What follows is a work of speculative fiction. Any resemblances to actual future events are purely coincidental. This scenario is plausible, but certainly not inevitable. It is offered in the modest hope that it will inspire and inform efforts to prevent the disastrous outcome described here.
It is January 2028. Looking back, the Americans did not “take” Greenland—not in any concrete sense. There was no invasion, no purchase, not even a plebiscite. But in the shadowy corridors of Arctic politics, Washington moved deliberately to confound its opponents. The Americanization of Greenland transcended brute imperial force in the Russian mold.
Two years earlier, in the wake of U.S. President Donald Trump’s showy military ouster of Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro—and Trump’s insistence that he intended to take over Greenland next—foreign policy analysts had been scrambling to imagine how he might seize the island. Would he force Denmark to sell its semiautonomous territory? Send in the troops, effectively attacking a NATO ally? But Trump didn’t have to do either. Instead, his administration pioneered a new form of twenty-first-century imperialism in which sovereignty over territory is imposed less by force than by function, through investments, contractors, and legal ambiguities. In the process, Trump’s Greenland gambit rewrote the rules of international order and created a template that Beijing, Moscow, and others soon followed. Now known as “geo-osmosis,” what follows is the story of how it happened.
FROM TROLLING TO TRUTH
Trump originally floated the idea of acquiring Greenland in his first term. The 2019 revelation that he had inquired about purchasing the territory from Denmark was met with global bemusement and a curt “Greenland is not for sale” response from the Danish and Greenlandic governments. Few in Brussels, Copenhagen, or Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, took the threat seriously. After all, Trump had long trafficked in hyperbolic bombast.
Seasoned Trump observers noted, however, that the idea of territorial acquisition had long held a special place in Trump’s worldview. Greenland grabbed Trump’s attention as “essentially, a big real estate deal,” as he put it, an accomplishment that the journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser note in a 2022 book “might give him a place in American history like William Seward’s purchase of Alaska from Russia.”
Early in his second term, Trump revived the proposal and gave it a geopolitical rationale. His argument that the United States should control Greenland had three pillars: It would help the country secure critical resources—the island is estimated to have enormous oil and gas reserves as well as troves of rare-earth minerals such as cobalt, graphite, and lithium. It would expand the U.S. military’s reach in the Arctic. And it would limit Chinese and Russian influence in a territory key to U.S. national security.
But when Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen offered to give the U.S. president more or less anything he wanted short of sovereignty to achieve those goals, Trump simply refused. It became clear that he was not actually interested in Arctic security. Rather, Greenland became the first in a series of Trumpian territorial ambitions that included Canada, the Panama Canal, and even the Gaza Strip—acquisitions that he apparently believed might secure his place on Mount Rushmore.
As was so often the case with Trump, it was difficult to separate the trolling from the truth. But it soon emerged that Greenland was a genuine target. With a more loyal second-term team ready to carry out his whims and a supine Congress, his administration was able to create a plan to make his desire a reality.
ABSORB AND CONQUER
In Greenland, the Trump administration lifted a few elements from its Venezuela template: for instance, the administration directed U.S. spy agencies to step up efforts to identify people in Greenland and Denmark who could support their objectives for the island, just as it leaned on the CIA to help overthrow Maduro. But Trump’s apparatchiks quickly concluded that the best way to control Greenland was not to follow the Venezuela model or to buy Greenland. Regardless of its immediate success, overt military action against a NATO ally would only ignite local and global opposition and limit the United States’ ability to assert sovereignty over the island. But they could control it by cleverly exploiting its supply dependencies.
The administration understood that Greenland was economically and politically fragile. At 56,000 people, its population was 500 times smaller than Venezuela’s. Manhattan’s East Village had more residents. A mostly uninhabitable ice sheet a quarter of the size of the U.S. mainland, its people were scattered and its infrastructure spotty; with only 93 miles of roads, many Greenlandic communities could reach the others only by boat, small plane, snowmobile, or dogsled, and less than 70 percent of the population used the Internet. Greenlanders had long resented Danish rule and accused the Danish government of keeping them poor and dependent. The island’s semiautonomous government, limited budgetary sovereignty, and simmering independence movement—most Greenlandic political parties ostensibly wanted the territory to gain full autonomy—made it highly susceptible to external influence. Add to this a thin institutional infrastructure and a lack of indigenous wealth, and you had an ideal laboratory for what Trump officials at the time termed “motivated alignment.”
A planning cell in the White House began drafting what was euphemistically titled the Northern Strategic Realignment Initiative. With information from U.S. spy agencies in hand, in May 2026, the Trump administration announced a $10 billion “strategic development initiative” for Greenland, ostensibly to upgrade infrastructure and promote the exploitation of the island’s natural resources.
The Americans did not need the Greenlandic population’s consent.
Washington moved through proxies. A patchwork of development consortiums, disaster response teams, nongovernmental organizations, consultants, and Arctic energy forums, almost all boasting loose ties to Trump-aligned donors or U.S. government funding, descended on Greenland in the summer of 2026. The activities of these polite people were ostensibly civilian: installing broadband, training local officials, or building roads, small airports, and health centers. Investment was deployed not nationally but municipally. Coastal communities received critical supplies, construction contracts, and digital infrastructure grants. The money came with no overt political strings, but it did have an accompanying series of technical agreements and memorandums that quietly shifted local loyalties and forced budgetary dependence.
This flurry of help and investment did not fool most Greenlanders. As early as January 2025, a survey jointly commissioned by Danish and Greenlandic newspapers showed that over 85 percent of the island’s residents opposed Greenland’s incorporation into the United States, and those numbers never changed very much. Greenlanders feared the erosion of their culture and autonomy, not to mention having to navigate the nightmare of the U.S. health-care system. But some of Greenland’s government officials and community leaders, long frustrated by Copenhagen’s paternalism and budget constraints, found themselves tempted by these American offers.
