Trump’s Cold War for the Arctic
Trump’s Greenland gambit mimics Nazi-style propaganda, weaponising history to justify annexation, undermining democracy abroad while emboldening despots like Putin to redraw borders through force.
In a recent video1 address cloaked in sentimentality and solemn patriotism, US President Donald Trump invoked the ghosts of World War II to stake a 21st-century claim to Greenland. “In the cold silence of the tundra,” he began, offering a cinematic rendering of wartime camaraderie between Americans and Greenlanders, before turning to present-day geopolitics. The rhetoric was chilling not only in tone but in its implications. Trump asserted, “Now is the time to stand together again. For peace, for security, for the future, America stands with Greenland.” But beneath this language of unity and shared legacy lies a disturbing echo of the propagandist playbooks used by regimes the West once vowed never to imitate.
America’s Arctic Ambitions Mirror the Playbook of Past Tyrannies
The president’s remarks, while carefully draped in the banners of historical remembrance and global peace, are in fact part of a broader campaign to justify what he has unabashedly described as the potential annexation of Greenland, by diplomacy or force.
“We are not talking about peace for the United States,” Trump told reporters. “We are talking about world peace. We are talking about international security.”
But peace, in this context, is not the absence of conflict. It is the imposition of control2.
Such language bears the unmistakable scent of the same nationalistic myth, making that once guided Nazi expansionism. Trump’s attempt to draw a moral lineage from the sacrifice of four chaplains in 1943 to contemporary Arctic strategy is more than historical revisionism; it is a calculated effort to fuse heroism with hegemonic ambition. The Nazis too invoked unity, sacrifice, and historical destiny when laying claim to foreign lands. Trump’s narrative now deploys those same rhetorical devices in a different theatre, the melting, mineral-rich expanse of Greenland.
The realpolitik behind these words became even clearer during Vice President JD Vance’s recent trip to Greenland3, which was abruptly curtailed amid backlash from Danish and Greenlandic officials.