Making Greenland Great Again: Trump’s Greenland Bid and the Human Right to Self-Determination

Introduction

In 2019, President Donald Trump of the United States expressed interest in attempting to buy Greenland for strategic reasons. The idea was greeted with widespread hilarity but with indignation in Greenland and Denmark. In his second inaugural address in January 2025, he declared inter alia that the United States will once again consider itself a nation that expands its territory, and history repeated itself vis-à-vis public reaction to the same. When President Trump announced Ken Howery as his Ambassador to Denmark, he wrote on social media that “For the purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.” Shortly after, at a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago residence, he stated that he would be unable to guarantee the ruling out of economic or military coercion to gain control of Greenland and the Panama Canal, as it was needed for economic and national security. He further went on to state that “People really don’t even know if Denmark has any legal right to [Greenland], but if they do, they should give it up because we need it for national security.” He also returned to the issue of Greenland while signing executive orders in the Oval Office, saying that they need Greenland for international security and suggesting that the people of Greenland are not happy with Denmark, and that they like the United States government.

Territorial Claims and the Law of Self-Determination

To say that such claims are untenable under established principles of international law raises few brows, if any, and these contentions lack legal backing in their entirety. Firstly, the right to self-determination occupies a central and non-derogable position in the international legal order. The consensus is that the subjection of peoples to alien subjugation, domination, and exploitation constitutes a denial of fundamental human rights and is contrary to the Charter of the United Nations. This principle is enshrined both in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESR), and has acquired the character of a jus cogens norm in certain contexts and enjoys widespread state practice. In the specific context of Greenland, this right has been further codified in its domestic framework through the Act on Greenland Self-Government, 2009, which provides a clear structure for the exercise of internal autonomy while contemplating the possibilities of full independence if the people of Greenland choose to pursue it.

Placing consideration on the aforementioned, the suggestion that America may assert ownership or control over Greenland, be it due to strategic necessity or through purchase, sits uneasily with established law, most significantly because the United States has itself recognised Danish sovereignty over Greenland in the 1917 treaty for the purchase of the Danish West Indies, as recognised in the Legal Status of Eastern Greenland decision of the PCIJ. It would be curious for the Trump administration to negate the very sovereignty that the United States formally acknowledged. Equally, the claim that the people of Greenland are dissatisfied with their current status to the point of welcoming U.S. governance lacks any evidentiary basis and contradicts the publicly expressed positions of Greenlandic political institutions. Thus, the idea that the U.S. government may bypass both the Greenlandic people and the Danish government is indicative of a misunderstanding of the legal architecture of self-rule.

Additionally, territorial sovereignty simply cannot be analogized to private property. The distinction between property rights and sovereign rights has been well-established in the jurisprudence of international courts, particularly in the Eastern Greenland Case and the Western Sahara Advisory Opinion, both of which affirm that sovereign title is derived from: (1) legal recognition; and (2) effective control. The US has exercised a high degree of control over Greenland, security-wise, since 1941, when Henrik Kauffman, the Danish ambassador to the United States, signed the Greenland Treaty, granting the United States access to establish military bases in Greenland when Denmark was occupied during the Second World War. Since then, the United States has had military control of Greenland. The same was reaffirmed in the Igaliku Treaty in 2004. However, there remains no legal recognition of the United States government having a sovereign right over Greenlandic territory.

Conclusion

The renewed assertions that the USA may acquire Greenland are thus reflective of a fundamental misapprehension of the framework of territorial sovereignty. It is a legal status based on recognition, enforced through effective authority, and most importantly, constrained by the will of the people to whom it pertains. The notion that Greenland may be transferred from one state to another without the consent of its inhabitants disregards both the clear terms of Greenland’s arrangement of self-governance and the broader corpus of international law concerning the right to self-determination. Also, the idea that the Greenlandic people want a move to the United States is flawed, according to a recent poll. The legal position is neither novel nor controversial; it is a restatement of the basic proposition that neither power nor interest substitutes for a legal right.