This past week, from March 23 to 28, 2025, the world again saw Greenland and Greenlanders at the center of a global security debate if the United States could assert control of Greenland, beyond longstanding and existing security arrangements that have seen U.S. military on the island continuously since World War II.
After the snow settled, one outcome was clear: Greenlanders are nobody’s fools.
The mostly ethnical Inuit population have called the more than 830,000-square-mile arctic island, the world’s largest, their home for nearly 5,000 years. Today, Greenlanders number about 57,000 residents, of which nearly 90 percent claim ethnic Inuit identity.
They are smart, resilient, and fiercely grounded in their identity as descendants for nearly five millennia of their homeland, what they call Kalaallit Nunaat in their Greenlandic language.
They are not pawns, patsies, or stupid.
I can say this based on my own experience, having befriended many residents there during my visits in 1998, 1999, and 2000. During my trips now more than a quarter century ago, I had lively discussions with Greenlanders who shared divergent views of becoming independent or staying aligned under semiautonomous status with Denmark.
What is clear is that Greenlanders made abundantly clear to the world they are opposed to coming under greater military and political control of the United States, as announced by the Trump administration.
President Trump’s plans to take control of Greenland rebuked by Greenland’s political parties and residents
U.S. President Donald Trump has assertively pressed for his vision for greater control of Greenland since December 2024, shortly after winning the November 2024 election.
Trump ratcheted up pressure as the new year started, sending his son Donald Trump, Jr. to the island on January 7, 2025. The visit further demonstrated the president’s assertion for U.S. control of the island and its mineral resources. The United States already has a 74-year-old treaty with Denmark, which allows the United States to expand its military presence in Greenland when it wishes.
The latest effort in late March 2025 by the Trump administration was met with a sharp rebuke by four political parties in Greenland, who all opposed annexation and control of their ancestral island of nearly five millennia by the United States.
The leaders of the parties signed an accord on March 27, 2025, just before President JD Vance arrived for a hastily rescheduled military base visit on March 28, 2025.
By the time the agreement was signed, the vice president’s trip had become both an international incident testing the transatlantic alliance under the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) charter and also an international embarrassment.
The initial plan, announced starting the week of March 23, 2025, was meant to have the second lady, Usha Vance, do a “diplomatic lite” trip to foster goodwill, attending a dogsled race and sightseeing. Media reports showed that vehicles flown in advance to Nuuk for the first planned and then ultimately scuttled second lady visit being loaded on U.S. military cargo planes and flown out.
Denmark’s TV 2’s correspondent in Nuuk, Jesper Steinmetz, reported on March 26, 2025, just before the two Vances’ later rescheduled trip, that American representatives knocked on door after door in the week before the originally planned Usha Vance visit, asking if they would like to have a visit from the vice president’s wife.
According to Steinmetz, everywhere the answer was the same: “No, otherwise thank you.”
According to Steinmetz and TV 2, that’s why the plans changed to keep the Vances far from Greenlanders, to even prevent what some claimed might be a riot. (This news coverage from the German news service DW shows Greenlanders’ strong and very vocal opposition to the visit by Vice President Vance and his wife.)
Plans quickly change with a policy visit by Vice President Vance and the second lady
Faced with diplomatic crisis, the Trump administration hastily changed their plans and sent Vice President Vance to deliver formal Trump policy remarks at Pituffik, which is now called a space base.
Formerly known as the Thule Air Base until 2023, it was built by the United States in the 1950s during the height of the Cold War, and one of the people who helped build it was my biological grandfather. The based provided radar awareness to monitor for any missiles fired over the North Pole from the USSR to North American targets.
The base is also, not coincidentally, far from the population centers of Greenland like Nuuk (the administrative capital) and Sisimiut, many hundreds of miles to the north of both.
Video footage, including this coverage by ITV News on March 28, 2025, showed the vice president and the second lady arriving at the Arctic base. Both were dressed awkwardly in oversized military green winter jackets that neither looked at ease wearing.
Though edited out in this ITV News clip, other outlets played the full remark by Vice President Vance that “it’s cold as shit here,” which he shared the moment he entered a base lunchroom, pressing the flesh with the U.S. military personnel.
Cold weather defines life at Pituffik. The base is 750 miles north (latitude of 76.53° N) of the Arctic Circle—and by its geographic location, arctic weather is to be expected this time of year.
Vice President Vance repeats Trump administration’s plans to control Greenland
The formal substance of the visit came in remarks the vice president delivered after the couple had lunch.
During the carefully orchestrated media event, with U.S. military personnel in uniform standing at attention behind the vice president, Vance laid out the Trump administration’s plans to take full control of Greenland from its home rule territorial status under Denmark, which has controlled the island for three centuries as a colonial then a more “benign ruler” in the second half of the 20th century.
Vance claimed Denmark “has not done a good job at keeping Greenland safe” and reportedly “underinvesting in the people of Greenland and … in the security architecture” of the world’s largest island.
Vance also claimed: “Denmark has not kept pace in devoting the resources necessary to keep this base, to keep our troops, and in my view, to keep the people of Greenland safe” from Russia, China, and other nations vying for Arctic control.
Vance repeated Trump’s claim for outright takeover, and that leadership of the island “simply must change.”
Vance further said Greenlanders would “choose … to become independent of Denmark, and then we are going to have conversations … from there.”
Echoing his remarks made at the security conference in Munich on February 14, 2025, that met with rebuke from the European Union and many NATO allies, Vance said “we are done being the piggy bank of the entire world,” doubling down on his past attack on “European friends” for “neglecting international security for 40 years.”
“I think Greenland understands that the United States should own it,” Vance concluded, to reporters and the diplomatic experts who would be watching his remarks the same day. “And if Denmark and the EU don’t understand it, we have to explain it to them. We need Greenland. Very importantly, for international security, we have to have Greenland.”
Back in Washington, D.C. the same day of Vance’s trip, President Trump reiterated his administration’s ambitions for Arctic expansion—a type of U.S. territorial enlargement he also pledged to do in his inaugural address on January 21, 2025.
One Canadian media outlet, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, interviewed Qupanuk Olsen, a member of Greenland’s parliament and resident of Nuuk, on March 28, 2025, the same day Trump and Vance outlined U.S. ambitions for Greenland.
Summarizing the visit of Vance, she told the CBC, “He sounds like another colonizer.”
An editorial published in The Guardian newspaper, on March 30, 2025, said simply: “The Observer view on JD Vance: spurned in Greenland and humiliated at home, the vice-president should resign.”
Keywords, Metatags: JD Vance, Usha Vance, Greenland, Greenland Home Rule, Greenland Parliament, Pituffik, Thule, Arctic Conflict, Arctic, Russia, China, Denmark, U.S. Military, Arctic Diplomacy, Donald Trump, President Trump, Trump Administration, Colonialism