Donald Trump is right, in a very broad sense, about one thing: Greenland is on the edge of the map but in the middle of everything. The European colonization of North America, the biggest story in all of history, began in Greenland in 986, with the Norsemen soon continuing on to Canada. You can see the remnants of their settlements still today in the fjords around Qaqortoq and Narsarsuaq.
That the first place in the Americas to be colonized is now set to become—if it separates from Denmark in the next decade, as seems likely—an independent, modern, and potentially prosperous nation, is a miracle of history. The Greenlandic Inuit survived the thousand-year gauntlet and have the chance to occupy the only place in North America in which the original inhabitants—some 90 percent of Greenland’s 60,000 people count themselves as native—have survived long enough to claim sovereignty. One of the many small tragedies of this affair is that Donald Trump has made this remarkable story a story about him.
From 1774, the kingdom of Denmark managed Greenland through Den Kongelige Grønlandske Handel, a company that had a trading monopoly on the island and set up a racial caste system. The United States repeatedly expressed interest in Greenland in the nineteenth century, most prominently in the administration of Andrew Johnson. Secretary of State William Seward attempted to make an offer to Denmark at roughly the same time he was negotiating the purchase of Alaska. Securing both would advance the great American cause of the nineteenth century: annexing Canada. But it wasn’t to be. In 1917, the United States bought the Danish Virgin Islands instead. In that treaty, the United States agreed to shed any claim to Greenland and recognize the Danish claim.
But just a few decades later, after Denmark fell to Nazi Germany in 1940, Greenland became a protectorate of the United States. This was supposed to be a temporary arrangement, but in practical effect it has been a loose appendage of the United States ever since. We have shared, with Denmark, a kind of informal condominium over Greenland that is still in effect today. This is what is so strange about Trump’s push to annex the island. He wants to take direct control—expensive, tiresome—over a place where he already exercises a high degree of indirect influence.