This is The Guardian. Today, we take a trip to Greenland, which Donald Trump wants to make great again. We had a lot of meetings yesterday on Afghanistan, on the economy, which is doing very well.
Cast your mind back to the summer of 2019. On a new Jersey tarmac, President Trump was taking questions. The usual stuff came up. Tariffs, the war in Afghanistan. And then out of the blue, a new interest. Well, Greenland, I don't know, it got released somehow. It's just something we talked about. We're very good allies with Denmark. We protect Denmark like we protect large portions of the world. So the concept came up and I said certainly I'd be strategically it's interesting.
Word had got out that buying Greenland, the world's largest island, was something Trump rather liked the sound of. Essentially, it's a large real estate deal, but we're looking at it. It's not number one on the burner. It might not have been number one on the burner, but it prompted a swift response from the Danish Prime Minister, Metaphredriksen. An absurd discussion, that's the response of Denmark's Prime Minister to President Trump's suggestion that the United States could be interested in buying Greenland.
That snub did not go down well, and Trump cancelled a trip to Copenhagen.
After that, the story really seemed to fade away. But then earlier this month, just before his inauguration, Trump put Greenland back in the global spotlight. And this time, he seems serious. They do. They should give it up because we need it for national security. That's for the free world. I'm talking about protecting the free world. Can you assure the world that as you try to get control of these areas, you are not going to use military or economic coercion? No.
So what does Trump want with this isolated icy island? And what do Greenlanders themselves think of all of this? The Guardian's Nordic correspondent Miranda Bryant got on a plane to find out. From the Guardian, I'm Helen Pitt. Today in focus. Why Donald Trump wants to take Greenland? With cash or by force?
Miranda, can you tell us about what it's like flying into Greenland? I flew from Copenhagen. I was in the middle, I old bit, so I was creaming around to try and see. But it was very bright, beautiful, clear-skied sunny day. And you could see a lot of white ice, snow-covered rock. And then as the plane starts to descend, even lower, you start to see the little different colored painted houses. Oh, it sounds beautiful.
And how cold was it when you stepped off the plane? Mostly close to minus 10, I think. But yeah, having worked as Nordic correspondent for a while, I have a very warm coat, so that was fun.
And you traveled to the capital Nuke? Did it feel like a place that realised, wow, we're suddenly in the global spotlight right now? From the moment I got in a taxi to go into town, the first thing the taxi driver says how Donald Trump Jr was there last week, he saw him.
So you were there the week after Trump Jr. visited. He's Trump's eldest son. Tell me about that visit. What was he doing there? So he said that it was a private visit, a personal visit, who was there for a few hours. He arrived at the airport. I'm just really excited to be here. Awesome country. The scenery coming in was just spectacular. I'm just very excited to be here. Do you have a message from your father?
He says hello. Okay, two. We were talking to him yesterday, so he says hello to everyone in Greenland. Okay, are you still interested in buying Greenland? He was later spotted outside a statue and then in a hotel having lunch and you saw a few people wearing MAGA hats and also a make Greenland great again hat as well. Good, good, good.
Donald Trump video call people in a room that his son was having lunch with. But then it later materialised that not all of this was quite as it seemed. He didn't necessarily have an adoring crowd waiting him there to have lunch with him.
We later reported that his team had, in fact, recruited people off the street to come and join him for lunch, who didn't even necessarily know who he was. Some of those people were apparently homeless. So he sweeps in for this lunch, has to find people to make it look busy. His team asks people on the street, do you fancy coming to this lunch? And they're like, free lunch?
Sure. Is that, is that what happened? Apparently. So according to the CEO of the hotel, who we went speak to, that's exactly what happened. Okay. He said that it was an ordinary lunch booking. They didn't know who was coming until they came. Some of their stuff caught in Don partway through who he was and, um,
that he was Trump's son. Yeah. And apparently for lunch, they had a traditional Greenlandic lunch of fish and caribou. In days following that, there were people in MAGA hats distributing $100 bills, opposite the hotel, outside a supermarket. You sort of saw reports in local press of people quite outraged that their young child had been given a $100 bill.
