Ask Greenland
What happens when America wants your land?
What happens when America wants your land?
Ask Greenland. They remember.
May 1953. The sea ice still frozen enough for dogsleds.
The village had stood on that coast for generations—homes built by hands that knew the weight of Arctic winter, the placement of walls against wind, the way light fell through ice in the months when the sun did not rise. One hundred sixteen people lived there, in a rhythm older than the nation that now wanted their land.
The American military needed to expand Thule Air Base. Uummannaq stood in the way. So the orders came. You have four days. Pack what you can carry.
Before they left, the families gathered at the cemetery to say goodbye to their dead.
We are leaving our graves behind. We are leaving our loved ones behind. We are leaving because the Americans are coming.
That is what Regina Kristiansen’s parents told her. She was fourteen years old. She drove a dogsled across the ice for two days before reaching Qaanaaq—a barren settlement eighty miles north, where the hunting was worse and the harbor less sheltered. Behind her, the village emptied.
They gave them tents. Canvas walls. Government-issue. Designed for summer deployment. One woman gave birth in those tents. A village elder died before Denmark finished building homes. Temperatures that could kill in minutes. Darkness that lasted months.
After they were gone, the family houses were burned down. The European Court of Human Rights would later document it: homes, hospital, school, radio station, warehouses—destroyed. Return made impossible.
In 1999, a Danish court calculated the value of a home, a village, a grandmother’s grave. A few thousand dollars per person.
In 2023, the base was renamed Pituffik—a Greenlandic word—to honor, the Pentagon said, “the rich cultural heritage” of the region.
The culture we bulldozed. The heritage we burned.
Now the Americans are coming again.
The Voice of Iron
Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, explained the philosophy on CNN this month: “We live in a world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.”
Days earlier, American forces had seized Venezuela’s president in a military strike on Caracas. Hours after the raid, Miller’s wife posted an image to social media: the American flag over Greenland. One word beneath—SOON.
The White House made the position official. “Utilizing the U.S. military is always an option at the commander in chief’s disposal.”
When asked about force against a NATO ally, Miller was dismissive. “Nobody is going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.”
Most likely, he is correct. No one will fight. Greenland has no army. Denmark would fall in hours.
But Miller believes this answers a question. It answers nothing. It only reveals he does not understand what the question is.
Iron laws. As though history were metallurgy. As though the thing that built civilizations—cooperation, trust, the slow accumulation of legitimacy—could be smelted down to who has more guns.
This is what power sounds like when it has forgotten what power is.
What the Colonizers Cannot Hear
Two empires face each other across the Arctic, both claiming to speak for the people they have spent centuries silencing.
Denmark protests American aggression—Prime Minister Frederiksen warning an attack would end NATO, shatter the order that has held since 1945. This week, seven European nations sent troops to Greenland. A few dozen soldiers. A reconnaissance team here, a liaison officer there. The founder of the alliance, now the threat the alliance mobilizes against.
But Denmark controlled Greenland when those homes burned. Denmark allowed it.
And Denmark ran its own programs. The “coil campaign”—4,500 Inuit women and girls, half the fertile female population, given IUDs without consent. Some were twelve years old.
Naja Lyberth was thirteen or fourteen. All the girls in her class were told to report to a visiting doctor and taken to a hospital for insertion. Decades later, she would say: “Our uterus, which is our most sacred internal organ, should be untouchable.”
Jytte Lyberth was fourteen. After a school medical check-up, she went to hospital and was told to take off her clothes. She was never told what would happen.
A woman identified in testimony only as Larsen was put in metal stirrups at seventeen. “I was very afraid,” she said. The coil was designed for adult women, not adolescents. She later contracted a serious infection. When she tried to have children, she discovered she was infertile.
The birth rate in Greenland was halved.
One colonizer burned the village. The other sterilized the women.
When Denmark met with Washington about Greenland’s future, Greenlandic representatives were not invited. Pipaluk Lynge, co-chair of Greenland’s foreign affairs committee, named it plainly: “Neo-colonialist.”
So here is what Greenlanders say, when asked.
Eighty-four percent support independence from Denmark. Eighty-five percent oppose becoming American. Jens Frederik Nielsen won the 2025 election on three sentences: “We don’t want to be Americans. We don’t want to be Danes. We want to be Greenlanders.”
Aaju Peter, Greenlandic Inuit attorney: “You can’t just take over a people just because you think you’re so superior.”
Miller speaks of iron laws. But fifty-six thousand people have been refusing to be owned for three hundred years.
The iron laws have no category for people who simply refuse.
The Law That Outlasts Empires
Miller says strength, force, and power as though they are synonyms.
They are opposites.
Strength does not announce itself. Force is not the presence of power but the symptom of its absence—the thing that rushes in when authority has fled, when legitimacy has crumbled.
After we helped defeat fascism abroad—if not at home—we did something unprecedented. We rebuilt our enemies instead of pillaging them. We wrote rules that said you cannot simply take countries because you want them. We built an alliance on collective defense, not domination. And at Nuremberg, we prosecuted the logic Miller now champions. "The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." We called it a war crime. We hanged men for it.
