I Went to Greenland and Saw a Warning for Canada

.text-block-underneath { text-align: center; }

.main_housing p > a { text-decoration: underline !important; }

.th-hero-container.hm-post-style-6 { display: none !important; }

.text-block-underneath { color: #333; text-align: center; left: 0; right: 0; max-width: 874.75px; display: block; margin: 0 auto; } .text-block-underneath h4{ font-family: "GT Sectra"; font-size: 3rem; line-height: 3.5rem; } .text-block-underneath h2{ font-size: 0.88rem; font-weight: 900; font-family: "Source Sans Pro"; } .text-block-underneath p { text-transform: uppercase; } .text-block-underneath h3{ font-family: "Source Sans Pro"!important; font-size: 1.1875rem; font-weight: 100!important; }

.flourish-embed { width: 100%; max-width: 1292.16ppx; }

.th-content-centered .hm-header-content, #primary.content-area { width: auto; } .entry-content p, ul.related, .widget_sexy_author_bio_widget, .widget_text.widget_custom_html.widget-shortcode.area-arbitrary { margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; } .hitmag-full-width.th-no-sidebar #custom_html-45.widget { margin: auto; } @media only screen and (max-width: 768px) { .img-two-across-column{ flex-direction: column; } .img-two-across-imgs{ width: auto !important; max-width: 100%!important; padding:0px!important; } .main_housing, .text-block-underneath { margin-left: 25px !important; margin-right: 25px !important; } .text-block-underneath h4{ font-family: "GT Sectra"; font-size: 35.2px; line-height: 38.7167px; } } @media only screen and (min-width: 2100px) { .main_housing, .text-block-underneath { margin-left: 32% !important; margin-right: 32% !important; } } @media only screen and (max-width: 1200px) { .main_housing, .text-block-underneath { /* margin-left: 25px !important; margin-right: 25px !important; */ } } @media only screen and (max-width: 675px) { .main_housing, .text-block-underneath { margin-left: 10% !important; margin-right: 10% !important; } } .hero-tall {display: none;} .hero-wide { display: block; } @media (max-width:700px) { .hero-wide { display: none; } .hero-tall { display: block; } } WORLD / JUNE 2026 I Went to Greenland and Saw a Warning for Canada How the resource-rich Arctic territory braced for invasion WORDS AND PICTURES BY BRETT POPPLEWELL

Published 6:30, April 15, 2026 Myggedalen in Nuuk, with its historic buildings clinging to the side of the fjord

BEFORE HE PULLED his hunting rifle out of storage and brought it to his bedroom to keep it close at night, Jan Køhler had been preparing, mentally and emotionally, in case the American military descended on the Greenlandic capital. He didn’t know which way they’d come. But if they did, he assumed the battle would be quick.

It was January 24, and he had been glued to the news for days, monitoring Donald Trump’s every word about Greenland, about America’s “absolute necessity” to own the world’s largest island, and the president’s refusal to rule out the use of force. Køhler had watched from his window as Danish military planes flew in to reinforce the city. Roughly 100 Danish troops had already arrived, and more were on their way.

The soldiers weren’t hard to find. Many of them were staying in the city’s hotels. They’d arrived with live ammunition and orders to “immediately take up the fight” in the event of an attack. But Køhler knew, as did everyone else, that if there were to be a war, the Danes would be overrun quickly. And so he prepared.

The fifty-one-year-old Danish-born father of three had never been a soldier and had never really thought about shooting someone either. A week earlier, he’d helped organize the biggest protest in Greenland’s history, a peaceful march down the streets of Nuuk and toward the United States consulate. He’d chanted with 5,000 others as they surrounded the structure, a red clapboard house perched—like most things in Nuuk—on the side of a rocky hill overlooking the fjord. He’d cheered as his fellow protesters carried Greenland’s flag on a staff and speared it into a nearby snowbank.

He slept a bit easier after the protest. Easier still in the days that followed as world leaders descended on Davos to deride Trump for jeopardizing the whole world order over his demands for Greenland. Køhler had felt some relief when Trump took the stage and offered what sounded like a concession: “We probably won’t get anything unless I decide to use excessive strength and force where we would be, frankly, unstoppable. But I won’t do that.”