Who was giving out the $100 bill? So it wasn't Trump Jr himself. No, no. Reportedly, they were Trump supporting YouTubers. And we should probably say here that you asked Trump Jr about all of this and he denied it. And I quite liked the response from one of his spokespeople, which went, do you think Donald Trump Jr was wandering around Greenland, inviting homeless people to lunch? Or do you realize that the suggestion sounds so beyond the pale ridiculous that you should feel stupid, even asking the question?
And what did the Greenlanders you spoke to make of this really quite bizarre sounding visit? One of the first places I went after arriving in Nook was a cafe.
and it's a kind of big, high-sealing-d kind of space with a coffee roastery. There's a couple of people playing backgammon and getting very excited. Later, they get very excited and it turns out that it's because one of the women her father had caught four narwhals.
People were saying that the Trump junior visit, there was a very serious element to it, but also quite a few people said they found the whole thing just kind of absurd. Yeah, it kind of looks like a big drama in a reality show.
Like really staged the arriving of Trump Jr. and the Cavs. He said that he's just here as a tourist. It was the biggest PR experience that is done from the Trump side for the locals. It was so hilarious. It was so funny to get those caps.
When I came outside, the Northern Lights were kind of dancing all over the sky. And yeah, these things are just normal, I guess.
You went to Greenland to try to find out why Trump is so interested in it. What did you find out? Why does he want Greenland? Trump has said he wants Greenland for security reasons that it's really important for the US and its security to have full control of it.
It's between the US and Europe and the Arctic is increasingly becoming this extremely important place in the search for minerals. In oil and gas exploration, those minerals that we're talking about are also ones that are vital for the green transition, including copper, lithium, cobalt and nickel. The EU last year, they said that Greenland has 25 of the 34 highly sought after raw materials that the EU needs.
And then also for shipping the northwest passage in the last decade or so has started to open up for a few months a year. Because the ice is melting. Yeah. Meaning that in theory, it is for part of the year possible now by ship, but in the future, it definitely will be a lot more.
But when it comes to minerals, Greenland's been wanting to access and use its minerals for some time, but has needed to find the right partners to be able to set up the infrastructure in order to get the minerals out. A lot of them are in the fjords. And a key tool that you need to operate effectively around that part of the Arctic is to have icebreakers and
This also exposes another kind of really strange thing, which is Denmark, and as a result, Greenland has no icebreakers. That sounds crazy. For a place like Greenland, right? And Denmark retired its last three in 2010.
And has only recently since Trump started talking about Greenland again, talked about how it needs to potentially order more icebreakers. But that takes years to build. You don't just buy an icebreaker. And in the global superpower struggle for the Arctic, Russia is the icebreaker superpower. They have dozens, some of them nuclear. Sweden has icebreakers, Finland has icebreakers and Finland still builds icebreakers. China has icebreakers.
But much of Europe doesn't, and the US doesn't have loads but is building more, I think, and Canada has some. So, yeah, it's this future-facing region that Russia and China have already been busy in. The US is now saying, we're getting in here.
I had no idea that these ice-breaking ships were so crucial to the global race for minerals and these trading routes. Greenland's sort of been taken for granted for all of these years, hasn't it really? By Denmark, it seems. While you were in Nook, you met politicians from the majority party in the Greenlandic parliament, as well as the main opposition party. What kind of things did they tell you about why they think Trump is so interested in their country?
Nia Nathanielson, who amongst other things is Minister for Minerals. She talked about the fact that we've been trying to get a deal with Denmark, with the EU, with the US, with lots of people for a very long time when it comes to minerals, and they've been keen to renew one of their agreements, which was actually set up during the last Trump administration.
I must also say that it's been difficult to get a go from the Biden administration in terms of extending or expanding the deal, which has been an interest on our side. So I do think that it will be easier to make a new deal with the incoming administration. And I, of course, I'm bound to do this in a way that profits and benefits the Atlantic population.
but I also understand the American need for minerals into their sectors. So I think there's a sense that the Trump administration is actually one of the few parties that has been cooperating with and working with the Greenlandic government to access the minerals that it wants to, which has seen as a key component that is needed to become independent and not receive funding from Denmark.
