Patrick Comerford
JD Vance is meeting the Prime Ministers of Denmark and Greenland next week to push Trump’s bullying demands to hand over the island. In advance of those talks, Greenland’s prime minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen says the island’s 57,000 residents will not be bullied by the US into selling its sovereignty to the US.
It is 80 years since Denmark said no to the Truman administration’s offer of $100 million in gold for Greenland. The answer remains unchanged.
Donald Trump in his bluster and threats, says he wants to annex Greenland, by purchase or, if necessary, by force if necessary. ‘We need Greenland,’ one senior US official. ‘It’s so strategic.’
A third option mentioned by the White House is a new form of association between the two, although the scope of this is not clear.
Under a 75-year-old agreement, the US already has the only military base in Greenland and the island government has been open to it expanding its presence and to encouraging US investment in extracting rare minerals.
Under the terms of this agreement, the US is supposed to consult Denmark and Greenland before making ‘any significant changes’ in its military operations on the island and the US explicitly recognises it as ‘an equal part of the Kingdom of Denmark’.
But the US military presence in Greenland in the past has regularly involved egregious breaches of those legal agreements. In the 1960s, the US tried to build a subterranean network of secret nuclear missile launch sites in the Greenlandic ice cap, without ever seeking consent from the Danish Government.
Project Iceworm was run from Camp Century from 1960 to 1966 before it was deemed unworkable and abandoned. The missiles were never fielded, the reactor was removed and Camp Century was abandoned. However, hazardous waste remains buried under the ice and has become an environmental concern.
The Danish government did not know about the programme at the time and only heard about it three decades later in 1997, when Danes was perusing declassified US documents and searching for records of the crash of a nuclear-equipped B-52 bomber near the Thule air base in 1968.
On the other hand, Denmark and Greenland have always shown an ability to reach amicable settlements to territorial disputes with Greenland’s nearest geographical neighbour, Canada. A border dispute began in 1973 over the ownership of Hans Island, a small island in Nares Strait directly between Greenland and the Canadian territory of Nunavut. The dispute was amicable and was resolved in 2022, when Denmark and Canada agreed to divide the island in half, meaning Greenland’s one and only land border is not with Denmark or the US, but with Canada.
Canadians may well fear that if the US forcibly acquires Greenland, Canada will be surrounded on three sides by the US, with Alaska to the west.
Indeed, the well-founded fears of Canada and Denmark may also be shared by many EU member states whose sovereign territories may become the target of US covetous eyes. Any US aggression in Greenland may give permission to Putin to think he can be aggressive, and with impunity, towards other member EU member states, particularly Finland, the three Baltic states that were once part of the Soviet Union, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and perhaps Poland and Romania too. The US claims to Greenland, and recent unilateral actions in the Caribbean – abducting Nicolás Maduro in Caracas and imposing a blockade on and attacking ships and boats – show the Trump regime regards the North Atlantic and the Caribbean as its backyard, and has no fears about how once friendly NATO and EU member states respond.
If Trump can claim Greenland, which is Danish, what’s to stop him from claiming Guadeloupe and Guiana which are French, or any of the other islands that are French Dutch, Spanish, Danish and Portuguese sovereign territories and that are parts of the European Union in a variety of ways.
Although Greenland is part of the Kingdom of Denmark, it is not officially a part of the European Union, yet it relates to the EU through the Overseas Countries and Territories (OCT) and receives support from the European Development Fund, Multiannual Financial Framework, European Investment Bank and other EU programmes.
It is often forgotten that the EU includes sovereign territory of a number of member states not just in Europe, but on all continents. French sovereign territory, for example, includes the five overseas departments and regions of France: French Guiana in South America, a part of the Guianas; Guadeloupe in the Caribbean Sea, a part of the Leeward Islands in the Lesser Antilles; Martinique in the Lesser Antilles; Mayotte in the Mozambique Channel and the Comoro Islands; and Réunion in the Indian Ocean.
Collectively, the special territories of the EU have a population of 6.1 million people and a land area of about 2,733,792 sq km, and Greenland makes up around 80 percent of that area. The smallest by land area is the island of Saba in the Caribbean (13 sq km). The largest region by population, the Canary Islands, accounts for more than a third of the total population of the special territories. The French Southern and Antarctic Lands is the only special territory without a permanent population.
