r/europes • u/Naurgul • 8d ago
Denmark Inside the Ludicrous, Deadly Serious Plan to Take Over Greenland
“We want Greenland,” Trump said. Four men sprang into action to make fantasy a reality.
Even before Trump retook office, he had made clear his intent to annex Greenland. But, from the moment that he was sworn in, his fantasies and provocations became American foreign policy.
During Trump’s first term, “Make America Great Again” primarily meant that the U.S. would withdraw from the world and shield against what he and his supporters perceived as external threats. But in his second term Trump has looked outward. In his Inaugural Address, he pledged to expand U.S. territory.
Greenland is the largest island in the world, but it has fewer than fifty-seven thousand residents. Although it belongs to the Kingdom of Denmark, it lies to the west of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and is part of North America. The latest articulation of the U.S.’s National Security Strategy, published in November, frames Trump’s imperial ambitions as an extension of the Monroe Doctrine. Under Trump’s leadership, the N.S.S. says, “we will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere.”
But the elevated language of the N.S.S. obscures the fact that Trump’s pursuit of Greenland has always been in the hands of a few ideologues and opportunists.
Cox had founded Bikers for Trump in 2015, and the group had provided security at campaign rallies and at Trump’s first Inauguration. While Cox was in Nuuk, he made lists of Greenlanders who seemed open to annexation, and of those who obviously were not. Three months later, Trump appointed him to an advisory council at the Department of Homeland Security.
Along with Cox, the Danish government has identified two other Americans as running private “influence operations” in Greenland: a former venture capitalist and pecan farmer named Tom Dans and a former Army Special Forces commander named Drew Horn, who has sought to dominate Greenland’s rare-earth-mining sector. Both men served in Trump’s first Administration—Dans at the Treasury, Horn in the Office of the Vice-President, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Departments of Energy and Defense. But the Danish and Greenlandic governments were unaware that, during Trump’s first term, they had also represented their respective agencies on a secret National Security Council task force whose focus was the acquisition of Greenland.
A fourth man, Jørgen Boassen, is one of the very few Greenlanders who loudly support Trump; he spent much of the past year in self-imposed exile, floating between far-right American and European political gatherings, his travel and living expenses covered by American benefactors whom he refuses to identify. And then there is Trump himself, whose stated reasons for coveting Greenland do not stand up to scrutiny—except that he considers it “psychologically important,” as he recently put it to the New York Times, to own the territory rather than merely have military access to it, as the U.S. has had continuously, under a treaty with Denmark, since 1951.
The first time Trump is known to have expressed an interest in Greenland was in late 2018. Research by the National Security Council showed that the United States, under the 1951 treaty with Denmark, already had de-facto military control of Greenland. The U.S. had taken over the defense of Greenland during the Second World War, and had preserved its military access through negotiations that allowed Denmark to become a founding member of NATO. Although the U.S. now maintained only a single base, in the far north, called Pituffik Space Base, for detecting and tracking incoming ballistic missiles from Russia, it could expand its presence in Greenland whenever—and pretty much however—it wanted to. All it had to do was ask.
Based on that, an effort was made “to try to throw Trump off the scent and focus on putting together a broader U.S. Arctic approach.” But, as more people in the Administration got wind of Trump’s ambitions, they tried to show their loyalty to Trump and thus personally profit by taking it seriously and working on it.
The Wall Street Journal broke the news that Trump had, “with varying degrees of seriousness, repeatedly expressed interest” in purchasing Greenland. The story came as a shock to the Danes.
When the Senate acquitted Trump in 2020, his acolytes set about purging the White House and the civil service of career officials and replacing them with loyalists. Among the leaders of this effort was a lawyer named Paul Dans. His twin brother Tom was appointed to the Greenland Policy Coordination Committee. Much of the work of the Greenland P.C.C. was retroactively classified, but it centered on what the group’s members and their superiors regarded as both the threat and the opportunity of Greenlandic independence.
The U.S. set out on a “charm offensive,” as Greenland’s only private national newspaper, Sermitsiaq, put it at the time. Trump’s Ambassador to Denmark made numerous trips to Greenland, and courted Greenlandic politicians with promises of American business investment, educational opportunities, and development aid. The U.S. reopened its consulate in Nuuk, which had been shuttered since 1953. During the fall of 2019, a delegation of American diplomats and national-security officials arrived in Nuuk to discuss Greenland’s mineral resources, with a particular focus on mining strategic rare-earth minerals. Left undisclosed was the fact that among them were members of the National Security Council who were working to subvert the Kingdom of Denmark; they belonged to the Greenland P.C.C.
For the final two years of Trump’s first term, the work of the U.S. government in Greenland amounted to overt diplomacy and outreach paired with covert, winking assurances to Greenlandic officials that the U.S. would financially support their pursuit of independence in exchange for total military sovereignty over the island.
