Greenland (which resembles the USA more than Europe) is the purest country in the world. This is why Trump wants him

I admit it: if I write these lines from Nuuk after my return flight has been postponed to an ice storm, If I have allowed myself a journey that I have wooed for years without deciding, it’s just thanks to Donald Trump. To his expansionist aims that have finally provided me with a pretext to leave. There is more. If I had been transported to Nuuk without knowing it and they had suddenly squeezed, I would think I was in America, Montana or North Dakota, perhaps in Alaska: Today’s Greenland resembles the United States much more than it looks like Europe.

The strategy: use propaganda to divide, then take advantage of the discontent

Signe Ravn-Højgaard has studied because Greenland is so susceptible to media intrusion: « The company is small and we are strongly connected, information and disinformation propagates quickly. A few shares are enough for a Facebook post to reach a large part of the population ».

The strategy is the one practiced with shades other than the right from all over the world: to use propaganda online to divide the electorate, then insert themselves into the spaces of discontent that open, proposing themselves as a solution. Here, specifically, it was Reaches the conflict between the majority inuit and the Danish minority, between Copenhagen and Nuuk, in short to revive the postcolonial tension. After that JD Vance said: « Greenland was not protected as it deserved! », Although it is not known by whom. And Donald Trump said: « We will make you rich! », Even if you don’t understand how. Someone who believes it, so much, is always found.

Greenland « true »

Still, the time I spent here was enough to understand that even « Greenland » is a elusive concept.
For many, the capital Nuk is not Greenland. Greenland « true » begins much further north, Where the hunting for the seal is practiced, fishing for piercing the ice and moves in the sled. Or is found in the poorest settlements on the East coast, where Ole has grown. Or again, it is in the middle, in the immensity of theinlandsisthe expanse of perennial icea territory where even the word « nothing » has an out of the ordinary meaning.

According to the ethnologist Adam Grydehøj, « Nuk is simultaneously in the center and on the outskirts »: It is center compared to the coastal settlements from which the populations have been pushed here, and is periphery with respect to the capital of the kingdom, or Copenhagen.

The reasons why the USA want Greenland

Surely, Nuuk is what we would call a « cute » urban center today. The houses of the historic neighborhood are all colorful, folkloristic, they attract tourists. At the time when the colors were built, they had a meaning, they served fishermen to orient themselvesyellow for the hospital, red for municipal offices, blue for fishing, black police.

The government palace where Jørgen T. Hammeken-Holm gave me an appointment is red as per legend. There are three official reasons why Donald Trump (like others before him) ardently want to possess Greenland:
1) the new commercial routes that will open with the Climate Change (although curiously denied by Trump himself),
2) military presence in the Arctic,
3) The raw materials of which Greenland is rich: hydrocarbons, graphite, uranium, rare lands.
But the new commercial routes are still a remote eventuality.
The military presence is already there and it has never been a problem for anyone (within a few days JD Vance will visit the American base of Pituffikik, to the north west, and a few days later it will make the commander off the commander who will have dared to criticize him).

The raw materials? « A great illusion »

Only the raw materials remain to be investigated. Jørgen is the most suitable person to do it, he has been directing the ministerial section dedicated to geological resources for four years. «Denmark we know how to manage it, he tells me, but the manipulations of the United States create tension. We are a small community, we see very well those who carry out the interests of the Americans, how they move. But we don’t understand what they want. « 
Oil, right?
« Do you see that map? These are the sites in which oil was extracted. The companies were all here, Chevron, Exxon, Shell, Texaco, Phillips … but they left. Offshore oil in Greenland costs too much, there are the extreme cold, the icebergs who wander at sea for most of the year « .
The uranium then.
« On the extraction of uranium we put a ban. »
Critical minerals, rare lands.
«The rare lands are there. But let’s talk about a potential. If they started extracting them today it would take at least twenty years to have them on the market. Even if we call them rare, the problem is not their availability, there are many parts of the world, nor their extraction that is relatively easy. The problem is to separate individual metals (rare earths are metals) from the other compounds. You get there through complicated and very polluting chemical processes. China has a monopoly. It does not only hold the know-how but also the patents. They were able to develop them thanks to the extreme carelessness towards the environment. Impossible that something like this happens here. Although The latest election results saw a weakening of the environmental party, In Greenland they will continue to pursue good ecological practices ».
So what?
“So I don’t know. It seems to me a great illusion. A Bad Business CASAnd ».

Geology, ethnography: who belongs to Greenland?

What Jørgen said is confirmed in full, a few hours later, by Thomas Varming, a geologist from the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources. After meeting both I find myself even more confused. What does Donald Trump want from Greenland really? It is possible that it is really an illusion, of a gigantic Bad Business Case?

There is no doubt that geological Greenland belongs to the North American continent. The tectonic plaque is the same and also includes Iceland. And there is no doubt that Greenland belongs to North America ethnographically: The inuit population that in the majority has come from Mongolia through the Strait of Bering, Nuk’s Inuit certainly have more common with those of Alaska and Québec than with the Danish. But are these sufficient reasons, to claim sovereignty on a free territory?

The purity of ice – and the strength of US iconography

Then a new idea takes shape in me, a completely personal hypothesis, unfounded and not verifiable. Perhaps Donald Trump wants the Arctic because it is the purest place on the planet. The most empty and the purest. All this ice … like every predator, he feels libidine to take possession of what is still intact.

Last night I was at dinner from Bone’s and ate Ribs shorts surrounded by Santini by Michael Jackson, Frank Sinatra, Marylin Monroe and Simpson. The walls hanging on the Nebraska plates, photographs of Rodeo Drive, autographed baseball shirts, and I thought about how strong the American iconography is. To what has conquered us without conquering us, everywhere in the world. Perhaps the Americans no longer have the generative capacity of the past, but with what they have produced they can live on an annuity for another generation at least. Maybe Donald Trump will not have to make great effort in the end. Or the Greenlanders will be able to keep it away with their kind firmness, as they kept away from me. But from where I find myself I perceive it near, America, just beyond the Baffin bay. Dumbledore and threatening. Starting from the summer, in a few months, a direct flight to United will connect Nuuk to New York.