Reporting from Nuuk, the Wall Street Journal’s Max Colchester captures something many in Washington still pretend is a joke: Greenlanders are finally taking President Trump seriously. After years of offhand commentary about buying the island, the president’s blunt talk about acquisition and control has moved from late-night banter to realpolitik that people on the ground in Greenland now weigh in private and public conversations.
What has sharpened the moment is not just rhetoric but boots-on-the-ground attention—most visibly the spectacle around Donald Trump Jr.’s visit, with MAGA paraphernalia and staged photo-ops that left locals bemused and many saying the whole thing felt like a bluff-turned-test. That awkward theater exposed a truth the media won’t admit: moving the needle on geopolitics sometimes takes disruption, and disruption can make formerly complacent partners reckon with serious options.
Greenlandic leaders and citizens have understandably bristled at talk of being bought or seized, insisting that “Greenland is not for sale” and that self-determination must come from Greenlanders themselves. Those principled responses are respectable but should not be confused with naivete about the new international scramble for Arctic resources and strategic positioning.
Across Europe the reaction has been predictable: outrage and talk of rules and outrage as if the United States has no legitimate national-security interests in the Arctic. Copenhagen and other capitals have rushed to posture, but the blunt fact is that Arctic security matters to America and to NATO, and leaders who refuse to see that are leaving their people vulnerable.
Reports that the administration explored pragmatic levers—everything from incentives or lump-sum payments to protect Greenlanders’ welfare, to tougher options on the table—have alarmed elites but are straight talk about leverage in diplomacy. If the goal is to keep adversaries like Russia and China from planting permanent influence in the Arctic, Americans should applaud a president willing to put tools on the table rather than surrender strategic ground.
Make no mistake: Trump’s interruption of the status quo has already yielded leverage for Greenland itself, accelerating conversations about true independence and better terms from Copenhagen, while forcing the island to reckon with offers it might otherwise never have received. That dynamic—competition producing options for smaller nations—is classic conservative foreign policy: project strength, expand freedom of choice, and let free peoples decide their own fate without being ignored by a passive international order.
Patriotic Americans should back a clear-eyed approach: defend our national security interests in the Arctic, stand ready to invest in Greenland’s prosperity if it chooses a closer partnership, and call out European posturing when it masks weakness. The world respects strength; when Washington speaks plainly and acts, allies and adversaries both take notice—and ordinary people in places like Nuuk begin, finally, to take America seriously.