Whatever sense of calm Køhler felt during the Davos speech dissipated when the president made it clear he expected the US to be granted sovereignty over parts of the island anyway.

Soon, Greenland’s government released a preparedness handbook advising households to keep at least five days’ worth of essential supplies on hand: food, water, medicine, warm clothes, radios, hunting weapons, and ammunition. The new guidance was, as one minister described it, an “insurance policy.” Like many, Køhler took the messaging seriously and began stocking up. He wasn’t political by nature. Nor was he prone to violence or violent thoughts. He was happily married, and enjoyed sailing in the fjord with his family. He had lived in Nuuk for half his life and couldn’t imagine moving anywhere else. The city made him feel as if he was living at the edge of the world—and, in some ways, he was.

Køhler knew every twist and turn of the 120 kilometres of roads that knit Nuuk together. But short of fleeing to Denmark, he figured there wasn’t much he could do if American troops entered the city. He suspected others might take the fastest available way out of town: head west, then north to where the reindeer roam, and carry on past the remains of Inuit villages and Norse settlements until they reached the Ice Sheet. There were countless residents with escape plans. Young and old, with children and grandparents and pets, all quietly prepared to abandon the city and run for the hills. He was determined to stay.

The hour was getting late. The northern lights were glowing in the sky. An unseasonably warm wind filtered through the fjord. Then everything clicked as the electricity cut out and the capital turned black. Køhler looked out into the darkness and remembered something he’d read in the news about how, weeks earlier, the American military had knocked out the power in Caracas before dropping into the city to oust Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro.

This is it, Køhler thought. This is how it starts.

The United States consulate in Nuuk. The yellow staff with the Greenlandic flag has been driven into the ground next to the rock.

IN THE OPENING salvos of 2026, Greenland felt at the centre of everything. What may have seemed abstract to those watching from afar felt both real and urgent for the people of Nuuk. By mid-January, the threat of invasion left citizens awake in the night and transformed the port city from an otherwise quiet Arctic outpost of 20,000 people into a rallying point for North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops and ambassadors. French soldiers were there, as were Germans, Swedes, and Finns. Together, they formed a tripwire force hastily deployed as an armed symbol of the Western alliance’s resolve to preserve the rule-bound order—even if it meant going to war with itself.

Those deterrents were still being arranged when, on January 20, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Prime Minister Mark Carney described “a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction, and the beginning of a harsh reality where the large main powers of geopolitics have no constraints.” He spoke of Canada shifting its strategic posture to something more principled and pragmatic. He talked about Trump, Greenland, and Manifest Destiny, even if he didn’t name them.

Greenlanders watched closely. Then, a few days later, winter winds snapped the power lines linking the capital to a hydroelectric plant fifty-six kilometres away, plunging the city into darkness for six hours. Homes cooled. Electronics died. People were on edge. Even after power was restored, the unease remained.

It lingered into early February, when I arrived to find that, amid the angst and geopolitical brinkmanship, another story was emerging—one largely written over by the more dominant narrative. A story of resilience, resistance, and reconciliation that echoed across both sides of Baffin Bay and the Davis and Nares Straits. It was a story that needed to reveal itself before I could understand it. One that would ultimately resolve into the most intimate tension of all: loyalty and betrayal.

Despite its inflated presence on our maps, Kalaallit Nunaat—to most who live there—possesses a vastness that must be seen to be understood. Viewed on approach from the sky, endless moraines and mountain peaks rise through the ice crust, cutting a jagged silhouette. Unlike most ranges on Earth, many of Greenland’s summits remain unnamed, unclimbed, and unseen from the ground. Few land masses have been less traversed.

I had been on the ground only a few hours when I met Køhler. He told me many locals were exhausted from speaking with foreign journalists. He wasn’t sure how many interviews he’d given, but he wanted to make sure I understood something. That, to him and to others like him, Greenland was worth dying for.

