Greenland’s Inuit reject U.S. influence as VP Vance’s visit reignites historic tensions

28 March 2025, 07:41

Strategically located in the Arctic, Greenland is rich in critical minerals and increasingly central to global competition.

It’s not surprising that President Donald Trump wants to annex Greenland “one way or another” – as he put it.

The American President’s designs on the world’s largest island may have shaken belief in the rules-based global order, but for the people in Greenland it’s personal.

This Friday, the Americans – in the form of Vice President JD Vance and his wife - are breaking with diplomatic protocol by turning up uninvited to tour an American military base.

But the reason the Greenlanders – in particular the Inuit population - are upset is not due to failure to observe the international rules of the game. Nor is it because of the lack of common decency.

The real reason that more than 85 percent of the population are opposed to becoming part of the United States goes back 56 years. It is a story of deception, deceit, and devastation. One rarely told – but one that explains why the Inuit are angry.

It was completely dark when it happened. For in the winter the sun never rises in Thule – the western name for the world’s northernmost airport. It was here, on 21 January 1968, that a Boeing B-52 Supersonic jet on a secret mission crashed, caught fire, and detonated the four B28 nuclear bombs on board.

One of which fell through sea ice and remains on the ocean bed today.

The crash caused extensive radioactive contamination. Many of the details are still classified under the American Freedom of Information Act.

This is the background.

“We don’t want to be Americans – and we don’t want to be Danes”, says Mute Eggede, the outgoing Premier of the devolved Danish territory. His people were never asked their opinion back then when Henrik Kaufmann, the Danish Ambassador to the USA signed over the right to run the airbase in 1950.

The Inuit had lived at the airbase site for 5000 years. They were not asked - rather, they were forcibly removed from the place they called Pituffik ("where the dogs are tired”).

They had to live in tents well into the arctic winter when the thermometer drops to −46 °C. It was only the following year they were given huts. Temporary ones. But the ones they still live in 56 years later.

It’s not just about protocol, or politics. For many Greenlanders, it’s about history — and a future they want to shape for themselves.

Professor Matt Qvortrup is Director of Research at the Henry Jackson Society and is an award-winning writer, broadcaster, and academic.

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