Thus, the U.S. efforts set the terms of Greenland’s next political phase. The Americans funded local media. They offered fellowships to emerging political leaders. Washington pushed a framing of Greenlandic identity in opposition to Danish “colonialism”—and as compatible with U.S. patronage. Ultimately, the Americans did not need the population’s consent. They just needed a few collaborators amid a general sense of fatigue and cynicism with politics as usual—an attitude Trump’s team is skilled at seeding.
FEALTY FOLLOWS FUNCTION
The sovereignty campaign was therefore not one of persuasion. It was one of circumvention and absorption. Trump’s advisers understood that Greenland’s democratic mechanisms could be rerouted by fragmenting the elite, creating greater economic dependence, and generating a need for emergency governance. Danish resupply routes began to face delays as ships were stopped and searched at sea. Fuel shortages, medical supply bottlenecks, and bureaucratic “miscommunications” caused by unexplained electricity and Internet outages pushed municipalities toward the only actors offering an alternative: the Americans.
Around 150 U.S. service members had already been stationed at Pituffik Space Base in northern Greenland. But acting on humanitarian grounds, the U.S. military rapidly expanded its footprint. Emergency logistics hubs became new de facto bases. U.S. contractors took over local security training. By October, several Greenlandic lawmakers had formed a “Sovereign Future Caucus,” signaling their openness to “alternative security and economic partnerships.” One Trump adviser described it as “the Taiwan model in reverse: build deep ties first and let the sovereignty claims follow.”
By early 2027, Greenland was operating in a sovereignty twilight. Formally, it was still part of the Danish realm, but it had become functionally dependent on a U.S. presidential administration that had not even bothered to try to secure Greenlandic popular support.
Greenland’s democratic mechanisms could be rerouted.
To move from de facto integration toward de jure sovereignty, the U.S. Justice Department assembled a legal framework that invoked historical precedent. Drawing on the 1917 U.S. purchase of the Danish West Indies (now the U.S. Virgin Islands), and citing Greenland’s right to self-determination under the UN Charter, Trump administration lawyers constructed what they called a sovereignty transition plan.
The Trump team avoided a national referendum, knowing it would fail. Instead, the administration encouraged the Greenlandic parliament to adopt a declaration of “provisional autonomy” and offered Washington’s recognition of Greenlandic sovereignty in principle. It was a phrase loaded with possibilities and devoid of obligations. A letter of support from pro-American Greenlandic officials, signed in July 2027, set the plan in motion. The U.S. then formally began stationing U.S. security forces in Nuuk, using the letter to claim that they had been invited by the Greenlandic parliament, even though no vote had been held.
In October 2027, Greenland’s parliament declared provisional autonomy and an “interim sovereignty transition.” The United States raised its flag over new “civil-military liaison offices” in Nuuk and Greenland’s three next-largest towns. Negotiations to grant Greenland a compact of free association, akin to those the United States has with Micronesia or the Marshall Islands, began immediately afterward.
EXPRESSING GRAVE CONCERN
These efforts, of course, ignited a firestorm in Denmark. The Danish government declared the sovereignty transition plan a “hostile act” and withdrew its ambassador from Washington. The European Union denounced it as a violation of international law. The French president called it “a colonial anachronism wrapped in nationalist theatrics.” But Denmark had little military or economic leverage to wield. And the EU, more focused on managing other elements of its strained relationship with the United States, was unwilling to do anything beyond “monitoring the situation.”
Meanwhile, Russian bombers conducted patrols near Greenlandic airspace. Chinese state media outlets declared the United States a “rogue imperialist actor,” even as many of their diplomats took notes. But these efforts only strengthened Trump’s case that the United States needed to control Greenland to protect it—and shore up U.S. national security.
The Greenland gambit divided American public opinion: MAGA conservatives hailed Trump’s move as a “strategic masterstroke,” while critics likened it to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and warned that the United States’ global credibility had suffered irreparably. But the administration’s media machine lurched into action, launching a public relations campaign called “America’s Frozen Frontier,” and Fox News aired segments with AI-generated images of Greenlandic children waving U.S. flags. Maps were redrawn. Trump rallies in Michigan and Pennsylvania featured chants of “Make Greenland Great Again.” The Trump Organization announced plans to make the island the “biggest, most beautiful winter resort” in human history, with fjord-based heli-skiing and extensive glamping opportunities.
Denmark challenged the United States’ moves at the International Court of Justice, but the case languished in procedural purgatory, and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio dismissed it as “nonsense.” Indigenous Greenlandic voices remained split: although some elites embraced U.S. investments, most residents warned of coming environmental degradation and cultural erasure. None of that mattered. U.S. contractors continued to deliver services. Washington concluded its association compact with Nuuk, assumed full authority over Greenland’s defense and security affairs, and asserted a claim that Greenland represented a U.S. “special economic zone.” Trump declared victory.
THE COLD BENEATH THE ICE
Decades later, the Greenland gambit would be studied as the prototype for a new form of state expansion, one that blurs the lines between consent, coercion, and capitulation. The Trump administration showed that territory need not be seized when it can be absorbed. It affirmed a simple truth of twenty-first-century geopolitics: in the absence of coherent international resistance, norms matter little; facts on the ground suffice. Commentators drew a direct line from the Trump team’s effort in Greenland to the later Russian absorption of Georgia and, of course, the Chinese takeover of Taiwan.
It also redefined the nature of international order and sovereignty. Manufactured dependence was no longer considered a form of imperialism; they became a method for building fraternal ties. Indigenous populations no longer determined sovereignty; supply chains did. And, perhaps most tellingly, the unimaginable became more than just possible. It became marketable.
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