Then he told me about the day Trump’s son—Don Jr.—came to Nuuk. It was a year earlier, and Køhler had watched from his window as a jet flew low over the city and landed at the airport, which is carved into a mountainside and is visible from much of the town. He could read the word “TRUMP” on the side of the fuselage. Curious, he went to the airport along with his twelve-year-old son. Soon, he learned that men in “MAGA” hats were handing out $100 bills in Nuuk’s main square, coaxing people into the city’s largest hotel for a free meal. That was when he realized how dangerous the moment was.

For many Greenlanders, their relationship with America and with the world beyond their borders shifted that day. It wasn’t simply the insult of being manipulated for a propaganda stunt. It was the loss of trust and the rejection of truth. “It was,” as Aqqaluk Lynge, one of the most prominent politicians in Greenland’s history, told me, “the worst day of my life.”

At seventy-nine, Lynge has lived through much of Greenland’s postwar experience. Like other leaders of his generation, he has spent his life securing Greenland’s autonomy within the Danish realm. The island shed its colonial status in 1953, established home rule in 1979, adopted its own flag in 1985, and expanded self-governance in 2009. There were dark chapters, including a painful era when Danish doctors inserted intrauterine devices into unsuspecting women and girls to control the population.

Lynge now worries that online misinformation and pro-Trump propaganda are eroding Greenlanders’ understanding of their own past. “Our own colonization story with Denmark has been misused by the MAGA people,” he said. He pointed to Trump’s remarks in Davos where he suggested that America had defended Greenland during the war and benevolently handed it back to Denmark. To understand what was being rewritten, Lynge said, you have to look at what actually happened.

Few Greenlanders today remember a time before the Second World War, when the US established its presence on the island. It built thirteen army bases, four navy bases, and three major airfields and dispatched roughly 5,800 personnel. At one point, nearly a quarter of the humans on Greenland were tied to the American military.

Their presence dwarfed the Nazi threat. The Germans managed to establish just four remote weather stations during the war, staffed mainly by meteorologists and radio technicians tracking North Atlantic storms. The last Nazi weather station was discovered in 1944 and shut down by the US Coast Guard after the other stations were found by Greenlandic dogsled patrols.

After Denmark was liberated from Nazi occupation, US president Harry Truman’s government showed little interest in withdrawing. Instead, the administration offered $100 million (US) in gold for Greenland. Denmark refused to sell but, five years later, agreed to let Washington maintain and expand its military installations on the island.

It was Sara Olsvig, chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, who explained to me the larger context of what came next. We were wrapping up an hour-long conversation about Inuit unity in the Arctic when she walked me to a map of the polar world, or Inuit Nunaat (Inuit Homeland), that hung in the hall of her office. Highlighted on the map were the regions still primarily populated by over 150,000 Inuit, spread across four countries and represented for over four decades by the Nuuk-based council, which safeguards the Arctic environment and Inuit ways of life.

Olsvig pointed to a spot on the map, high above the Arctic Circle, on the northwest coast of Kalaallit Nunaat, where a US base has operated since 1951. Originally conceived as America’s northernmost military outpost, Thule Air Base—now known as Pituffik Space Base—was a vast Cold War project: a 10,000-foot runway, hangars for bombers and fighters, sprawling radar and satellite systems, housing for thousands of troops. Once prized for its proximity to the Soviet Union, it remains the only American base in Greenland. To accommodate its construction, the Danish government forcibly relocated more than 100 Inuit from the area.

What I hadn’t understood until Olsvig explained it was that many of those displaced weren’t even present when the order came down. They were in what’s now Nunavut, travelling or hunting. When they tried to get back, they found the landscape transformed and themselves effectively shut out of it.

“The people who were there were still living a semi-nomadic life, as Inuit did up until very recently,” she said.

The base, and the subsequent enforcement of the border between Greenland and Canada, left the Inuit community divided and unable to live as they once had.

After everything she had described, Olsvig returned to a point she had made to me earlier.

“There’s no such thing as a better colonizer.”

The Jean Goodwill, the Canadian Coast Guard vessel dispatched to Nuuk to mark the opening of the Canadian consulate.

