'Change is coming': Brendan O’Hara reviews 'So You Want to Own Greenland?'
March 2025, Greenland: US vice president JD Vance at Pituffik Space Base | Image by: Associated Press
4 min read
Elizabeth Buchanan has produced a well-written and timely study of this hotly contested, gigantic frozen island
For all those colleagues who have said to me recently, “With everything that’s going on, I really wish I knew more about Greenland,” well, help has arrived in the form of Elizabeth Buchanan’s timely, easy to read, well-researched, fact-packed book, So You Want to Own Greenland?.
From the arrival of Erik the Red in 985AD, through the harrowing colonial relationship with the Kingdom of Denmark, to President Trump’s covetous desire to own his mineral-rich neighbour, Buchanan explains why Greenland has always been a lure to those who believe they could tame and exploit this gigantic frozen island.
Ironically – had it not been for Trump’s increasingly belligerent rhetoric about wanting to own Greenland – I suspect few people would have paid much attention to what is, and will increasingly become, one of the most strategically important and hotly contested parts of the world.
Of course, Trump is not the first US president to want to buy or annex Greenland. Back in 1867, US secretary of state William Seward, flush with success of buying Alaska from Russia, found Denmark a far more reluctant seller. Undeterred, however, the United States tried again in 1910, still with no success – but the ambition of the US to own Greenland has never really gone away.
Trump is not the first US president to want to buy Greenland
It is easy to understand why the United States wants Greenland, not just in terms of defence and security but increasingly in areas of trade, extraction of critical minerals, as well oil and gas exploration. While most mineral extraction is currently not economically viable, the impact of global warming and the rapidly melting ice sheet has had the international community’s most rapacious vultures circling over Greenland already.
So it was the manner of how Trump articulated it, rather than the desire itself, which surprised people – particularly the way he crudely declared, “One way or another, we’re going to get it.”
Say what you like about Trump – and many of us do – his political antenna will have picked up that relations between Denmark and Greenland have rarely been more fraught, particularly as stories of the appalling mistreatment of Greenlanders continue to emerge, including the infamous ‘Little Danes Experiment’ of the 1950s in which Inuit children were forcibly removed from their parents and given to Danish families. Recently, Copenhagen admitted pursuing an abhorrent campaign of forced contraception, on almost 5,000 Greenlandic women and girls, into the 1970s.
So the relationship between Nuuk and Copenhagen is fraught, and it has become the accepted wisdom that there will be a parting of the ways, as Greenland moves inexorably towards independence. The question of independence is not one of will or should. It is now a question of when and how.
So when Trump said to the Greenlandic people recently, “we will keep you safe, we will make you rich”, he knew exactly the audience he was appealing to.
Of course, in politics as in life, nothing is guaranteed – but with a domestic desire for change, external interference, an international scramble for mineral wealth, and huge security and defence concerns, one suspects that sweeping changes are afoot for Greenland.
As Elizabeth Buchanan says in this very readable, well-written book, change is coming, and while the ‘Trump Bump’ may have focused international attention on Greenland as never before, we must ensure that Greenland’s future is determined by the Greenlandic people themselves, and that the people of the world’s largest island do not become the latest victim of an undemocratic, international, authoritarian, hard-man, power-play.
Brendan O’Hara is SNP MP for Argyll, Bute and South Lochaber and chair of the Greenland APPG
So You Want to Own Greenland? Lessons from the Vikings to Trump
By: Elizabeth Buchanan
Publisher: Hurst
