Early Wednesday morning, Danish public broadcaster DR broke the news that several associates of Donald Trump had been flagged by the Danish Police Intelligence Service for running a shoddy espionage campaign in Greenland to soften the ground ahead of a potential push by the United States to take over the island. Shortly after the report was published, Denmark's foreign minister summoned U.S. charge d'affaires Mark Stroh to reiterate the longstanding Danish line that the U.S. is not allowed to, in Trump's words, "get" Greenland.
Trump has made no attempt to hide his lust for Greenland. He has been agitating to acquire the island since his first term in office, after he apparently got the idea from Ronald Lauder, heir to the Estée Lauder fortune. "I said, 'Why don't we have that?'" Trump told the New York Times's Peter Baker. "I love maps. And I always said: 'Look at the size of this. It's massive. That should be part of the United States.'" In March, he said, "One way or the other, we’re going to get it." Cartophilia aside, Trump's desire to annex the large, sparsely populated island is not a unique quirk, but rather the latest instance of a long-held U.S. foreign policy goal.
The U.S. has been trying to acquire Greenland from its colonial overlord Denmark since shortly after the Civil War, which is not that long after Denmark formally annexed it. William Seward, Secretary of State under Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, turned his attention to Greenland and Iceland after negotiating the purchase of Alaska, and came fairly close to securing the Arctic islands. Every few decades, successive U.S. State Department officials would revive the idea, and while they occasionally got far along in negotiations, they never convinced the Danes to sell them the island or trade it for an island or two in the Caribbean Sea. (For a more thorough look at the U.S.'s acquisitive posture towards overseas territories and protectorates, I highly recommend Daniel Immerwahr's 2019 book How To Hide An Empire.)
During World War II, the Nazis overran Copenhagen, so the Danish government let the U.S. take over defense of Greenland for a few years. This was more important than it might sound, because even though Greenland's population was in the low five figures at that time, it was still geostrategically relevant. As aerial combat was extremely important in World War II, mastery or at least an accurate understanding of the weather was equally important. Where do Northern Europe's weather systems come from? The Arctic. The benefits of meteorological superiority in an air war were potentially huge, so the Germans and the U.S. contested what is known as the North Atlantic Weather War, which consisted of the sinking of a few weather boats, the establishment of secret Nazi weather bases on the east coast of Greenland, and the forcible dismantling of those weather bases. The U.S. is no longer actively fighting a war along the North Atlantic/Arctic border, though Greenland remains a strategically valuable landmass, especially for the control it offers over northern air routes.
Another thing Greenland has that Trump wants is minerals. In addition to considerable oil and gas reserves, Greenland also has a bunch of valuable mineral deposits, most notably the Kvanefjeld deposit, which is stuffed with cerium, neodymium, and terbium, to name a few. And so his State Department is trying to take the island. The Wall Street Journal reported in May that U.S. intelligence officers were told to "step up" their Greenlandic intelligence gathering efforts.
Greenlanders writ large do not want to join the U.S.; what they want is independence from all foreign occupiers. The independence movement is one of the areas on which the U.S. is reportedly gathering intelligence. Per DR, three Americans with ties to Trump were flagged by Danish intelligence. One of them "has been seen in public with the U.S. president many times, [and] has recently been appointed to a role that could give him influence over US security policy." The goal of the operation, per DR's translated Danish, is to "penetrate Greenlandic society in order to weaken relations with Denmark from within and make the Greenlanders submit to the United States."
These American plants reportedly have been making secret—or "secret"—contact with independence movementers and whatever pro-Trump factions exist within Greenlandic society, to see how they might wedge the island away from Denmark. Clearly the covert part of their covert mission is not going so well, if DR has this level of detail and the Danish Intelligence Service is all over it; sending a recognizable figure with obvious ties to the Trump administration on an infiltration mission to a sparsely populated area where both he and his reason for being there would be instantly recognizable bears a certain hamhanded incompetence now effectively the signature of the U.S government. One only hopes that the negative press from this stupid mission actually matters, and that the affair accomplishes the opposite of its goal and galvanizes Greenlandic society against the American threat.
