‘I don’t want to live in an American Empire’: Greenlanders bristle at U.S. threats

NUUK, Greenland — Maja Overgaard drags her blade back and forth across a sopping wet sealskin. It will take months of back-breaking work before she has transformed the hide into boots ready to venture into a Greenlandic snowstorm. Like most Greenlanders, however, Overgaard is now more preoccupied with the geopolitical storm raging over her vast Arctic homeland.

In Nuuk, the snow-swept capital of Greenland, residents worry that President Trump is hell-bent on seizing their island home come what may. Overgaard sighs and says that she has begun discussing with her husband about whether to flee for Denmark in the event of an American takeover. “I don’t want to live in an American Empire,” she said.

None of her neighbors, assiduously working on skins and intestines, wants to either. “Trump is serious,” said Martin Rasmussen, whose sealskin treatment seemed less advanced than that of his neighbor. He has started boycotting American goods. “Trump is going to fight to the bitter end.”

The idea that the U.S. might try to seize control of Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark that is home to 57,000 mainly Inuit inhabitants, was once brushed off as a geopolitical folly. But Trump, who has repeatedly raised the possibility of trying to purchase Greenland and has refused to rule out using military force to acquire the island, has not let the idea drop.

Trump insists that securing Greenland, which hosts a small but strategically important American military base, is an urgent national security priority. He says Denmark, which has ruled Greenland for more than 300 years, has failed to adequately defend it and has allowed its waters to become infested with ships and submarines from Russia and China, although this is dismissed as nonsense by Nordic officials and Greenlanders themselves.

By the quayside in Nuuk, several trawlers were bobbing in the inky-blue waters. “I have never seen any Russians or Chinese,” said a bemused Helte Johannsen, a fisherman in overalls who has been sailing up and down the Greenlandic coastline for almost 40 years. Snowflakes caught in his whiskers as his crew prepared his trawler to go to sea. “I don’t think that Trump knows anything about Greenland,” he said.

Nearby, Josef Iyberth was taking a breather from unloading freshly caught Greenlandic cod on to the docksides. He spends his spare time hunting seals and reindeer in the seas and mountains outside Nuuk, but would not dare fight an invading force. “Our guns are not for people,” he said and laughed.

There is a growing sense of crisis among Greenlandic and Danish officials as Trump has raised the stakes. Discussions are scheduled for this week with U.S. secretary of State Marco Rubio, which Nuuk and Copenhagen are hoping might help defuse tensions.

It is a sign of how serious the crisis has become that Rubio was forced to downplay the possibility of an invasion when speaking to the U.S. Congress last week, instead saying the U.S. was prioritizing buying the island. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, in an unprecedented intervention, said an attack by the U.S. would mean the end of NATO.

In Nuuk, apprehension about American intentions is giving way to anger. “They are treating us as if we were merchandise in a shop,” spat Greenlandic MP Per Berthelsen, a softly spoken former rocker who founded the political party of incumbent Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen. “I have difficulties seeing the difference between the way the Americans are acting towards Greenland, and Russia, where you can see that the interest is to make their [territory] bigger.” he said.

“We are not for sale. We don’t want to be Americans, we want to be Greenlanders,” Berthelsen, a former Greenlandic foreign minister, added.

There has long been a consensus in Nuuk that Greenland should strive for eventual independence from Denmark, which supports Greenland financially with a large annual grant. But there is disagreement over how quickly this should happen and whether working with Copenhagen to fend off American depredations is a wise choice.

Jeppe Strandsbjerg, an expert in Arctic affairs at the University of Greenland, said that the cautiously pro-independence Greenlandic government had so far largely seen eye-to-eye with Denmark. “We are seeing much closer collaboration over the past year,” he said, pointing to broadly successful co-ordination despite some recent bickering. “They are not tearing Nuuk and Copenhagen apart,” he explained.

But not everybody in Nuuk is on the same page. Pele Broberg, who runs the main opposition party, favors accelerating Greenland’s efforts to wriggle free from Denmark and sees Denmark and the U.S. as one and the same. He says Denmark is weaponizing fear of an American takeover to discredit independence.

Many Greenlanders have deeply ambivalent, and sometimes hostile, feelings toward Copenhagen. The history of Danish rule in Greenland is littered with abuses committed against the indigenous Inuit, including forced resettlement and making thousands of young women use contraceptive devices without their consent. Greenlanders often face discrimination in Denmark.

Broberg bristled when asked about whether pushing to sever ties with Denmark might risk swapping one overlord for another, likening Danish control of the island to rape and insisting it was more important to deal with the current crisis than worry about the next. “How can it be worse?” Broberg asked. “We are living in one nightmare, we can’t worry about the next nightmare.”

Trump has repeatedly suggested the U.S. has much to offer Greenland economically, but has not convinced many Greenlanders. Even Broberg said he would not countenance securing independence with U.S. support, although he is open to discussing arrangements akin to those for three Pacific island nations that give Washington unrestricted military access in exchange for generous financial packages — once Greenland has achieved independence.

In Nuuk, there is no evidence of any American efforts to win Greenlanders’ hearts and minds. The U.S. Consulate appeared to have been closed for some time and its flag was neatly propped up inside the hallway. The FT spent an hour knocking on neighbors’ doors and asking passers-by whether they had ever seen anybody inside or spotted its Trump-appointed official. None had.

Jørgen Boassen, the only well-known outwardly pro-Trump figure in Greenland, appears to be one of the few Greenlanders other than officials whom U.S. officials interact with. He told the FT he was in regular contact with two serving U.S. ambassadors and Tom Dans, a Trump-appointed official working on Arctic affairs. He also showed messages he had exchanged with Nigel Farage and other influential European populists.

But Boassen, a former bricklayer turned MAGA darling, is such a polarizing figure in Greenland that he has ended up moving, seemingly semipermanently, to Denmark.

“I trust Trump,” he said over several late-night beers in Copenhagen. He rattled off several supposed benefits of being annexed by America. “People could get old in Florida,” he said.

Many Greenlanders are deeply suspicious of the U.S. and its newfound desire to build an Arctic empire.

Sofie Amondsen, a traditional seamstress, was methodically washing, drying and physically blowing into long coils of seal intestines. Once fully dry, she planned to cut them into small strips that will eventually be turned into traditional Inuit earrings.

Talk that America might try to take over Greenland was confusing and painful. “We are just healing from [Danish] colonization,” she said. ‘‘I have had a bad feeling since last year, when he said he wanted to take us over.”

Amondsen had spent time in Inuit communities in Alaska and Canada. “They speak mostly in English, especially in Alaska. They told me their grandparents and parents, they were told not to speak their own language. They banned the language,” she explained.

Amondsen had secured the seal intestines from a hunter in remote eastern Greenland. Hunters, when they stalked game along the craggy coasts, had begun to see signs of the geopolitical tensions affecting Greenland, she said, including spent cartridges from increased military exercises.

Other Greenlanders also look to Alaska, whose isolated Iñupiat Inuit people live in scattered destitute villages and have struggled to maintain their language and traditions.

“We still have them and we are under Denmark, they are under the Americans and they don’t,” said Overgaard, working her sealskin as snow whipped at her workshop windowpanes. “I don’t want this to be forgotten, to disappear.”

Judah writes for the Financial Times.