The European Economic Area (EEA) has 32 special territories of EU member states and EFTA member states that for historical, geographical, or political reasons have a special status with the EU and the European Free Trade Association (EFTA).
The special territories of EU member states fall into three separate categorises:
• 9 Outermost Regions (OMR) that form part of the EU, though they benefit from derogations from some EU laws due to their geographical remoteness from mainland Europe;
• 13 Overseas Countries and Territories (OCT) that do not form part of the EU, but co-operate with the EU through the Overseas Countries and Territories Association;
• 10 special cases that form part of the EU.
The Outermost Regions were recognised in the Maastricht Treaty (1992), and confirmed by the Treaty of Lisbon (2007) form part of a member state of the EU. EU law applies in these outermost regions, but because of their significant distance from mainland Europe they have derogations from some EU policies. They are part of the EU customs area, although some fall outside the Schengen Area and the EU VAT Area.
The status of an uninhabited French territory, the abandoned island of Clipperton – in the North Pacific and 1,280 km off the coast of Mexico – remains unclear and it is not explicitly mentioned in primary EU law. It is an interesting place in this discussion because it was briefly occupied by the US in 1944-1945.
Today, the nine Outermost Regions of the EU are parts of the national territories of France, Portugal and Spain:
• France (6) : French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, St Martin, Mayotte, Reunion;
• Portugal (2): Azores, Madeira;
• Spain (1): the Canary Islands.
We all know of Trump’s golf courses in Scotland and Ireland. But he has also owned a holiday home in one of these EU Caribbean islands since 2013. Le Château des Palmiers in a beachfront estate on Plum Bay in the French part of the island of St Martin, which is shared by France and the Netherlands. The estate once had a price tag of £21.5 million; after a tropical storm he dropped the asking price to £13 million but he still has not been able to sell it.
The 13 Overseas Countries and Territories of the EU are parts of Denmark, France and the Netherlands:
• Denmark (1): Greenland;
• France (6): French Polynesia, the French Southern and Antarctic Lands, New Caledonia, Saint Barthélemy, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Wallis-et-Futuna;
• the Netherlands (6): Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao, Saba, Sint Eustatius, Sint Maarten.
As a group, the Dutch islands are still known as the Dutch Caribbean. Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao form the ABC islands, 80 km off the coast of Venezuela, and in Dutch law Aruba and Curaçao are defined as countries; Saba, Sint Eustatius and Sint Maarten are known as the SSS islands. These islands are so close to Venezuela, the Netherlands can identify with Danish fears about Trumps threats to Denmark’s sovereignty in Greenland.
In addition, there are 10 special cases involving territories that are part of Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Italy and Spain but with unusual political borders and geographical locations:
• Cyprus (1): the UN Buffer Zone;
• Denmark (1): Faroe Islands;
• Finland (1): Åland;
• Germany (2): Büsingen am Hochrhein and Heligoland;
• Greece (1): Mount Athos;
• Italy (2): Livigno and Campione d’Italia;
• Spain (2): Ceuta and Melilla.
The cities of Melilla and Ceuta have had an autonomous system of rule since 1995. In addition, the plazas de soberanía or ‘strongholds of sovereignty’ are a series of Spanish territories scattered along the Mediterranean coast bordering Morocco. They are closer to Africa than Europe.
Quite separately, there are five European microstates that are not EU members: Andorra, Monaco, Liechtenstein, San Marino and Vatican City. Gibraltar left the EU with the UK at Brexit, but an agreement last year (June 2025) creates a special relationship, joining Gibraltar to the Schengen Area and establishing a customs union with the EU, yet preserving UK sovereignty.
If Trump gets his small grubby hands on Greenland this year, could it be Guiana, or Guadeloupe soon after? He has already spoken of Gaza as desirable real estate; could he also have eyes on Gibraltar, with desires for the Mediterranean as a playground to twin with the Caribbean? Nothing is beyond the realm of possibility when it comes to the capricious whims of an autocrat. The fears of Denmark today should be the fears of all EU member states too.
