Not content with trying to incorporate Canada, President-elect Donald Trump has set his sights further north to Greenland. Too bad it’s not for sale.
Greenland’s Prime Minister Mute Egede told Trump Monday to back off his outlandish bid to control the world’s biggest island. “Greenland is ours. We are not for sale and will never be for sale. We must not lose our long struggle for freedom,” Egede said in a written comment.
In a post on Sunday, the president-elect announced that Ken Howery, co-founder of PayPal and former ambassador to Sweden during Trump’s first term, would serve as the ambassador to the Kingdom of Denmark, which holds control of the semiautonomous Greenland. He also re-upped a bid to take Greenland off its hands.
“For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Trump previously floated the idea of the U.S. buying Greenland in 2019, which the Danish prime minister at the time called “absurd.” His megalomaniacal musings never came to anything, and likely won’t this time around either.
Greenland is home to the U.S.’s Pituffik Space Base that, among other things, “detects and reports attack assessments of sea-launched and intercontinental ballistic missile threats in support of strategic missile warning and missile defense,” according to its website.
Greenland is strategically significant to the U.S because it sits between Russia and the eastern coast of the United States, and is the fastest way from Europe to New York. It’s also located beside the Norwegian Sea, which connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Arctic Ocean and the Barents Sea, where the Russian navy’s northern fleet operates.
U.S. expansion seemed to be on Trump’s mind Sunday, and the geopolitical mastermind also threatened to take control of the Panama Canal, which has been the property of Panama since 1999. “Welcome to the United States Canal!” Trump captioned a photograph of the canal in a post on Truth Social Sunday.
Earlier this month, when facing criticism about his plan for harsh tariffs on Canadian imports, Trump made a crack about Canada becoming the 51st state. The last time the U.S. tried to make a play for Canada, the British burned down the U.S. Capitol.
It’s difficult to consider Trump’s latest imperialist dreams as anything other than a distraction from his sinister plans stateside—which include violently rounding up undocumented immigrants into camps and deporting them en masse.
