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No, the US does not now own the island
Anne Applebaum, Sep 19, 2026 (Posted on: Open Letters, from Anne Applebaum)
The Trump administration has just announced a new “deal” with Greenland. It seems to be more or less the same deal that the U.S. has had with Greenland since 1951. In that year, Denmark, a founding member of NATO, agreed to give the US the right to build military bases on Greenland, in the context of the NATO treaty.
Here is a good summary:
As I wrote back at the beginning of 2025, Danish tolerance of the American presence even extended, in the 1950s, to nuclear weapons. At the time, the sitting prime minister kept this arrangement secret:
In 1957, the U.S. ambassador nevertheless approached Denmark’s then–prime minister, H. C. Hansen, with a request. The United States was interested in storing some nuclear weapons at an American base in Greenland. Would Denmark like to be notified?
Hansen responded with a cryptic note, which he characterized, according to diplomatic records, as “informal, personal, highly secret and limited to one copy each on the Danish and American side.” In the note, which was not shared with the Danish Parliament or the Danish press, and indeed was not made public at all until the 1990s, Hansen said that since the U.S. ambassador had not mentioned specific plans or made a concrete request, “I do not think your remarks give rise to any comment from my side.” In other words, If you don’t tell us that you are keeping nuclear weapons in Greenland, then we won’t have to object.
The US-Danish Greenland treaty itself was public, and it enjoyed widespread approval. Indeed, it was a source of pride in Denmark, which has been a loyal American ally ever since.
During the Cold War, the Danes were central to NATO’s planning. After the Soviet Union dissolved, they reformed their military, creating expeditionary forces specifically meant to be useful to their American allies. After 9/11, when the mutual-defense provision of the NATO treaty was activated for the first time—on behalf of the U.S.—Denmark sent troops to Afghanistan, where 43 Danish soldiers died. As a proportion of their population, then about 5 million, this is a higher mortality rate than the U.S. suffered. The Danes also sent troops to Iraq, and joined NATO teams in the Balkans. They thought they were part of the web of relationships that have made American power and influence over the past half century so unique. Because U.S. alliances were based on shared values, not merely transactional interests, the level of cooperation was different. Denmark helped the U.S., when asked, or volunteered without being asked.
Readers surely know what happened next. Starting even before the inauguration, Trump (and Stephen Miller) spent months threatening Greenland, posting memes and making aggressive statements. Finally, in January 2026, after the Danish army brought blood banks to the island and prepared to blow up airport runways to thwart a possible U.S. invasion, he backed off, giving a long, rambling speech in which he confused Greenland and Iceland several times (creating a crisis in Reykjavik too) but seemed to say he would not invade.
A series of negotiations followed. These were accompanied by a semi-covert influence campaign, conducted mostly by private companies, that I described in Empire of Grift, the Atlantic cover story published this week:
In May, the governor of Louisiana landed in Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, declaring that he had come to “make a bunch of friends.” Jeff Landry is Trump’s “special envoy” to Greenland, a title that comes with no salary and no recognition from Denmark, of which Greenland is a semiautonomous territory. Landry had nevertheless told Trump, on X, that “it’s an honor to serve you in this volunteer position to make Greenland a part of the U.S.”
Upon his arrival, Landry changed into camouflage pants, as if he were preparing for combat. He attended a business conference to which he had not been invited. He tried to hand out MAGA hats, without much success. Although Louisiana is near the bottom of all U.S. health-care rankings, and although Greenland has full access to a state-funded national health service, Landry brought a doctor who seemed to be there to discuss Greenlandic health care. On the day after Landry’s departure, Greenlanders staged a large protest outside the new U.S. consulate, which they had dubbed “Trump Tower.” After returning home, Landry nevertheless told Fox News that the people he had met “want more U.S. involvement in Greenland.”
The visit was farcical, but no one in Denmark was laughing. Ever since the surreal, shocking days in January 2026 when the Danish army brought blood banks to the island and prepared to blow up airport runways to thwart a possible U.S. invasion, the government in Copenhagen has been watching the Americans who visit Nuuk, some for business, some for politics, some for a strange mix of both. In August, for example, an American oil company called Greenland Energy began bringing equipment to drill for oil in a remote part of the island, although it had not received formal permission to do so. Greenland Energy’s investors include Ken Griffin, a major donor to the Republican Party. Dr. Phil, the former talk-show host and prominent Trump supporter, has been commissioned to make a documentary series about the project, designed to “capture the mission of these modern-day wildcatters.” The company offered locals huge salaries—$185,000 annually, well above the national average—and talked up the potential size of the oil deposit. (Greenland Energy has said that it hasn’t officially started recruiting employees, and that high salaries are standard for specialized security guards.) A local leader told me that this talk of big money seemed ominous to Greenlanders, and in several towns, people staged protests against the drilling project. In mid-August, officials in Greenland formally postponed the drilling.
