Only a minority of Canadians would welcome Donald Trump’s offer to become the 51st state, and Canadians have a long history of coping with the overflow of American politics across the border. Greenland is suddenly a target for involuntary statehood if Trump gets his way, yet few seemed to be concerned how the actual people in Greenland feel about this proposed change of legal status:

Satellite view of Greenland, Iceland, and parts of Northern Canada.
NASA/Ames Research Center, 17 May, 2005.

According to President Donald Trump, taking possession of Greenland is a national security necessity. It’s so critical, he claims, that he’s willing to take the chilly island the “easy way” or the “hard way”. Denmark, which governs Greenland, isn’t eager to surrender the territory. Even more important, the residents of Greenland, most of whom don’t especially want to be Danish, have even less interest in becoming American. The leader of a country founded on high-minded sentiments about the “consent of the governed” should consider taking that into account.

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“56% of Greenlanders answer that they would vote yes to Greenlandic independence if a referendum were held today, 28% would vote no, and 17% do not know what they would vote for,” The Verian Group announced a year ago about a survey it conducted in Greenland.

With regard to Trump’s long-voiced desire to acquire Greenland for the United States, Verian’s Camilla Kann Fjeldsøe added, “the results show that 85% of Greenlanders do not want to leave the Realm and become part of the United States, while 6% want to leave the Danish Realm and become part of the United States, whereas the remaining 9% are undecided”.

Greenland’s 57,000 people don’t want to be Danish, but they really don’t want to be American. If forced to choose between remaining an appendage of one country or joining another, they’ll likely take the devil they know over the one they don’t.

What About the Consent of the Governed?

That’s a problem for Trump’s imperial ambitions — annexing Greenland would have to happen over the objections of the people who live there. The U.S. could get away with that sort of thing when it didn’t even pretend to give a damn about what the Sioux and the Cheyenne wanted, and when it bought the Louisiana Territory and Alaska from autocratic regimes. It’s not as if Napoleon Bonaparte or Czar Alexander II were going to offer their subjects a say in the matter anyway. But Denmark is a relatively inoffensive liberal democracy that holds regular elections. Greenlanders are accustomed to picking their own political leaders and having input into their fate. If asked, they’ll almost certainly reject the offer.

So, is Trump really going to opt for doing it “the hard way” and just grab the island?

When the United States decided its own fate 250 years ago, the Declaration of Independence set out grievances with the British crown, as well as some basic principles for the new nation. Among them:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Most Americans no longer consented to be governed by King George III or the British Parliament and so set up a new country with a government of its own. What excuse would we have for foisting American governance and laws on Greenlanders if — as seems likely — they reject political affiliation with the U.S.?

In his Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan — who has never in his life been a fan of Donald Trump — warns that “Greenland is a Red Line” and crossing that line will destroy the American constitution (Warning – contains Andrew Sullivan):

“We’re liable to wake up one morning and Donald, if he were president, would have nuked Denmark,” — Ted Cruz in 2016.

The essence of tyranny is the imposition of one man’s will on an entire polity — with no checks, balances, or even reasons cited to back him up. It is, to coin a phrase, a triumph of will. In fact, you could argue that a tyrant aims for exactly such a demonstrable act of pure solipsism as soon as he can pull it off — against all elite and popular opinion and common sense — because it proves by its very arbitrary irrationality that only he matters.

That’s why President Trump’s threat to the sovereignty of a NATO ally, Denmark, is a red line. No one — neither Greenlanders nor Americans — wants what is an insane idea. No one needs it. No reason can be given for it. And yet Trump keeps insisting, like a mafia boss, that he will take it. He must be stopped.

The reasons given have changed, as they do when they are being invented on the fly to justify something already decided and totally bonkers. We were first told that this was about national security, because the Arctic — thanks to the climate’s rapid heating of the North Pole — is becoming a far more disputed part of the globe, with more valuable shipping lanes and military activity. Russia and China have their eyes on it. And so should we.

Fair enough. In fact, let’s get to it. Greenland is already in NATO, and the Danes and Greenlanders would be more than happy to have all the US bases that were once there to come back, and more if necessary. The Danes, after all, are among the finest members of the alliance, committing to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, for example, for many long years, with many fatalities. When Germany and France refused to send troops to accompany the US and UK in Iraq, the Danish parliament voted to support the US. Danes have literally died for us — and now we repay it by threatening to invade and conquer them. It’s a disgusting and shameful idea.

This week, Trump tried to suggest that unless the US occupies Greenland against the wishes of its people, Russia and China will. There is no substance to this absurd lie. If Russia or China were to threaten Greenland’s sovereignty, NATO would invoke Article 5. Which is why Russia and China haven’t. The only reason they might is if Trump effectively ends NATO, as he is now apparently planning. And let’s be honest: if we’re not buying Greenland, and not allying with it, we are illegally invading and occupying a sovereign country — an action opposed by a super-majority of Americans (75 percent per CNN, 86 percent per Quinnipiac).

So what’s left to defend the madness? According to Trump, the “psychological” benefit of “owning” the place. The best way to understand that, I think, is simply that Trump wants, like all tyrants, to expand the footprint of his domain. We missed this in the first term. But it’s just what tyrants do, what tyranny is — as Plato first explained. It’s what Putin is trying in Ukraine; and Xi in Taiwan and Tibet; and Netanyahu in Gaza and the West Bank. Trump wants to see the stars and stripes extend on a Mercator map to make America look BIGGER. So he can gain GLORY. That’s it. Yep. That’s really all this is.