Greenland’s culture of calm meets a moment of fear as U.S. pressure mounts
As the United States under President Donald Trump increases pressure on Greenland, the island’s deeply rooted tradition of emotional restraint is colliding with a geopolitical confrontation many residents say they are afraid to even discuss.
- Advertisement -
The unease reaches back to the anthropological record. In the 1960s, scholar Jean Briggs lived among Inuit families for 17 months, documenting a culture of striking composure in her 1970 book, “Never in Anger.” Conflict was avoided wherever possible. Children were taught from infancy to master their emotions. That heritage of self-control still shapes Greenlandic society—yet it now sits uneasily with a moment that feels, to many, like an assault on sovereignty too serious to absorb in silence.
In interviews, it has been hard to get politicians to talk—and harder still to persuade ordinary people to speak on camera. Some fear repercussions. Others refuse on principle, seeing public statements as a risky escalation. Their quiet is not indifference. If anything, it is proof of how destabilizing this moment feels.
“I don’t like to talk about [Donald Trump] because he spoils my sleep. I don’t sleep very well because I’m afraid,” said one woman, a retired university lecturer. “They have no respect for us, for my country, for our country.”
Another retired woman said she woke from a nightmare of Trump arriving by ship. “It was awful, that dream. I’m scared for his plans. We are scared. We are all scared.”
The restraint is not universal. Outside the U.S. consulate in Nuuk last March, protesters gathered, signaling that public anger does exist—even if it is not the dominant response.
Inside Greenland’s political class, the debate is sharpening. Some leaders argue the best answer is not defiance but direct engagement. Pele Broberg, leader of the pro-independence party Naleraq, which won a quarter of the vote in last year’s elections, says Greenland should bypass Copenhagen and negotiate with Washington. He and his allies are open to a “free association” model akin to arrangements the United States has with Pacific island states such as the Marshall Islands and Palau. Those agreements leave countries formally independent while the United States guarantees defense, supplies economic support, and holds open-ended military access.
For now, that path is blocked. Greenland’s foreign minister, Vivian Motzfeldt, says the law does not allow direct talks with Washington without Denmark. Motzfeldt is seeking what she calls a “normalization” of relations and hopes a meeting next week with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio can ease tensions.
Denmark and the European Union have little appetite to stand aside. In Brussels, officials are quietly exploring how to raise the cost of any American move deemed coercive or destabilizing. European powers know they cannot stop a full-scale U.S. military operation if one were ordered, but some believe they could make such a step costly enough to trigger resistance in Washington—or at least a second look.
Those conversations are no longer hypothetical. Germany’s foreign minister is reportedly working on planning options that include deploying European forces as a deterrent, modeled in part on NATO’s Baltic posture. France’s foreign minister has not ruled out sending French troops to the island. And EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas has asked the question that frames the emerging strategy debate: If the threat is real, what should the response be?
Beneath the diplomatic maneuvering lies a puzzle European leaders and Greenlanders are still trying to solve: What does Trump actually want? The stated rationales—national security, countering China and Russia, and securing mineral wealth—do not, in this case, fully add up. The United States already enjoys extensive access under an existing agreement. While Moscow and Beijing are expanding activity in the Arctic, hostile ships are not near Greenland. As for resources, extraction costs remain prohibitively high. If the familiar pretexts do not fit, it is harder to craft a coherent response.
That uncertainty also complicates Greenlandic politics. Free association promises speed toward formal independence with U.S. backing and a security umbrella—appealing for a movement that sees Copenhagen as a colonial holdover. Yet the price could be open-ended American military access and a recalibration of external leverage that leaves Nuuk dependent on Washington in new ways. For a people trained, culturally and politically, to lower tensions and seek internal consensus, the choice is wrenching.
The legal constraints are equally constricting. Any move to negotiate directly with the United States would test the limits of Greenland’s autonomy within the Kingdom of Denmark and risk a confrontation with Copenhagen and Brussels at the very moment the EU is trying to show it can deter coercion on its periphery. That helps explain why Motzfeldt is emphasizing process and “normalization”—the language of continuity rather than rupture—even as hardliners at home push for a pivot toward Washington.
In this tableau, silence becomes strategy as much as custom. The reluctance to speak—on camera, in parliament, or in the streets—serves to avoid inflaming a crisis that Greenlanders know they cannot control outright. Yet it also creates a vacuum others can fill, whether in Washington, Copenhagen, or Brussels.
What happens next will depend less on bold declarations than on a chain of decisions: whether Trump escalates, whether Europe puts hard deterrents on the table, whether Denmark and Greenland can coordinate without fracturing, and whether the promise of free association becomes a concrete path or a bargaining chip. Each choice carries risk. Each will test the balance between Greenland’s instinct for calm and the geopolitical storm gathering at its door.
For now, there are more questions than answers. But one fact is hard to miss: fear is back in a place that has long prized composure. And for a society that learned, over centuries, to keep anger at bay, that may be the most unsettling change of all.
By Abdiwahab Ahmed
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
