“If the United States takes over and annexes Greenland, what legal rights will they have to try to stop Putin in Ukraine?”
That was the question posed by Jens B. Frederiksen, Greenland’s former deputy prime minister, when we met over coffee in central Copenhagen last week. “Which legal rights will they have to try to defend Taiwan, if China wants Taiwan?” he continued. “Trump [is] just the same person as Putin. Trump wants to own Greenland. He wants to make the US bigger.”
Three weeks before our conversation, Frederiksen had addressed 30,000 Danes and Greenlanders as they gathered in the Danish capital to oppose Donald Trump’s threat to invade Greenland some 3,550 kilometres away. The strategically important island, two-thirds of which lies within the Arctic Circle, has been a semi-autonomous part of the Kingdom of Denmark for more than 70 years, and a Danish colony for 140 years before that.