That was what attracted countries to our alliance. Not our bombs. Our restraint. They believed the rules applied to us too.
When you post SOON over allies’ territory, you announce you can no longer inspire and must terrify instead. You are not describing strength. You are describing the philosophy we built American power by opposing.
They look at 56,000 Greenlanders and see a formality to be dispensed with.
The pattern is the same. You create a category. You put the people inside it. Then you remove the category.
The Refusal
This week, C-130s touched down on the runway at Nuuk. French mountain infantry. German reconnaissance teams. Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Dutch, British officers. Soldiers from seven nations, unloading equipment in the Arctic dark, breath visible in the cold—the alliance we built, deploying against the nation that built it.
Not enough to stop us. Everyone knows that. But they came anyway.
Force can take land. It cannot create legitimacy. You could seize Greenland by morning. But you cannot make fifty-six thousand people want to be American. You cannot unburn the village or give back the graves.
The Greenlanders have been asked what they want. Eighty-five percent said no. They do not need an army to answer.
They simply refuse.
And refusal is the thing empires cannot conquer. You can take the land. You can burn the homes. You can rename the base and claim to honor what you destroyed.
But you cannot make the no into a yes.
Regina Kristiansen died in 2019. She never went back to Uummannaq. There was nothing left to go back to. But she told her story until the end—to researchers, to journalists, to anyone who would listen. The testimony of a fourteen-year-old girl on a dogsled, preserved in archives, in court records, in the memory of a people who refuse to forget.
The sign at Pituffik Air Base, in Greenlandic now, honors the rich cultural heritage of the region.
Notes & Sources
** Note: The Indigenous Greenlandic name for Greenland is Kalaallit Nunaat—Land of the Greenlanders.
The 1953 Relocation
Adam Federman, “The New Cold War in the Arctic,” In These Times/Type Investigations, November 2023: https://inthesetimes.com/article/cold-war-militarism-greenland-inuit-arctic
European Court of Human Rights, Hingitaq 53 and Others v. Denmark, Application No. 18584/04 (decision): https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng?i=001-72219
Stephen Miller CNN interview; “iron laws” quote
ABC News, “In his own words: Stephen Miller’s arguments for White House actions in US cities and abroad,” January 14, 2026: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/words-stephen-millers-arguments-white-house-actions-us-129224664
Axios, “Stephen Miller asserts US right to Greenland as allies push back,” January 6, 2026: https://www.axios.com/2026/01/06/stephen-miller-greenland-europe-nato
“Military is always an option” / Katie Miller “SOON” post
ABC News, “US military is ‘always an option’ for Trump to acquire Greenland, White House official says,” January 7, 2026: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-military-option-acquiring-greenland-white-house-official/story?id=128960041
The IUD campaign (1966–1975)
UNRIC (United Nations Regional Information Centre), “Speaking up for women in Greenland spiral-case,” March 8, 2024: https://unric.org/en/speaking-up-for-women-in-greenland-spiral-case-we-were-frozen-in-our-bodies-for-decades/
Juliette Pavy, “Greenland’s ‘coil campaign’: the forced contraception of thousands of Inuit women and girls,” Lacuna Magazine, February 2025: https://lacuna.org.uk/justice/greenlands-coil-campaign-the-forced-contraception-of-inuit-women/
Pipaluk Lynge “neo-colonialist” quote
Emile Simpson, “As US and Denmark fight, Greenland’s voices are being excluded once again,” The Conversation, January 15, 2026: https://theconversation.com/as-us-and-denmark-fight-greenlands-voices-are-being-excluded-once-again-273131
85% oppose American acquisition; 84% support independence; Nielsen election
Verian Group, “Opinion poll in Greenland, January 2025,” January 29, 2025: https://www.veriangroup.com/news-and-insights/opinion-poll-greenland-2025
CNN, “Greenland’s center-right opposition wins closely watched election dominated by Trump’s annexation threat,” March 12, 2025: https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/12/europe/greenland-election-polls-close-demokraatit-intl-hnk
Aaju Peter quote
Democracy Now!, “Trump’s Plan to Seize Greenland Would ‘Militarize the Arctic,’ Trample Indigenous Rights,” January 7, 2026: https://www.democracynow.org/2026/1/7/greenland_trump
NATO troop deployment / Operation Arctic Endurance
CNBC, “NATO nations deploy to Greenland after tense White House talks,” January 15, 2026: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/15/greenland-nato-troops-denmark-germany-arctic-trump.html
CNN, “European nations send additional troops to Greenland as US annexation threats escalate,” January 15, 2026: https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/15/world/europe-troops-greenland-trump-nato-intl-hnk
Further Reading
Paul Bierman, When the Ice Is Gone: What a Greenland Ice Core Reveals About Earth’s Tumultuous History and Perilous Future (W.W. Norton, 2024): https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324020677
Minnesotan in Denmark and just wanted to say thank you for writing this. It's a helluva time to have a foot in each of these places and I appreciate you drawing attention to the history between Denmark and Greenland that many people don't hear about.
Thank you for distinguishing between strength and power. As you describe, the U.S. is behaving shamefully in ways old and new.