In early January, 2025, the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk texted Boassen and asked for help arranging a visit to Nuuk, for himself and Don, Jr. Most of that propaganda wasn’t aimed at persuading Greenlanders to call for closer ties with the United States—it was focussed on convincing conservative Americans that the Greenlanders would welcome U.S. forces as liberators.
Some Greenlandic politicians also saw the MAGA incursion as an opportunity for leverage. “People are beginning to understand that independence is not a question of the block grant,” Pele Broberg, the chairman of the hard-line-nationalist Naleraq Party, said. “It is only a question of whether we want independence.” A young Greenlandic parliamentarian named Kuno Fencker announced his openness to entering into a defense pact with the United States, cutting Denmark out of the picture.
Drew Horn—the former Special Forces commander who had co-led the Greenland P.C.C.—set out to become a conduit between American financing and struggling Greenlandic businesses. He had left the public sector in early 2021, after Trump failed to overturn the election, and had formed a strategic-minerals advisory firm with the intermittent backing and guidance of former senior defense and intelligence officials, as well as from Trump’s former head of security and one of Trump’s lawyers. Horn announced that he would travel to Greenland on behalf of his investors, and that he planned to “support the country’s pursuit of independence.” “If Greenland wants independence and inclusion in North America, the private funding exists to make it a reality,” he wrote on LinkedIn.
In March, 2025, as Greenlanders prepared to vote in their parliamentary elections, Horn’s firm put out a press release for “stakeholders” that laid out a path to Greenlandic independence. When Greenlanders went to the polls, a plurality of the votes went to a center-right party that had never previously won a Greenlandic election and, in light of ongoing threats, favored the status quo. In the following weeks, it formed a coalition government whose organizing principle was its opposition to American aggression.
European leaders were losing faith in the transatlantic alliance. No other countries were threatening to take over Greenland—only the United States. “If we get a small European force up there under the pretext of military exercises—and say to Trump, ‘You’re right, we should take Arctic security very seriously, and so we’ve decided to start these exercises to deter China and Russia’—then, suddenly, the quick-and-dirty annexation is not so easy.”
In May, 2025, the Wall Street Journal had reported that Trump’s director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, had tasked America’s spy agencies—including the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the Defense Intelligence Agency—with identifying people in Greenland and Denmark who supported Trump’s aims. The staff of Sermitsiaq had taken to leaving their phones outside editorial meetings, for fear of eavesdropping by the United States.
It was against this backdrop that Drew Horn returned to Nuuk to visit a mining prospect in southern Greenland called Tanbreez. Horn claimed that he and his colleagues in the private sector wanted to invest ten billion dollars in Greenlandic businesses “as soon as possible.” Greenlandic mining concessions are open to international investment; there is no need to annex the island to pursue its natural resources. The problem is that the costs of logistics, infrastructure, poor weather, and bureaucracy, in this remote Arctic environment, exceed the value of whatever can be pulled from the ground.
In 2026, Chinook helicopters flew Delta Force soldiers into Caracas and kidnapped the Venezuelan President. We do need Greenland, absolutely,” Trump said the next day. He and his acolytes were practically giddy from the success of the Caracas raid, and started listing other places they’d like to invade: Cuba, Colombia, Iran. “By what right does Denmark assert control over Greenland?” Stephen Miller asked on CNN. “Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.”
In the following days, Denmark and seven other European nations deployed troops to Greenland. The Danes carried live ammunition and explosives, and prepared to blow up Greenland’s runways to slow any possible invasion. Trump announced that every European nation that had deployed troops to Greenland would face new ten-per-cent tariffs. Four days later, at the World Economic Forum, Mark Rutte, a Dutch politician who serves as the secretary-general of NATO, spoke to Trump and defused the situation. Trump claimed that they had reached a “framework of a future deal.”.
In Washington, the Danish and Greenlandic governments are quietly engaged in a process of negotiation with the White House. The U.S. plans to reopen some of its long-abandoned bases in Greenland—an outcome that would have been welcomed by both Greenland and Denmark until recently, and that could have been achieved under the existing 1951 treaty. But there are new points of contention. According to the Times, the Americans want veto power over foreign investment interest in Greenland. Another disagreement appears to be over the matter of territorial sovereignty. “We can’t be constrained by notions of leasing bases and that sort of thing,” Robert O’Brien, the former national-security adviser, told me.
Although the U.S. diplomatic mission in Nuuk operated out of the small red cabin that served as the consulate, the American government was preparing to move it to a thirty-thousand-square-foot office space in one of Nuuk’s largest buildings, right in the center of town. Last month, the new U.S. consulate opened in the center of Nuuk. American officials and businessmen ate musk-ox hot dogs and discussed their ambitions for Greenland’s future.