THERE ARE COMMUNAL legends Inuit have passed down for centuries on both sides of the maritime border between Greenland and Canada. Among the better known is Sassuma Arnaa—the mother of the sea. In Nuuk’s historic harbour, a statue of her rests on the shore, a reminder that alongside this 298-year-old colonial town stands something older. Hunters read her moods. Children mind her stare. Elders pass down her warning: disturb the waters, take more than you need, and Sassuma Arnaa will withhold the sea’s bounty. All will suffer until balance is restored.

Even without the threats of invasion, the natural balance of life has been disturbed. The Greenlandic Ice Sheet, which has long shielded the world’s largest island from external forces, remains three kilometres thick in places, but it is melting rapidly. The fjords are widening, and with them, the psychological distance between Greenland and the rest of the world is dissolving.

Eighty-nine percent of the island’s 56,000 residents are Greenlandic Inuit; most of the remaining 11 percent are Danish or of other European descent. And then there are the soldiers. Roughly 150 US military personnel are permanently stationed at Pituffik Space Base. Another 200 Danish troops are now present. When I was there, half were housed in the main harbour on floating barracks—a forty-five-year-old former Soviet cruise ship chartered for lack of space on land. The rest were stationed largely at a former US base 300 kilometres north of the capital, accessible only by air.

A newly opened international airport blasted into a mountainside overlooking Nuuk now offers direct flights from Copenhagen and Reykjavik, with seasonal service from New York and Iqaluit. It is easy to imagine a future in which melting fjords and retreating ice draw waves of visitors. External forces have long shaped the island’s trajectory. The difference now is that the consequences may be irreversible, even existential.

What we understand of Greenland has long been distorted and coveted by powers from afar. Even its name is misleading, coined by the tenth-century Norse explorer Erik the Red to lure settlers to its snow-covered shores. Our image of the land mass has been further altered by the Mercator projection, a centuries-old cylindrical map designed for navigation that stretches land near the poles. Greenland lives in our minds as it often does on classroom walls, appearing comparable in size to Africa, when in reality it is fourteen times smaller.

Greenland’s first inhabitants migrated from Siberia, across the Bering Strait, thousands of years ago, moving east through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago and arriving on the island by 2500 BC. The Dorset, a pre-Inuit culture, were the dominant group in the area by 600 BC, though they would ultimately vanish and be replaced by the Thule people—ancestors of modern Inuit—whose culture stretched from northern Alaska to Greenland’s northern coast.

The Dorset were still far north when the Norwegian-born Erik the Red sailed from Iceland to establish two southern settlements. For centuries, the Norse of Greenland endured, their early survival aided by a medieval warm period until the climate turned against them. By the mid-1300s as many as 6,000 Norse lived there, trading and sometimes clashing with the Thule, who had begun moving southward through the western fjords. That distant era would later underpin Denmark’s claim to the island, long before it was coveted by America.

The last recorded contact between Greenland’s Norse and those from Iceland occurred at a 1408 wedding held in a stone church near Greenland’s southern tip. After that, silence. It would be another 313 years before the Danish Norwegian Lutheran missionary Hans Egede sailed from Bergen in 1721 in search of the lost settlers. Departing with three ships and forty colonists, Egede followed what he believed were the old Norse routes toward the Eastern Settlement, landing in what is now Nuuk. But there were no Norse to be found, only Inuit.

Statue of Hans Egede, the Lutheran priest who sailed to Greenland in 1721, credited as the founder of Nuuk.

The unfrozen terrain around Nuuk is largely moss-covered rock. The tundra-like landscape feels as imposing today as it must have when Egede stepped ashore. From the outset, the colony he founded relied on Inuit knowledge for survival. The earliest structures were prefabricated in Denmark and then rebuilt in Nuuk. The lumber required to build what would become the larger European settlement was imported from Denmark and Norway, setting the pattern for a long and unequal partnership.

