‘Not for sale’: Trump wants to buy Greenland, and its Prime Minister is fighting back

Donald Trump wants to buy Greenland… again.

“For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity,” said Trump in a Truth Social post. Greenland’s Prime Minister wasn’t happy. “Greenland is ours,” said Greenland PM Múte Egede in a written statement. “We are not for sale and will never be for sale.”

Greenland is a territory of Denmark, and has been for the last 600 years. Denmark is a NATO aligned nation just like the United States, and, despite Trump’s ambivalence toward NATO itself, attempting to purchase the island would only add further tension to the president-elect’s already fraught relationship with Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen. The bad blood between Frederiksen and Trump runs back to 2019, when the president-elect floated the idea of buying Greenland once before during his first term in office. Frederiksen called Trump’s idea “absurd.” Trump called her “nasty” in response, and then cancelled his scheduled visit to Copenhagen out of spite.

What does Trump want with Greenland anyway? Despite being the world’s largest island, Greenland is a mostly uninhabited sheet of ice. In a remote northwestern corner of that ice sheet, America has already taken hold. The Pituffik Space Base, the northernmost U.S. military base in the world, provides missile defense and radar surveillance for both Denmark and the United States. Due to the war in Ukraine, the value of the site has risen dramatically, as the base provides a key foothold in the North Arctic that the U.S. hopes to strategically exploit against Russia.

While this fact provides a semblance of method to the madness of Trump’s request, to suggest the purchase will likely only further erode U.S. relationships with NATO allies. Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen hasn’t responded to Trump’s absurd offer to buy Greenland, and based on her response the last time it was made, it’s possible she never will.

Greenland isn’t the only foreign-owned land that Trump has been eying lately. Hours before his remarks about Greenland, the President-elect suggested that he would take the Panama Canal as well. In a post on Truth Social, Trump called the key shipping lane a “rip-off” and said that the fees charged for its use were “ridiculous.” Trump lamented that the U.S. ever relinquished control of the Canal in the first place, and said that he “will demand that the Panama Canal be returned to the United States of America, in full, quickly and without question” should ownership not be gifted by Panama.

As was the case with Greenland, Trump’s demands were rejected immediately. Panama’s President José Raúl Mulino released a video in response saying ““every square meter of the canal belongs to Panama and will continue to belong” to his nation. “When it comes to our canal, and our sovereignty, we will all unite under our Panamanian flag,” he concluded. In a Truth Social post, Trump responded “we’ll see about that” and posted a picture of the Canal bearing a U.S. flag captioned “welcome to the United States Canal!”

Even before becoming president, Trump is already making enemies out of key U.S. allies by threatening to take their land. Considering he recently mocked Canada as the “51st State,” he likely won’t stop anytime soon.