VP's Greenland journey: Family vacation or expansionist plot?

Politico

27-03-2025

President Donald Trump's threats to control Greenland are growing more intense — and Greenland and Denmark's leaders are growing increasingly defensive.
Vice President JD Vance, his wife, Usha, and a U.S. delegation that includes embattled national security adviser Mike Waltz are heading to the Arctic island Friday, where they'll visit a U.S. Space Force base to 'check out what's going on with the security there,' as Vance said Tuesday on a
video in social media
.
The trip, which has had a chaotic rollout, comes as the president is accelerating his aggression toward Greenland, saying 'we'll go as far as we have to go' to bring it under U.S. control, despite opposition from the people who live there. And it highlights the tricky politics of Trump's expansionary inclinations — and how seriously Danish and Greenlandic officials are taking the president's intentions.
'The Greenlanders are feeling quite uneasy, and there are concerns about what this might lead to,' said Minna Ålander, a fellow on transatlantic defense and security at the Center for European Policy Analysis.
One senior White House official told POLITICO that Vance would emphasize how Danish leaders — on whom Greenland relies for financial and military support — 'have spent decades mistreating the Greenlandic people, treating them like second class citizens and allowing infrastructure on the island to fall into disrepair.'
The trip was initially pitched innocently as a mission of cultural goodwill and a Vance family vacation. On Sunday, the first lady's office announced that she would travel to the world's largest island with her young son 'to visit historical sites, learn about Greenlandic heritage, and attend the Avannaata Qimussersu, Greenland's national dogsled race.'
'I'm also coming to celebrate the long history of respect and cooperation between our nations and to express hope that our relationship will only grow stronger in the coming years,' she said in a video posted to social media.
The backlash was swift. The Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, said it was '
clearly not a visit
that is about what Greenland needs or wants,' and the Greenlandic government wrote on Facebook that it 'has not extended any invitations for any visits, neither private nor official.' Even the group behind the dogsled race, Kalaallit Nunaanni Qimussertartut Kattuffiat,
wrote Sunday
that it 'did not invite them.'
'Certainly, a visit like this would be welcome if it didn't come alongside veiled threats of annexation, but it is, and so it's seen as provocative,' said Rachel Rizzo, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Europe Center.
Then, on Tuesday, the vice president announced he would be joining Usha — and that instead of the dogsled race, they'd be visiting Pituffik Space Base, high above the Arctic circle and far from Greenlandic civilization.
Two people familiar with Vance's thinking, granted anonymity to speak freely, attributed the change from the dogsled race to the space base to a last-minute decision by the vice president to join his wife. One of the people said he'd been 'super jealous' when Donald Trump Jr. visited the island in January, so his team 'moved the trip around to accommodate him.'
But Vance's involvement in the trip is far more than the benign family adventure the people around him have suggested. The vice president, who appears to have real influence on the administration's foreign policy, is burnishing his credentials as one of the biggest Euro-skeptics in a White House full of them, while attaching himself to a project of personal importance to Trump.
Still, Denmark and Greenland
welcomed the change
in the delegation's itinerary from a central destination to a U.S. military base far from Nuuk. Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen called the shift 'a positive development' and a sign that the Americans 'have understood the resistance to the U.S. overtures in Greenland.' And Frederiksen framed it as a win for the Greenlandic people,
writing on Facebook
: 'You have not been cowed. You have stood up for who you are – and you have shown what you stand for. That has my deepest respect.'
Even as the delegation adopted a less provocative itinerary, the president was ramping up his attacks. 'We'll go as far as we have to go,' Trump told reporters Wednesday in the Oval Office. 'We need Greenland and the world needs us to have Greenland, including Denmark.'
'We need it,' the president
said the same day
in a radio interview. 'We have to have it.'
Adding to European suspicions about Trump's expansionist intentions, Russian President Vladimir Putin jumped into the fray on Thursday,
saying during the International Arctic Forum
that 'it would be a great mistake to believe' that Trump's goal of annexing Greenland is 'just some eccentric talk.'
Putin's comments, laying down a predicate for U.S. expansion by referencing
Civil War era discussions in Washington
about the value of Greenland, reflected his interest in reestablishing stronger bilateral relations with the U.S. now that Trump is back in office. By linking America's potential interests in annexing Greenland with his own invasion of Ukraine, the Russian leader appeared to have two goals. He wanted to justify his country's claims just as Trump is eager to begin negotiations aimed at ending that war. And he wanted to deepen the growing rift between the U.S. and Europe, which is deeply resistant to U.S. expansion plans involving a territory now tied to Denmark.
The Trump administration's strategy for taking Greenland is now tied to diminishing Denmark's role.
'As the Vice President has said, previous U.S. leaders have neglected Arctic security, while Greenland's Danish rulers have neglected their security obligations to the island,' Vance's press secretary, Taylor Van Kirk, said in a statement to POLITICO. 'The security of Greenland is critical in ensuring the security of the rest of the world, and the Vice President looks forward to learning more about the island.'
Greenland, which has a population of about 60,000, has had its own government and parliament since 1979 but relies on Denmark for economic and military support. Earlier this month, an opposition party favoring a gradual path toward independence from Denmark
won a parliamentary election
. A
recent poll
found that only 6 percent of Greenlanders are in favor of becoming part of the U.S.
'They don't want to exchange one colonial power for another. They want to be an independent country,' said Ålander, adding: 'The question everyone in Europe is asking is: Do they misunderstand the interests of Greenlanders? Or do they just not care?'