Greenlanders will head to the polls on March 11 amid a looming geopolitical showdown over calls from US President Donald Trump for the Danish territory to become an American island.

"One way or another, we're going to get it," Trump vowed to Congress on March 4 as he asserted Washington needed Greenland for the sake of America's national security. "You have China's ships all over the place. You have Russian ships all over the place. We're not letting that happen," Trump told reporters in January.

The current focus on Greenland is only the latest resurgence of Washington's more than 150-year-old ambition to take over the territory.

Ice-covered Greenland was given its incongruous name by 10th-century Norse explorer Eric the Red. The early settler chose the name because, as he put it, "people would be attracted to go there if it had a favorable name."

The Norse settlers in Greenland did not last. Researchers believe the newcomers fell victim to a changing climate and economic upheaval caused by the plague among other hardships. By 1721, when Danish missionaries first arrived to the island, only the indigenous Inuit population remained.

A missionary described Greenland's hardy Inuit people as being so covetous of calories they would eat lice plucked from their own clothing. To avoid wasting minerals, he claimed they would "scrape the sweat from off their faces with a knife and lick it up."

Denmark declared sovereignty over Greenland in 1921 and enforced a trading monopoly with the island. The ban on outside merchants enabled Copenhagen to purchase whale and seal blubber -- a prized source of fuel for lanterns -- strictly on its own terms.

During World War II Denmark was invaded by Nazi Germany, leaving the Danish territory of Greenland open to a German takeover.

George L. West, an American foreign service officer, recalled that US President Roosevelt "immediately decided we had to do something about Greenland." American forces occupied the territory, securing its valuable Cryolite mine.

With weather prediction a critical factor in waging war, Nazi operatives made repeated attempts to set up secret meteorological stations on isolated parts of Greenland.

"It seems that a lot of your weather for Western Europe originates up on that icecap. It's invaluable, from a military standpoint, to get meteorological reports from there," West explained, adding that part of the American mission in Greenland was to "find these [illicit Nazi weather stations] and destroy them."

The United States returned Greenland to Danish control following the war but did not pull out its military. In 1951 the two countries signed an agreement that allowed Washington and the newly formed NATO military alliance to "improve and generally to fit the area for military use."

One of the US facilities on Greenland, named Camp Century, was declared a research facility. In reality it was a front for Project Iceworm, a planned network of nuclear missile launch sites under Greenland's ice sheet aimed at the Soviet Union.

The covert American nuclear weapons station was doomed from the start. Engineers faced constantly shifting ice that twisted and buckled around silos designed to hold delicate nuclear warheads. In 1966 Camp Century was abandoned, along with radioactive waste that remains buried beneath the ice today.

Proposals for the United States to purchase Greenland date back to 1867, when the idea was first seriously considered by Washington.

In 1946 a concrete offer, of the modern equivalent of around $1 billion, was made to Copenhagen for Greenland, which one senator described as "a military necessity" for the United States.

Greenland, Washington said, would allow for "staging areas from which to launch military operations over the Arctic against America's adversaries," among other uses.

Denmark's foreign minister rejected the 1946 offer, responding that, "while we owe much to America I do not feel that we owe them the whole island of Greenland."

Trump, during his first term in 2019, repeatedly suggested that the United States take over the territory -- statements that were widely dismissed as unserious. After making the territory a priority in his second term, however, Denmark apparently responded by increasing the prominence of the Polar Bear -- representing Greenland -- on the Danish king's coat of arms, and reiterating that the territory is not for sale.

Today Greenland runs many of its own institutions, including its own parliament, but remains heavily dependent on Denmark.

The territory receives nearly $600 million in aid each year from Copenhagen, a fund that represents more than half of Greenland's entire government budget and equal to more than $10,000 for each of the territory's 57,000 people.

If a burgeoning independence movement in Greenland is able to successfully detach the territory from Danish rule after the March 11 elections, Washington could bypass Copenhagen in its quest to take ownership of the territory. But while a majority of Greenlanders favor independence from Denmark, some 85 percent of Greenlanders oppose becoming a US territory, according to a recent poll.

The complexity of the geopolitical storm brewing over Greenland was recently summarized by the territory's Prime Minister Mute Egede, who told reporters in January, "We don't want to be Danish, we don't want to be American, we want to be Greenlandic."