The island’s population might not be easily convinced as the president tries to clinch one of history’s greatest real estate deals.
Greenland’s economic and strategic value have grown as warming temperatures melt Arctic ice.Credit…Evgeniy Maloletka/Associated PressPresident Trump’s longtime goal of claiming Greenland for America has shifted from rhetoric to official U.S. policy as the White House moves forward on a formal plan to acquire the Arctic island from Denmark.
The plan mobilizes several cabinet departments behind Mr. Trump’s years of talk about wanting Greenland, whose economic and strategic value have grown as warming temperatures melt Arctic ice.
Greenland’s size — 836,330 square miles — also offers Mr. Trump, a former Manhattan developer, the chance to clinch one of history’s greatest real estate deals.
Danish officials angrily insist that the sparsely populated island is not for sale and cannot be annexed. But Mr. Trump has made clear his determination to control it.
“We need Greenland for national security and even international security, and we’re working with everybody involved to try and get it,” he said in an address to Congress last month.
“One way or the other, we’re going to get it,” Mr. Trump added.
The White House’s National Security Council has met several times to put Mr. Trump’s words into action, and recently sent specific instructions to multiple arms of the government, according to a U.S. official.
The plan’s full details are unclear. But despite Mr. Trump’s allusions to the possible use of force, the deliberations led by the security council never seriously considered military options, the official said.
The policy instead emphasizes persuasion over coercion, and features a public relations effort aimed at convincing Greenland’s population of 57,000 that they should ask to join the United States.
Mr. Trump’s advisers have discussed using advertising and social media campaigns to sway public opinion on the island, according to another person briefed on the matter.
It may be an uphill battle. In an election last month, an opposition political party that favors quick independence and closer ties with the United States finished in second place but with just a quarter of the vote.
The U.S. messaging campaign will include an unlikely appeal to Greenlanders’ shared heritage with the native Inuit people of Alaska, nearly 2,500 miles away, the official said.
Greenland’s Inuit population is descended from people who migrated from Alaska hundreds of years ago, and the island’s official language is derived from Inuit dialects that originated in Arctic Canada.
Mr. Trump’s advisers have already begun making their public case, arguing that Denmark has been a poor custodian of the island, that only the United States can protect it from encroachment by Russia and China, and that America will help Greenlanders “get rich,” as Mr. Trump has put it.
The Trump administration is also reminding Greenland that the United States has defended it before.
Last month, Mr. Trump posted a slick 90-second video on social media celebrating the “blood and bravery” of U.S. troops who took positions on the island during World War II to prevent a feared Nazi invasion after Germany occupied Denmark.
Although Denmark hoped that American forces would leave after the war, they never did, and the United States still maintains a military base there.
The Trump administration is also studying financial incentives for Greenlanders, including the possibility of replacing the $600 million in subsidies that Denmark gives the island with an annual payment of about $10,000 per Greenlander.
Some Trump officials believe those costs could be offset by new revenue from the extraction of Greenland’s natural resources, which include rare earth minerals, copper, gold, uranium and oil.
Trump officials argue that American capital and industrial might can gain access to the island’s largely untapped mineral wealth in a way that Denmark cannot. “This is about critical minerals,” Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz, told Fox News in January. “This is about natural resources.”
