Hands off Greenland!

It’s hard to say who comes out worse in the war of words over Greenland. Is it President Trump, who has flagrantly abandoned his promise to the American people to wean Washington off its vain, destructive meddling in world affairs? Or is it the leaders of Europe, who expect us to buy that they are overnight converts to the cause of sovereignty, despite having spent years ravaging sovereignty across our continent? On one side, a president whose commitment to the ideals of sovereignty turned out to be thin indeed; on the other, leaders who never had any such commitment.

Trump’s mad mission to ‘get Greenland’ – as if it were a piece of real estate – has intensified. He says that, from 1 February, he will whack a 10 per cent tariff on goods from Denmark, Sweden, Norway, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Finland and the UK. And it might later rise to 25 per cent. This punitive measure will stay, he said, until ‘a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland’ (sic). Experts estimate that buying Greenland would cost the US $700 billion – around 85 per cent of America’s annual defence budget. So much for the Trumpian drive to cut wasteful spending and wacky policies.

The Greenland debacle is proof of how speedily geopolitical tensions can spin out of control. A war of words on social media now morphs into a trade war. Trump says nothing is off the table – not even the use of military might – when it comes to ‘getting Greenland’. Military personnel are being deployed. Soldiers from European states, including France, Germany and the UK, have arrived in the Greenlandic capital, Nuuk, for a ‘reconnaissance mission’. The numbers are tiny, but it’s a significant move. Trump says these nations are ‘playing a dangerous game’.

It’s hard to figure out what Trump wants. Greenland, obviously, but why? The US already has military bases there. If it’s about resources, like rare-earth minerals, he could easily work with the Greenlandic government and the Danes to get greater access to them. Trump’s claim that America must ‘own’ Greenland in order to prevent the resource-hungry Chinese or the power-hungry Russians from seizing it just doesn’t wash. It’s the dodgy dossier of 2026: China conquering Greenland is as likely as it was that Saddam could have launched a nuke in 45 minutes.

The Greenland clash feels like a great game of diversion. Neither side is saying what they really feel. To Trump, the Greenland issue has clearly become a means of forcing to the fore the question of America’s relationship with Europe. He’s never made a secret of his frustration with European nations that don’t pull their weight militarily and which refuse to take more responsibility for their continent’s security. If he’s using Greenland as a wedge to expose to the world the impotence of European nations after decades of living like welfare queens off of America’s military largesse, he has succeeded. Witness Keir Starmer earlier today, cosplaying as a tough headmaster and saying Trump’s tariffs are ‘completely wrong’, while also making clear he won’t retaliate in any way, shape or form.

This is a global power game masquerading as the purchase of a piece of land. As Wolfgang Munchau says, the Greenland affair has exposed that Europe is ‘weak and divided’. This is a continent that has chosen ‘military and geostragic weakness’ and continued ‘dependence on the US’. The sight of European leaders spluttering about the wrongness of Trump’s Greenland plans, even as they pray that Trump will continue looking after them, suggests he has achieved one of his key aims without firing a shot.

What is at risk of being lost in this global spat is the rights of the Greenlandic people themselves. Most importantly, their unshakeable sovereign right to determine the destiny of their nation as they see fit. Trump’s threats to ‘get’ Greenland by any means necessary add up to a grotesque throttling of Greenland’s sovereign integrity. Trump has no more right to rule Greenland than he has to rule Italy or Indonesia. Either states are sovereign or they are not. In Trump’s eyes, they clearly aren’t. States, to him, exist not as independent entities with territorial rights but as mere satellites of the mighty USA that Washington might claim ownership of at any moment.

And yet, the cries of ‘What about sovereignty?!’ from Europe are farcical. The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, says Europe will ‘uphold the sovereignty of Greenland and the Kingdom of Denmark’. Is this the same Brussels machine that is currently fining Hungary a million euros a day for exercising its sovereign right to turn away migrants? The same institution that has punished member states whose pesky populations exercised their sovereign right to reject the Lisbon Treaty and the European Constitution? The same oligarchy that seized control of the Irish economy and the Greek economy to impose austerity measures the people of those nations did not want?

The EU is the world’s most merciless diluter of national sovereignty. Indeed, Greenland itself withdrew from the European Economic Community – the precursor to the EU – way back in 1985, when it clocked that it would not enjoy sovereign control of its incredibly valuable fish resources. Imagine EU leaders reprimanding Trump for disrespecting Greenland’s sovereignty when their predecessors did the very same for years. This is a clash of hypocrites, with sovereignty-despising EU suits set against a MAGA set that claimed it wanted to restore borders after decades of globalist mayhem. Lost in the fray is the sovereignty of Greenland, and the entire idea of sovereignty.

Trump and other players in the MAGA movement love to talk about how nations are more than just landing strips for migrants. More than just airport lounges for the super-rich. More than just businesses to be managed. They are real places, they are homes. And they’re right. Which makes it all the more galling that some of them now speak of Greenland, home to 57,000 free people, as if it were a skyscraper in New York City that men with money and power might just buy and ‘own’. That’s not just an insult to Greenland – it’s an insult to the ideals that are meant to underpin the populist era.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.