Trump’s talk of buying Greenland energizes island’s independence movement
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Jørgen Boassen, a 50-year-old bricklayer and Trump admirer, was at the airport in Greenland’s capital Nuuk this week wearing a MAGA hat to cheer the arrival of Trump Force One. But Boassen, who helped organize the visit from Donald Trump, Jr., says he has no interest in President-elect Donald Trump’s entreaties to buy the icebound island.
“We can’t be sold," he says. Instead, he wants to further Greenland’s push for independence, and to that end, Trump’s interventions are proving unexpectedly useful. Greenland is a self-ruling part of the Kingdom of Denmark.
The Danish government says it is willing to grant Greenland full independence if there is local support, and recent Greenlandic elections and polls indicate there is. Like many independence movements, the Greenlandic campaign is butting up against uncertainty over what happens next when freedom is secured. The Danish government has said that if Greenland became independent, it would stop around $600 million in annual handouts—about half the island’s budget—raising doubts over how the new nation would fund itself.
Trump’s recent threat of a trade war with Denmark is changing the negotiating dynamic, says Ulrik Pram Gad, a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies. The Danish government now might be more open to agreeing a divorce deal that includes some continued payments to ease Greenland’s path to independence, he says. “My prognosis is that the Danish government will accept it in the next few years," he says.
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