‘Greenland chooses the Greenland we know today.’ The country’s PM responds to Trump’s Davos speech 

Hans Egede was a Danish-Norwegian missionary who founded Greenland’s capital of Nuuk in 1728. While his legacy is a complicated one, there is no question that he was a particularly tough cookie. Some of the people that Monocle met in Nuuk this week would also fit this description, one of them being Greenland’s prime minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen, who we saw on Thursday. The 34-year-old is nearly 10 months into a term that came as a surprise to many in the country, not least the man himself. While it is the highest office in the land, it is not usually one that involves much international scrutiny. 

On Wednesday, we attended a press conference with two government ministers at Inatsisartut, Greenland’s parliament. There were 20 chairs for the 80 to 90 journalists in attendance. At about 11.00 on Thursday morning, we received an email from Nielsen’s press secretary, explaining that the day’s press conference had been moved to Nuuk’s Katuaq Cultural Centre, from where we have been broadcasting The Monocle Daily live all week. The prime minister shuffled in at 14.00. Power can superannuate even the freshest face but Nielsen still looks very young, if not a little drawn, after his crash course in international diplomacy.   

There had been a lot of noise over the past few days from President Trump and now it was Nielsen’s time to talk. “I will say it again just to be clear: Greenland chooses the Greenland we know today as part of the Kingdom of Denmark,” he says. The right to self-determination was once considered a core tenet of the US-led world but now it is the nations that feel threatened by the superpower who must repeatedly assert it. “We feel the massive pressure on our country as well as on our partners and friends in the EU. Support from the Nordic countries, Denmark and our EU allies is absolutely crucial in the current situation,” adds Nielsen. “We are strongly aware that this requires a lot from our friends and allies. We deeply appreciate it.” When gratefulness is extracted under duress, as it now is by the US president, it can gain a hollow quality. But to see it demonstrated with sincerity by Nielsen should have given Europe’s leaders some relief after a fraught fortnight. 

Nielsen was here to announce the creation of a high-level working group to begin negotiations on the principles of the 1951 US-Denmark agreement, which governs the American military presence on the world’s largest island. A willingness to reopen the document was apparently communicated to Donald Trump by the Nato secretary general Mark Rutte before the former’s speech at Davos on Wednesday. Greenland’s PM would not be drawn on what exactly the negotiations would reconsider. On the supposed US desire to extract rare earth minerals, he says: “If you want to exploit [our resources], you have to respect our legislation and high environmental standards, because that’s a part of our culture.” He was unequivocal about Greenlandic sovereignty. “Our integrity, our borders and international law is a definite red line that we don’t want anyone to cross.” 

The events of the past year, and especially the past few weeks, have offended Greenlandic sensibility, both ancient and modern. This is a people for whom nature and the land is a deity, but also one whose modern history has been steered by international law and multilateral institutions. “Try to imagine how it is as Greenlanders, a peaceful people, to hear and see in the media every day that somebody wants to take your freedom,” says Nielsen. The Greenlandic and Danish governments’ decision to negotiate with the US is a compromise of sorts. To take Trump at his word, even if it is enshrined in a legal document, requires a leap of faith. But Nielsen and Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, feel that they have no other choice but to jump. Hans Egede’s first colonising mission was a bruising one, but today a bronze statue of him stands overlooking the harbour of the town he founded. Nielsen will need similarly metallic properties for the year ahead.

Alexis Self is Monocle’s foreign editor. For more on-the-ground coverage on Greenland, tune in to ‘The Monocle Daily’ on Monocle Radio.