ON GREENLAND, NOT JUST OVER IT PART 2

YESTERDAY, PART 1 SHARED JAMES MEEK’S personal encounters experienced in Greenland described in “Everything is Possible,” London Review of Books, April 17, 2025. Today’s Part 2 begins with an horrific example of Greenland’s relationship with Denmark and then turns to Trump’s lust for the place.

The “Spiral Scandal.” Meek recounts Denmark’s egregious experiment with Greenland: “Only three years ago, DR [the Danish Broadcast Corporation] broadcast an exposé of the Danish state’s implantation in the 1960s and 1970s of IUDs into Greenlandic women and girls, often without their or their parents’ consent or knowledge. The Spiral Scandal affected more than 4500 women, an enormous number in a country that even today only has a population of 57,000.”

Meek continues, “The combination of these stories—the colonial power trying to save money on Greenland’s welfare spending by means of a clandestine programme of birth control while also quietly shipping billions of kroner out of the country for its own benefit—incensed Greenlanders. Trump’s bid to possess their country, with its emphasis on Greenland’s potential mineral riches, might have made Denmark seem like the better patron, but the documentary served to make Denmark look more Trump-like than Trump in the eyes of already dissatisfied Greenlanders.”

Trump’s U.S. Security Angle. “Ever since Trump’s obsession with Greenland emerged,” Meek recounts, “he and his underlings have been coming up with reasons why it should become part of America, not one of which makes much sense.”

 It’s true that on a map with the North Pole at its centre,” Meek observes, “the world looks very different from the cartography we’re used to. Russia, stretching across ten time zones from Chukotka to Murmansk, faces Alaska, northern Canada, Greenland and Iceland across a rapidly thawing polar ocean. It’s also true that Russia has built or renewed a string of military bases along its Arctic rim, opposite America, and that Denmark has virtually no military presence in or around Greenland.”

Meek continues, “Russia has large industrial cities, such as Murmansk and Norilsk, in the Arctic, and its main nuclear submarine fleet is based there. But America already has a military base in Greenland, Pituffik. There’s nothing to stop the US enlarging it, and an existing treaty with Denmark gives Washington pretty much carte blanche to set up more bases. If Trump really thinks Greenland is essential to US security, he would buy the icebreakers and patrol ships to police its waters and the airstrips and planes to guard its skies: owning the land won’t in itself make America safer.” 

Greenland’s Cryolite. “During the Second World War, when Denmark was occupied by the Nazis,” Meek recounts, “U.S. troops occupied Greenland, partly to secure the air bridge to Britain, but mainly to protect Ivittuut cryolite, which was used to smelt the aluminium for Allied warplanes. After the war the mine, and its wartime earnings, were handed back to its Danish shareholders.”

Meek notes, “The most easily accessible reserves were exhausted by 1962, but the mining company had a processing plant in Denmark that carried on turning out cryolite, using already mined ore, until 1987, by which time it was part-owned by the Danish state.”

Other Mineral Wealth. Meek also deemphasizes the importance of Greenland’s other material wealth: “Trump has a lust for plunder—see Iraq and oil—but, again, the argument doesn’t stand up to examination. Building and running a mine in Greenland, with its lack of infrastructure, its difficult climate and limited local workforce, is a long-term, high-risk endeavour.”

He continues, “If there were some rare and essential mineral that was found there and almost nowhere else, as was once the case with cryolite (available synthetically since the 1930s), an American mine could exploit it now, without America owning the country—the model of investment and exploitation that has served American capital well since the 19th century.” 

A Real Estate Ego. “Perhaps,” Meek reasons, “it’s better to look elsewhere for the source of Trump’s preoccupation with Greenland and Canada. In the mythology of the real estate deal, for instance. ‘I do it to do it. Deals are my art form,’ his ghostwriter has him say in The Art of the Deal.” ds

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025