In an extraordinary message to Norway’s prime minister, President Donald Trump linked his pursuit of the self-governing Danish territory of Greenland to his failure to win the Nobel Peace Prize. He repeated his long-debunked claim that he ended eight wars. And he made another false claim – that no written documents support Denmark’s ownership of Greenland.
“Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a ‘right of ownership’ anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also,” Trump wrote.
In reality, Nordic boats began arriving in Greenland centuries before the United States even existed; the settlement that became Greenland’s capital of Nuuk was established by a Danish-Norwegian missionary in the early 1700s, decades before US independence. Of course, the history of many countries, including the US, also involved Europeans arriving by boat and claiming territory in regions previously populated by Indigenous peoples. But just as that wasn’t the end of the story for the US, it’s not the end of the story for Greenland. There are numerous written documents recognizing Danish sovereignty over Greenland – some of them signed by the US government during this century and the last.
“Donald Trump’s claim is false, again,” said Marc Jacobsen, associate professor at the Royal Danish Defence College who is an expert on Arctic security and diplomacy. He noted that Denmark...
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