So they know full well that they're sitting on, I was going to say a goldmine, that's mixing my minerals, metaphors, but they know that they've got a lot of valuable resources onto the ground. Yeah, and then I went to visit Pelle Brouberg, the leader of the largest opposition in Greenland at the Greenlandic parliament building, and he could see quite clearly what advantages Greenland had for the US. But it is a long-term thing. If you know this is worth a lot in the future,
They try to make sure that whoever it is tries to get a hold of getting in the resource. Not necessarily getting out of the ground, but getting access to it.
So Greenland is a treasure trove of different possibilities without anything firm confirmed. That's the funny thing. He said the difference this time versus last time when it comes to Trump and his interest in Greenland is that he's done his homework. And his team are aware of the frustrations in Greenland and of the desire to be independent and the fact that Denmark hasn't been treating them.
So yeah, clearly this time he's aware of this discontent and fury and upset and trauma over what has happened between the two.
A little history lesson for people who don't know too much about Greenland. Greenland is part of the Kingdom of Denmark and it has been for hundreds of years, has knit first as a colony and then from 1979 as a self-governing nation with limited autonomy. Denmark still controls its foreign policy and security.
As of 2009, and this is crucial, I think for this conversation, Greenland gained control of its natural resources. And from your visits to Greenland, why do you think Trump thinks now is the moment to make his bid? I think Trump and his team can sense that this time is different to last time round.
Nobody I spoke to said, yes, let's be bought by the US. Independence seems to be what most people are aiming for. However, I think there's this idea that people might think that Trump is using that rhetoric, but that actually that could mean working together or cooperation or collaboration.
And then also on the history element, I think it's important to say that Inuit people had been in Greenland for a very long time since 2500 BC, so that came long before any of the relations were done up. And you said that there's a growing independence movement. What has fueled that? Is that just an increasing dissatisfaction with
how Denmark treats Greenland. Independence has long been a goal of many Greenlanders and many politicians, but recent revelations about current and historic abuses by the Danish state on Greenlandic people seems to really have propelled it forward and maybe unified people behind that cause.
Miranda, you mentioned abuses by the Danish state. What did people in Greenland have to say about that?
I met the actor and musician Anggun Guat Flarson, who played the fictional Greenlandic Prime Minister in the Danish political drama Borgan, as well as lots of other brilliant Greenlandic films. I met him at the Culture House in Nook, and he talked about the stereotypical way that Greenlanders are often viewed by Danish people, that many, many are drunkards, some stereotypical views are
about child abuse as well. The days just see us on some strongly people, the drunken green lander, that beauty sit and play all time and abuse is our children. And then we start to, how can we say, answering back, and then we could just cut the money.
It's very hard to vote on both sides.
And Miranda, the last Today in Focus episode that we made looking at Greenland last year was all about the shocking forced contraception scandal that has recently been brought into the spotlight where over many years, and I'm still so shocked about this, really, thousands of Inuit women were given contraception by the Danish government against their will and sometimes against even their own knowledge when they were quite young teenage girls in a bid to reduce the population. And it's been described by some as an act of genocide.
I wonder how has this coil scandal, the force contraception scandal, played into the Greenland denmark dynamics today? It seems to have been a really quite a big contributing factor, because this scandal that's been known about between people but hasn't been in the public eye until very recently, and then also there's been a high profile court case minutes. Yeah, it's a big class action, isn't it? They're suing the Danish government.
And as you heard on your program, women who maybe didn't even know that it had happened to them until now when they're a lot older or new, but didn't realize it was part of this wider, wider thing. There was someone who didn't even realize that they had a coil fitted until they went to the doctor to say, I can't get pregnant, what's going on? And the doctor examined them and said, well, of course you're going to get pregnant, you've got a coil up there. Yeah, it's incredibly shocking. Yeah, definitely.
the widespread publicity around that and the very courageous women who have been speaking out publicly about it for the first time, only in recent years, has really brought the subjects to the fore and, yeah, it's a big political and social issue. And despite all of this, the Danish government has said very little about it.
then plus the very recent, very recent revelations about how Greenlandic parents in Denmark have been assessed by Danish local authorities using these parenting tests that have not been culturally adapted for Greenlandic people or non-Danish people and it's contributed to lots of Greenlandic parents being separated from their children.
