Commentators in Europe are understandably agog about Trump’s rumblings that the US might somehow, possibly, annex Greenland at some point in the future. One would think asking Greenlanders how they see their future might have been a better idea. But I’m curious about how we should take these rumblings. Several possibilities suggest themselves, which are not necessarily mutually exclusive:
- Trump lives in a fugue state. Today it’s Greenland, tomorrow it will be communists putting red stripes in our toothpaste. Or maybe it’s just a plea for attention. Move on.
- Trump’s modus operandi is always to make outrageous demands in the hope of getting something much smaller. So perhaps he wants a somewhat bigger US military presence in Greenland, or a stake in its minerals. This is his way of getting there.
- Trump is seriously worried about Chinese and Russian power. This is another example of his tendency to say the quiet (realist) part out loud: Greenland is going to fall into someone’s orbit; so it had better be ours.
- Trump has a bad case of dictator envy. He thinks (all facts aside) that it’s unfair Putin and Xi Jinping have empires while he doesn’t.
- Something else entirely.
Speculate away!
{ 17 comments… read them below or add one }
Matt 01.09.25 at 9:59 am
2) and 3) are too rational to be right. Trump isn’t actually a good negotiator (this is clear all through his history of making bad business deals), and he’s not engaged or serious enough for 3 to be right. (He’s also not a “realist” – not that that’s any credit to “realism”. The fact that people in power act for all sorts of insane reasons that can’t be justified on “realist” grounds are a serious problem for the view!) I think that something that’s left out here is that he had this stupid idea in his first term, and the less crazy (though still very bad) people in his administration – like John Bolton – did everything they could to quash it. One of his big motivations is being bitter about things like that, so I don’t doubt he’s been stewing about it and has come back to it with the thought that this time he’s not going to let any walrus mustached pipsqueak stop him.
Just an Australia 01.09.25 at 10:25 am
My 2 cents: 1-4 are all true, but in this case, it’s mainly 2 with 4 for what he actually wants.
Dan 01.09.25 at 10:54 am
Over on Slate com, Jim Newell has the answer: on the Mercator projection, Greenland looks vastly bigger than it actually is. Trump is unaware that this just a product of the map being laid out flat, and so he thinks Greenland really is bigger than Africa, and therefore worth fighting over.
Laban 01.09.25 at 12:04 pm
“The Donroe Doctrine”
Andrew Nathanson 01.09.25 at 12:42 pm
He wants to blow up NATO (because Putin wants to blow up NATO).
Alex SL 01.09.25 at 1:06 pm
The idea that he would care about what is best for his country is very funny, so options two and three are definitely off the table. Only one, four, and five are even worth considering.
I find it very difficult to believe any explanation that involves him consciously doing something strategic, be it torpedoing NATO at Putin’s behest or wanting to secure a sphere of influence from China. Strategic thinking has not been in evidence in the last few years, outside of when he tries to get out of legal trouble, where it seems he does understand that he should listen to a lawyer from time to time and was able to work out that becoming president again would solve it all anyway. We need to guard against the usual fallacy of assuming that somebody is smart because they are rich and/or powerful, in this case both. He is well known to be easily distracted, narcissistic, short-sighted, and unable to grasp mutual benefit, instead seeing everything as competitions with one winner and lots of suckers*.
Thus the most plausible explanation is fugue state, coupled with a desire for affirmation and an instinct for what statements his followers will see as tough and MAGA-like, and coupled with an understanding that his followers are cultish enough to never hold him accountable for failing to deliver the annexation of Greenland, Canada, or Panama, just as they did not care about the failure to make Mexico pay for the wall. His talent is to fool stupid people by telling them what to hear, not geopolitics or long-term planning to secure rare minerals.
*) This last point is why NATO might be in trouble. If the USA aren’t visibly dominating and humiliating their allies, he can only conclude that the USA must somehow secretly be dominated and humiliated. His personality does not allow for the third possibility of a win-win alliance. Putin isn’t even required, although he presumably does his best to steer things in that direction too.
Alex SL 01.09.25 at 1:08 pm
What they want to hear, I meant. Darn.
BenK 01.09.25 at 1:43 pm
While I normally scoff at assertions which rest on Trump having a distorted view of the world, it makes some sense that he operates with an inflated view of Greenland due to its presence on conventional maps being ‘larger than life.’ This is not entirely a bad thing; because it has an outsized presence in the awareness of the average citizen.
I believe that Trump’s interests in Greenland and Panama are very different than those of the internationalists (Left and Right) because he believes that national boundaries matter. This is a belief he shares with many and expresses in many ways, but the idea of acquiring territory peacefully – a hallmark of US action during other periods in history – is particularly distinctive among the elites. It isn’t a bad contrast to Putin or Xi. It’s a big contrast with many current US elites, and the polite opinion in those favored circles of the EU, etc.
Thomas P 01.09.25 at 2:03 pm
Is a very bad negotiating tactics. A demand like this is just making the people on Greenland more hostile to the US. Panama might possibly be more suceptible to US pressure as they have been invaded before and have more reason to worry that Trump might use force to get what he wants.
Greenland already is in the US orbit with Thule military base.
The US already is an empire. Renaming colonies to “territories” doesn’t change that.
