And What About Greenland?

The Uncomfortable Truth About Trump

Let’s get something out of the way: Donald Trump is a crass, boorish man. His style is abrasive, his rhetoric often revolting, his personal conduct frequently beneath the dignity of the office. These things are true.

Also true: he’s president again because two consecutive Democratic administrations failed to govern. The American people didn’t elect Trump because they were fooled. They elected him because the alternative kept demonstrating its incompetence.

Which brings us to Greenland.

Trump wants it. Not just rhetorically—he’s appointed a special envoy, sent JD Vance to tour Pituffik Space Base, and after last weekend’s military operation snatched Venezuela’s Maduro off the streets of Caracas, the White House confirmed that “utilizing the U.S. Military is always an option” for acquiring Greenland. Stephen Miller’s wife posted an image of Greenland draped in the American flag with the caption “SOON!”

Denmark is in crisis mode. Seven European leaders issued a joint statement affirming that “Greenland belongs to its people.” Greenland’s Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen pleaded: “No more pressure. No more hints. No more fantasies about annexation.”

The proposal drew mockery when Trump first floated it in 2019, and the renewed push is getting similar treatment—plus genuine alarm. How gauche. How unsophisticated. How dangerous. How very American.

When I was growing up, the Europeans called tourists from the US the Ugly Americans—crass and uncultured. They weren’t ugly when they liberated Europe from the Germans. The phrase comes from the book “The Ugly American” by William Lederer and Eugene Burdick. Interestingly enough, the cultured Europeans got the whole meaning of the book backwards. The hero was American and a good guy but was physically ugly. The book was really about diplomats, not tourists.

But strip away the real estate developer packaging and the post-Venezuela panic, and a reasonable question remains: What exactly is Denmark doing with Greenland?

What Denmark Does With Greenland

Almost nothing.

To be fair: not literally nothing. There are research stations monitoring climate change. A few small mines extracting anorthosite and corundum. Recent pledges of $250 million for runways and ports. Denmark hasn’t entirely abandoned the place.

But relative to what Greenland is—the world’s largest island, a strategic Arctic chokepoint, a repository of rare earths and minerals the West desperately needs—the activity is trivial. A rounding error. Denmark holds title to an enormous asset and has no strategic vision for it. This isn’t about extraction for extraction’s sake—it’s about the absence of any coherent plan. No development strategy. No security architecture. No pathway to the independence Greenlanders say they want. Just maintenance payments and hope.

The mineral wealth everyone talks about—rare earths, uranium, zinc, oil, gas—remains almost entirely in the ground. The strategic Arctic position everyone agrees matters? Barely developed. The newly accessible shipping routes that climate change is opening? Greenland watches ships pass.

Denmark sends half a billion dollars a year to maintain this arrangement. Not to build Greenland’s future. Not to unlock its potential. Just to keep it Danish on the maps while very little happens there.

The Math of Emptiness

Greenland spans 836,000 square miles—three times the size of Texas, larger than France, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, Italy, Greece, Switzerland, and Belgium combined. The population? About 56,500 people. That’s it. Declining—with births hitting the lowest level since World War II and young people emigrating steadily. Denmark’s central bank reported this week that the population is expected to shrink 20% by 2050.

Do the math. That’s roughly 15 square miles per person. Every man, woman, and child in Greenland could have their own Central Park sixty times over. The population density is 0.03 people per square kilometer—one of the lowest on Earth. You could give every Greenlander their own small country and still have land left over.

And what do they do with this vast territory? They fish—an industry that accounts for roughly 90% of Greenland’s exports. They receive Danish subsidies. They wait.

The economy grew just 0.8% in 2025 and is projected to limp along at the same pace this year. The Danish central bank warned this week of “major challenges ahead”—declining shrimp stocks, deteriorating public finances, treasury liquidity that “fell to a critically low level” in late 2025.

That’s not an economy. It’s a holding pattern with the fuel gauge dropping.

The NATO Panic

But NATO! cry the serious people. The Atlantic alliance! Article 5!

Let’s be honest about what would actually happen if the United States seized Greenland.

Nothing.

Denmark is not going to war with America. It doesn’t have the military capacity—Denmark’s entire armed forces would be a rounding error against a single US carrier group. More importantly, it doesn’t have the will. No Danish government is going to spend Danish lives to hold an Arctic island that most Danes have never visited and that Denmark itself has said can leave whenever it wants.

Here’s the thing: the United States already defends Greenland. Pituffik Space Base—the northernmost U.S. military installation—provides the missile warning and space surveillance for the entire Arctic region. American taxpayers fund the security umbrella. Denmark collects the prestige of ownership.

Would NATO invoke Article 5 against its largest member, the country that functionally is NATO’s military backbone? The idea is absurd. France might issue a strongly worded communiqué. Germany might summon an ambassador. There would be emergency summits and stern faces and much talk of “unprecedented violations of the rules-based order.”

And then everyone would move on.

NATO will still be as it is now.

The Financial Reality

Denmark says Greenland has no value. They’re willing to let it walk away for nothing—in fact, they’d save half a billion dollars a year if it did.

So what is the Greenland economy? Fish. That’s it. Ninety percent of exports are shrimp and halibut. One company, Royal Greenland, runs most of it. The GDP is $2.4 billion—roughly the economy of Bismarck, North Dakota. Forty percent of the workforce is on the government payroll. The government itself runs on Danish money: half its revenues come from Copenhagen.

There are fewer than 100 miles of paved roads on the world’s largest island. No roads connect the towns. You get around by plane, boat, or dogsled.

This is what Denmark is fighting to keep?

If Greenland became American tomorrow, the fish don’t disappear. The people who live there still fish. Denmark loses nothing except the bill.

There’s a deal to be made here—one that’s more than generous to everyone involved. Nobody is quibbling over that.

Let’s stop the hysterics and settle this amicably.