Amid fallout from the US military ouster of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on January 3, a war of words has again broken out over the Danish territory of Greenland. US President Donald Trump has repeatedly declared that Washington needs control of the territory and has not ruled out capturing it by force.
“We need Greenland," Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on January 4. "It’s so strategic right now. Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place."
"Denmark is not going to be able to do it,” he added.
Denmark's Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen responded on January 5, saying, "we will not accept a situation where we and Greenland are threatened in this way." Citing Greenland's inclusion in NATO as a territory of Denmark, she added, "If the United States chooses to attack another NATO country militarily, then everything stops."
The current focus on Greenland is the latest resurgence of Washington's long interest in the territory, which the US first discussed purchasing from Denmark in the 1800s.
Greenland was named by 10th-century Norse explorer Eric the Red. The early settler chose the incongruous label for the territory, populated by indigenous Inuit, because, as he put it, "people would be attracted to go there if it had a favorable name."
Norse settlements 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 Inuit population remained.
A missionary described Greenland's hardy Inuit people as being so covetous of calories that 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 potential German takeover.
George L. West, an American foreign service officer, recalled that US President Franklin D. Roosevelt "immediately decided we had to do something about Greenland." American forces occupied the territory, securing its valuable Cryolite mine.
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 US 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 "research" facilities on Greenland was a front for Project Iceworm, a planned network of nuclear missile launch sites under Greenland's ice sheet that were aimed at the Soviet Union.
The covert US 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 and in 1966 it was abandoned. Radioactive waste from the site remains buried beneath Greenland's ice sheet.
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.
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."
In 2019, during Trump's first term, the US president repeatedly suggested that the United States take over the territory -- statements that were widely dismissed. 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.
A majority of Greenlanders favor independence from Denmark, but some 85 percent of Greenlanders oppose becoming a US territory, according to a 2025 poll.
The complexity of the geopolitical storm brewing over Greenland was summarized by the territory's Prime Minister Mute Egede, who told reporters in January 2025, "We don't want to be Danish, we don't want to be American, we want to be Greenlandic."