So there's the forced contraception scandal, this parenting test scandal that you mentioned, very genuine grievances that Greenlandic people have in terms of how Denmark has treated them over the decades. And it sounds like Donald Trump and his team are aware of this very much. And you could say taking advantage of this difficult points in Danish Greenlandic history. Would you say that he's exploiting this difficult time or just tapping into this
sense of discontent at the moment? Well, he does seem to be tapping into this difficult time, but from a Greenlandic perspective, people want results. They want these things dealt with and apologies made and payments made. So, Greenlandic politicians seem to want to use this to get the results that have been so long-awaited from Denmark.
A moment like this hasn't happened before. One of the people we spoke to, Akka Hanson, an Inuit filmmaker, she talks about how we've been protesting all these months. People have been talking about the parenting tests all these years and the Danish government hasn't listened.
We have to protest this because it's so tiring to witness and to hear about and read about in the news all the time that this happened and this happened and I think that's actually one thing. That's what brought us together, this feeling of exhaustion, of hearing about the mistreatment of our people.
And now, finally, after all these years where Greenlandic people have said we are being treated in a racist way by Denmark, suddenly the Danish government has said, we're going to stop doing these parenting tests on Greenlandic people. And they've also suddenly said, we're going to address racism against Greenlandic people.
So there seems to be a lot of sudden changes being made in a very short period of time of a fortnight or something. Right. So the power of the most powerful man in the world with the biggest mouth. Yeah. How else has Denmark responded to Trump's intervention?
At the beginning of January, which feels like a very long time ago now, the King of Denmark, who is a relatively new King of Denmark, he's only been doing the job for less than a year. His mum suddenly abdicated, didn't she last year? Yes, last new year. He suddenly unveiled this new coat of arms that far more prominently featured the bear that represents... The polar bear, right? The polar bear that represents Greenland and also the symbol of the Faroe Islands, which is also part of the Kingdom of Denmark.
It was seen as maybe a potential rebuke to Trump and his interest in Greenland. However, the palace says that this was a review that was commissioned some time ago. But the timing does seem very timely. And as well as changing the coat of arms, Denmark has also said that it plans to spend $1.5 billion on two new inspectionships, two drones and two dog sled patrols. The latter is something that Trump made fun of this weekend when he was on Air Force One.
We're the one that can provide the freedom. They can't. They put two dog sleds there two weeks ago. They thought that was protection.
So it sounds like there is this growing divide between Greenland and Denmark, which Trump is keen to exploit. But he's not completely starting from scratch, is he? Because there's already a US military base on the island, and they have a long-term relationship. When the Nazis occupied Denmark during the Second World War, the US kind of looked after Greenland before returning it to Denmark at the end of the war. How do Greenlanders feel about that time?
People I talked to largely seem to talk about it fairly positively. Some people refer to the fact that that was a time when Greenland really prospered. Apparently it was a time when Greenlandic people were allowed coffee for the first time because apparently Denmark didn't allow coffee into Greenland.
And also, Pella Broulberg, who is the leader of Nalara Greenland's largest opposition party, he told me that people in Greenland looked upon that time positively and saw the US as treating Greenland as with more kindness than Denmark had done.
And so it sounds like Denmark is not going to give Greenland up without a fight. Over the weekend it emerged that there'd been what was described as a fiery phone call between Donald Trump and Meta Fredrickson, the Danish Prime Minister, in which Trump insisted, apparently very aggressively, that this wasn't a joke and that he is very serious about taking Greenland, potentially by force, how much alarm did it cause in Denmark?
I mean, it's dominated headlines. The whole Trump saga has dominated headlines in Denmark. I don't think it would be as stretched to describe it as the biggest challenge pivotal moment for the Danish Prime Minister or for Denmark in a very long time. Coming up, how far will Trump go to get what he wants?
