s much older declaration that, although he claims to have disagreed with the invasion of Iraq, ‘we should have taken the oil.’ ”

The Greenlanders’ View. Meek continues, “Trump’s play for Greenland didn’t go down quite this way in the island itself. None of the Greenlanders I met want to, or expect to be forced to, accede to the president’s high-handed claim.”

“But even as it eyes the future imperialist power,” Meek notes, “Greenland has to deal with the current colonial power: Denmark. Officially, Denmark doesn’t see itself as having a colonial relationship with Greenland. Greenland has considerable powers to run its own affairs and on paper Greenlanders have the same rights within the Danish Realm (Denmark, Greenland and the Faroe Islands) as any Dane. But the immediate effect of Trump’s menaces, and the visit to Nuuk in January of his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, was to highlight the paradox of Denmark defending Greenland’s freedom, when it is Denmark’s ownership of Greenland that makes the country unfree in the eyes of many Greenlanders.”

The town of Ilulissat with the icefjord in the background, March 2025. Ilulissat is Greenland’s third largest city (4670), after its capital Nuuk (20,113) and Sisimuit (5520). Image from London Review of Books.

Danish Clichés about Greenland. “Greenlanders will tell you,” Meek says, “there are two Danish clichés about the island. One is that Denmark’s 300-year rule over Greenland has been benign, generous and open-hearted; the other is that Greenland is utterly dependent on the subsidy it receives from the Danish government, that it’s a charity case and a burden on the Danish taxpayer. As unwelcome as Trump’s interest is, it puts a value on Greenland that the self-consciously charitable Denmark has never given it— or, as the cynical part of the Greenlandic population has come to believe, has pretended not to.”

A Dane’s View. “The Trump assault had caught Denmark off guard,” Meek describes, “because it was based on Greenland’s desirability, a concept Denmark had long ago rejected.” Meek talks with Morten Rasch, a Danish climate scientist who worked in Greenland for many years: “ ‘If you look at [Denmark’s] general perception, it’s very much that Greenland costs us a lot of money each year, they drink too much, they commit suicide [“six times the global average,” Meek notes], they have big problems with incest. That’s just not how I see it,’ Rasch told me. ‘There are problems with poor people in Greenland, but I also see a Greenlandic society that is a society like ours [i.e., Denmark’s]. And what has happened since Trump put a value on Greenland, actually said that this is so important for the US that we want to take this territory … this had an influence on my Greenlandic friends.’ ”

Tomorrow we continue Meek’s analyses of Greenland with a horribly eugenics example of its relationship with Denmark, the “Spiral Scandal.” And why ever does Trump covet Greenland anyway? ds

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025