Tm 01.09.25 at 2:24 pm
Part of the purpose of Trump making these statements is precisely to provoke a zillion news items and blog posts like the above and Social Media comments and so on. It’s distraction and confusion with something that the public doesn’t know how to handle. But after almost 10 years, the fact that the public, or at least professional media and political and academic types, are still unable to handle this kind of thing is an indictment. We should know better and we (as a collective) still don’t.
The correct appropach is simple: take Trump seriously and literally and act accordingly. Treat threats of military aggression not as a riddle to be solved or as cocktail party entertainment or as an opportunity for second guessing Trump’s mental state. Treat them as exactly what they are: threats of military aggression – and respond appropriately.
The oligarchic-fascist movement (for which Tim Snyder has coined the very apt term Mumpism) really wants to take us back to the 19th century. Away with democracy, away with women’s rights, away with labor rights, and also away with the UN charta, away with respect for international borders and national self-determination. Hello oligarchical capitalism, hello colonialism, hello white nationalism, Herrenmenschentum, racial superiority. Make no mistake, they are not joking for a second, they mean this. The hatred against postcolonial studies btw is no coincidence at all. There has been a movement going on to rehabilitate old style colonialism and they are methodically working to shut up critical voices.
The purpose of Trump’s threats is always to normalize. Maybe he literally wants to conquer Greenland, maybe not or not yetr, but he does want to normalize the idea that colonialism, imperialism, and racial superiority of people who look like him (yikes) are good and natural things that we should rehabilitate and “make great again”.
Sashas 01.09.25 at 3:53 pm
Tm @10 is absolutely right.
To add an extra thought here: The purpose of a system is what it does. Trump is a bumbling, racist, narcissistic clown. The first half of option (1) is just true. Trump does live in a fugue state. Tomorrow it will be something else random. I remember the scandal-a-day parade from his last administration. There isn’t a secret strategy behind it all on his part… but there doesn’t need to be. The Greenland stuff is really dumb, but he’ll do it anyway if he doesn’t encounter resistance. He throws the spaghetti at the wall and his allies go after whatever sticks. The rest of us need to get back into the habit of treating his madness as simultaneously evil AND not-newsworthy. There’s no deeper puzzle here to figure out. There’s just some dumb evil shit to oppose sustainably because tomorrow’s going to be some new dumb evil shit.
somebody who remembers what happened when biden ended the war in afghanistan 01.09.25 at 4:05 pm
Tm is exactly correct @ #10. it’s a real threat and it should be taken seriously as a real threat. europe should prepare a response and should be prepared for the united states to use furious military force to obliterate anyone who resists. trump’s popularity will go up in america dramatically when he starts invading places for no reason and obliterating our allies with drone strikes. america thirsts for blood and torture. the indirect method of sending arms to ukraine and israel is like methadone. it aint the real stuff.
Laban 01.09.25 at 4:27 pm
Some are theorising that the whole kerfuffle is to take attention away from his and Musk’s H1B proposals (not forgetting a green card stapled to every degree certificate).
Brett 01.09.25 at 4:54 pm
The real reason is that Trump probably saw a picture of Greenland on a Mercator projection map (where it looks gigantic) and thought it would be cool to have that, and now he just says it out loud and all his enablers and cultists have to repeat and say it’s a really good idea to get it. There’s no other real threats there or hidden demands I think – just him being the center of attention, which is what he wants at all times.
Lee A. Arnold 01.09.25 at 5:32 pm
I imagine that he intends to give Ukraine to Putin, so making noise about grabbing Greenland (and the Panama Canal) is a way to show MAGA voters that he tried to even the score. Of course it’s never going to happen, so it’s also the beginning of “Flood the Zone with Shit, Part 2.”
Interestingly the MAGA crowd extolling on Xhitter the acquisition of Canada or Greenland for US statehood doesn’t seem to realize that it would increase the number of Democrats in Congress.
China made inroads into trade deals with US trading partners during Trump’s first administration, a pattern that is likely to repeat because he is so shortsighted, strategically inept, with the tactics of a schoolyard bully. So I also imagine his belligerence may worsen.
Casey 01.09.25 at 5:44 pm
Trump has also made vague threats about annexing Canada. As a Canadian, what has been bouncing around in my head for the last few weeks is that: (1) we cannot win a trade war with a country ten times our size, which buys 86% of our exports, and (2) the prospect of an actual war is even more laughable, in the sense that it would be over before it started.
Given this, it seems to me that Canadian sovereignty, and to some extent the sovereignty of all NATO states, in an illusion. It has always relied on the goodwill of our American neighbours, the international community’s standards, and basic inertia. With the whole concept of democratic mandates crumbling before our eyes, all of those “protections” are now moot.
Trump’s aim with his Greenland (and Canada) threats is to remind us all of how he sees the world. Western nations other than America are not sovereign state, they are American vassals, and he is not (just) president, he is Emperor. There won’t be tanks rolling down the streets of Ottawa because there don’t need to be – he can extract whatever concessions he needs as the price of doing business.
DB 01.09.25 at 5:56 pm
Maybe it’s the first step in encircling and then annexing Canada? Seems unnecessary, but from a perspective of colour on the map as well as creating facts and momentum, perhaps the logic is compelling?