Americans have been quietly plundering Greenland for over 100 years, since a Navy officer chipped fragments off the Cape York iron meteorite

President Donald Trump’s insistence that the U.S. will acquire Greenland “whether they like it or not” is just the latest chapter in a codependent and often complicated relationship between America and the Arctic’s largest island – one that stretches back more than a century but has recently been on the rocks.

On Jan. 14, 2026, U.S., Danish and Greenlandic officials met at the White House to discuss Trump’s comments. The foreign minister of Denmark later told reporters that while the two sides had a “fundamental disagreement,” they would “continue to talk.” In Congress, Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell also criticized Trump’s threats, saying seizing Greenland would mean “incinerating the hard-won trust of loyal allies in exchange for no meaningful change in U.S. access to the Arctic.”

Although Americans have long pursued policies in Greenland that U.S. leaders considered strategic and economic impe...