Miranda Greenland is not the only place that Trump has in his sights. The Panama Canal and even Canada are apparently part of his expansionist vision for the US. And he's already directed the federal government to start referring to the Gulf of America rather than the Gulf of Mexico. But in terms of Greenland, do we have any idea of how a potential deal could take place if he was going to try and buy it?
I cannot see anybody agreeing to anything that looks like or is or can be interpreted as buying Greenland because it's a notion that all parties seem to agree on, apart from the US, that it's not viable. Trump thinks you can buy anything, right? Trump thinks that, but Greenland doesn't agree that it's viable and Denmark doesn't agree that it's viable.
But the thing that that does seem to be more possible is with the strength of the independence movement and there's an election coming up by early April in in Greenland. So that's quite important. If
Most Greenlanders can be convinced that it would be able to manage without the support of Denmark and be in favor of independence. And then you combine that with Donald Trump wanting whatever his priorities are when it comes down to it, whether that's
north-west passage, whether that's minerals, oil, military bases, or all of it, then it is imaginable that perhaps there's some way of striking a deal with access in return for money that would enable independence or trade deals that would enable independence.
And you said that nobody, except for Trump, accepts that Greenland is for sale or could be bought. And there was a poll recently that said that 85% of Greenlanders don't want their island to become part of the US. But there is precedent, isn't there, for the US buying extra land? They bought Alaska and they also bought the Danish West Indies from Denmark back in 1917 for $25 million, which I think is about 650 million in current money.
And back then they had defence concerns. And President Harry Truman in 1946 did actually put in a bid for Greenland of $100 million in gold, which amounts to about a billion and a half today. But if Trump can't get an agreement, how far do you think he will really go to get what he says he needs?
Well, he's not ruled out using military force, and he's also talked about tariffs, which could have a really disastrous impact on Denmark. The Danish Prime Minister does seem to be trying to sound as amenable to Trump as possible, whilst also insisting that it belongs to Greenlanders.
But the other thing is, since that supposedly disastrous phone call with Donald Trump, she has posted on her Facebook a picture of her with other Nordic leaders having a very cozy dinner in her kitchen. And there does seem to be movement amongst other Nordic leaders talking about the Nordics being united on this issue.
although the Nordics United are still minnows compared to the US. Yes, but they do have icebreakers. True.
And so when you look back now on your time in Greenland, what was your takeaway from how Greenlanders feel about the concept of the US buying Greenland? No to buying, but yes to collaboration is my general takeaway. There is a sense that this is a moment that we could leverage to try to improve our standing with Denmark or maybe to become independent or maybe to get closer to achieving some of the things that we want to achieve.
But Ango Ngwak Larsen said that he felt like Greenland needs to be careful what it wishes for, if you look back at America's history. I mean, I know the story about America, how to build America. They kill Indians, they made slavery. I mean, they also have a lot of colonial history.
So, and I see some memes on Facebook. And I look with a MAGA cap and an Indian. And he says, this is gonna be your downfall if you go into the States. So we have to be very cautious because we know what they did. We can take advantage of this.
but it has to be done wisely. That was Anggun Guac-Larson, the Borgen actor. Thanks to him and to everybody else, Miranda Bryant met on her trip to Greenland. You can read all of her coverage of Greenland and the rest of the Nordic nations at TheGuardian.com.
If you appreciated this episode, please do leave us a review. We really enjoy hearing what you think about the show and it also helps other people to find us. And it's probably worth pointing out that journalism like this doesn't come cheap and it takes time. If you want to support The Guardian to make more episodes like this, please consider becoming a supporter by going to TheGuardian.com forward slash today in focus pod.
And if you missed the episode that we made about the forced contraception scandal in Greenland, you can find it by searching for the chilling policy to cut Greenland's birth rate. On tomorrow's episode of Politics Weekly America, Joan E. Grieve looks at how far the Trump administration will go to curtail LGBTQ plus rights in the US, and she speaks to the people who are fighting back.
And that's all from us for today. Today's episode was produced by Ruth Abrahams and presented by me, Helen Pitt. Sound Design was by Joel Cox, and the executive producer was Courtney Youssef. We'll be back tomorrow. This is The Guardian.