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LATELY, a half-remembered Bee Gees song from long ago has been haunting the mind. It’s the one that begins with: “I started a joke, which started the whole world crying/ but I didn’t see that the joke was on me…”
When Donald Trump indicated on the eve of his second inauguration a year ago that his longing for Greenland had not diminished since his first term, it was viewed as just another thought bubble, alongside his designs on Canada and the Panama Canal zone. After all, it had been made clear to him in 2019 that the vast, mostly frozen territory wasn’t for sale.
But once he gets a bee in his bonnet, it can be hard to dislodge. The US president has sought to justify his redoubled focus on acquiring Greenland by claiming that American might alone can protect the world’s largest island from a takeover by Russia or China. The latter has never displayed any such inclination, while the former has enthusiastically been applauding Trump’s designs. Moscow’s delight barely requires an explanation.
Russia has predictably, and to some extent justifiably, been assailed by its western neighbours for Vladimir Putin’s territorial ambitions in Ukraine. So it’s amused by the spectacle of the hostile powers scrambling for a response to an American land grab. The US has had designs on Greenland since it bought Alaska from Tsarist Russia in 1867 at the throwaway price of two cents an acre. The Truman administration offered Denmark $100 million in gold bullion to purchase the territory in 1946, but Copenhagen wasn’t interested.
Europe struggles to hold on to Greenland.
However, under a secret agreement concluded in 1951 (but not revealed until 40 years later), Denmark gave the US unlimited use of Greenland for military purposes. That pact has never been rescinded. The Pituffik US military base has existed for decades, but the dozen or so others that were abandoned at the end of the Cold War would require only polite requests to re-establish. That might have been a solution had Trump’s interests been purely strategic. But it also illustrates a massive problem.
Once the competing spheres of influence had been established in Europe following World War II, most of East Europe tended to be described in Western media as Soviet satellites. West European nations, on the other hand, were never called out as American dependencies, an arrangement formalised by Nato. Ironically, the reliance on the US for ‘security’ only expanded following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the USSR’s demise.
It would have made sense in the 1990s to incorporate the Russian Federation in European defence arrangements. Stupidly, the focus was on extending Nato’s reach to Russia’s borders. Putin, initially keen on cooperating with the West, baulked at the idea of Georgia and Ukraine being invited into Nato. That’s not the only reason for his misguided violation of Ukrainian sovereignty, but he can surely be excused a spot of schadenfreude as his inveterate adversaries in Europe struggle to respond to the threat of US aggression against one of its most servile allies on the continent.
Denmark has long served as an obsequious handmaiden of US imperialism, willing to commit war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. Hence its discombobulation at being turned into a potential target. The Danish colonisation of Greenland (initially alongside its Scandinavian neighbours) is justly resented by the territory’s Inuit inhabitants. Among the now self-governing island’s 57,000 people, around 85 per cent reportedly want complete independence from Denmark. A similar proportion disdains the idea of forcibly being turned into Americans.
The EU has plucked up the courage to whimper about its American masters’ stated intentions, including the threat to impose 10pc, and eventually 25pc, tariffs on states that oppose Greenland’s takeover. There’s been talk of triggering counter-tariffs, but that’s unlikely to make much headway when European ministers meet tomorrow. Europe is paying the price for having latched on to Uncle Sam’s hindquarters for far too long, and its current predicament deserves little sympathy. Ursula von der Leyen is hardly the kind of figurehead who can proclaim European independence, while even Dutch courage would be too much to expect from Nato’s Mark Rutte, who infamously called Trump ‘daddy’, and is lost for words when the pater familias goes rogue.
New shipping routes and Greenland’s rare earths are also in the mix as climate change advances with the US administration’s eager (and egregious) imprimatur, and this week’s Davos conclave should provide more entertainment as Trump comes face to face with his reluctant detractors. Meanwhile, the song cited at the outset concludes on a sombre note: “I fell out of bed hurting my head from the things that I said/ ’Til I finally died — which started the whole world living.” If only it were that simple.
Published in Dawn, January 21st, 2026