Larry Swets, the company’s executive chair, told Fortune that the project is not related to American annexation. But two days after the Greenlandic government warned that it had not given the company permission to deliver equipment, Trump posted an AI-generated photograph of himself glowering over a Greenlandic village beneath the headline “Hello, Greenland!” So is Greenland Energy there for politics, for business, or both?
Equally hard to assess are the motives of Dryden Brown, a co-founder of Praxis, which Brown has described as a “crypto-native country” that has financial backing from, among others, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale and Balaji Srinivasan, the author of The Network State: How to Start a New Country, along with entities associated with Peter Thiel and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Brown visited Greenland just before the 2024 U.S. presidential election to “try to buy it,” as he wrote on X. Praxis seeks to build a “digital nation”—anyone can apply to join—and he wants, at some point, to build a city in Greenland to house it. Maybe this was Brown’s own initiative. Maybe it was Thiel’s. Or maybe the idea came from Ken Howery, now the U.S. ambassador to Denmark, who co-founded PayPal with Thiel. Officially, Howery represents the U.S. government, but he equally represents the tech oligarchy, whose influence in this new world far exceeds that of mere government officials.
Lately, a more frequent visitor is Drew Horn, who describes himself as an entrepreneur “focusing on critical minerals and resource development.” With a Greenlandic business partner, a former politician who once starred in a Danish TV series, Horn is planning to build a data center in western Greenland, a daunting project that would require new port facilities, the construction of an undersea cable, housing for imported workers, and some bespoke engineering to prevent the center from sinking into the permafrost. But Horn is also a former Trump national-security official, according to The New Yorker, with links to at least one covert operation: In 2020, a participant in a failed coup attempt in Venezuela named Horn as one of his contacts, though Horn has denied all wrongdoing. He also denies playing any such role in Greenland, writing an article for Britain’s The Spectator magazine in May titled “No, I’m Not a CIA Spy in Greenland.” Still, he told Reuters in April that he maintains a “dialogue” with White House officials. Does he still represent Trump? American oligarchs? Both?
Horn has also met several times with the leader of Naleraq, Greenland’s populist pro-independence political party. At the time of Landry’s visit in May, Julie Rademacher, a Danish Greenlandic politician whom I’d met in Copenhagen, called me from Nuuk to describe the situation. Rademacher said that ever since American business and political operators from the Trump orbit had gotten involved in Greenland, Naleraq had become more aggressive, initiating votes of no confidence in a Parliament that is historically more decorous. Greenland does have long-standing grievances against Denmark. As recently as 2022, the Danish and Greenlandic governments launched an investigation into the Danish promotion of birth control in Greenland in the 1960s and ’70s, which included inserting IUDs into women without consent, a practice that former Greenlandic Prime Minister Múte B. Egede has said constituted “genocide.” Are Americans seeking to exploit that legacy?
Regardless of their opinion about Denmark, Greenlanders are becoming aware of, and are unnerved by, this semi-covert, sometimes glaringly obvious American pressure. The night after Landry’s visit, Rademacher said, she had gone to a bar in Nuuk where people were openly carrying guns, something she’d never seen before. The atmosphere on the island was becoming unsettled, strange: Greenlanders knew that envoys from a predatory foreign power were circulating among them, seeking minerals, money, attention, regime change. “They are destroying the trust and the respect in society, in institutions, but also in people,” she said. “They fuck with people’s brains. It will be a fight for Greenlanders to keep their sanity.”
After all that, new “deal” is a damp squib. As of this writing, no text of the agreement has been released, but background briefings have been provided to media. The BBC reports that the agreement states that hostile powers, meaning Russia and China, cannot build bases on Greenland, which the Danes would never have allowed anyway. It rules out major investments from those countries too, which weren’t a serious prospect either. The government of Greenland is explicitly included, which is also new. But, at least in the reporting so far, nothing else really changes. The Danish prime minister and foreign minister released a statement declaring that the agreement respects "the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Kingdom and the right of the Greenlandic people to self-determination."
These are all additions to the existing treaty that could have been added without the drama, anger and stupid memes, without Trump blustering about "deals” and without terrifying the inhabitants of Greenland. And I fear that the covert and overt influence campaigns will continue.
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NOTE:
On Friday 18 Sep 2026, President Donald Trump said that the U.S. has reached an agreement for “permanent control over security” for Greenland that would enable a broad expansion of the American military presence on the territory of Denmark that he has long coveted.
The White House did not release a draft of the agreement, which is expected to be signed by all three parties at the U.N. General Assembly next week. It would apparently replace the 1951 treaty that granted the U.S. authority to station troops in Greenland.