By 1860, American vessels were arriving in Nuuk. Seven years later, after the US had torn itself apart in civil war and emerged with a renewed sense of destiny, Secretary of State William Seward set out to buy Greenland and Iceland and fold them into a growing American empire. Fresh from negotiating the Alaska Purchase, Seward believed in Manifest Destiny: the idea that the US would one day control the North American continent. Greenland and Iceland, he argued, held strategic value and would leave the nascent Dominion of Canada surrounded. Washington even commissioned a report on the islands’ natural resources to arrive at an estimated price of $5.5 million (US). No offer was made. Instead, the White House became consumed by a presidential impeachment.

Another attempt followed in 1910, when the US diplomat to Denmark proposed exchanging the Philippine islands of Mindanao and Palawan for Greenland. The offer was turned down. In 1916, Washington formally recognized Danish sovereignty over Greenland as a prerequisite for Denmark handing over control of what are now the US Virgin Islands.

Then came the Second World War and a renewed urgency over Greenland’s fate. After Denmark fell to Germany in April 1940, Britain and Canada, both at war with the Nazis, developed plans to occupy Greenland to prevent German bases in the North Atlantic. Canadian military planners drafted a top-secret proposal, which they called Force X, to land an expeditionary force in the south and secure a cryolite mine vital to Allied aluminum production.

The plan collapsed when the Americans, still officially neutral, made it clear that Greenland fell within their sphere of influence under the Monroe Doctrine. Canada redirected its attention toward Iceland, deploying a small contingent of troops to guard against a possible German attack. The US then made the larger move. In 1941, an agreement was signed with the exiled Danish ambassador in Washington, authorizing America to open bases in Greenland.

From that moment on, the US has maintained a military foothold on the island.

Throughout the Cold War, American forces used Greenland as a testing ground for several nuclear-era experiments. Among the more audacious was Project Iceworm, a top-secret 1960s program that sought to conceal as many as 600 nuclear-missile launch sites beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet. The project, undertaken without the full knowledge or consent of Danish authorities, was abandoned after 1963, when engineers determined the ice was too unstable and constantly shifting.

More infamous, however, is the B-52 bomber that was carrying four thermonuclear hydrogen bombs when it plummeted into sea ice roughly twelve kilometres away from the Thule Air Base. The plane was part of Operation Chrome Dome, a Cold War initiative designed to maintain a constant, airborne nuclear deterrent. On January 21, 1968, a cabin fire broke out aboard one of the bombers. The crew bailed out onto the ice below, leaving the unmanned aircraft to crash. The hydrogen bombs didn’t detonate but broke apart, spreading radioactive waste across the ice and into Baffin Bay. Six crew members were eventually rescued, some by Inuit hunters travelling by dogsled.

The Chrome Dome episode took on renewed resonance in early January when Trump mocked Greenland’s defensive capacity, joking that Denmark’s military presence amounted to “two dogsleds.” As when that B-52 went down, dogsleds remain the most effective tools for patrolling the land. Snowmobiles, drones, and tracked vehicles can go only so far. In extreme Arctic conditions, they are prone to mechanical failure.

Dog teams, by contrast, endure. They are used by the Sirius Dog Sled Patrol, an elite Danish unit that serves as the military’s “eyes and ears” across the remote northeast. The broader logic behind the Greenland patrol model is similar to that of the Canadian Rangers, a largely Indigenous reserve force that has become central to Ottawa’s strategy for asserting sovereignty in the High Arctic.

In Greenland, the old ways persist for more reasons than one.

• Canada’s Cowardice on Greenland Will Come Back to Haunt Us
• Trump Is Serious about Greenland. What Does Carney Do?
• Greenland Has Been Fighting Off Americans for Over a Century

THERE’S A DETERMINATION among Greenland’s residents to preserve what remains of the ice, land, sea, and people that define this world. The coastal fjords may be widening, but they remain relatively unscarred by human presence. Aside from the stone foundations left behind when they vanished, there is little evidence the Norse were ever here. In most places, the same is true for Inuit.

Even in Nuuk, a city with modern infrastructure—which includes a hospital, churches, apartment blocks, a courthouse, a prison, schools, government buildings, a ski hill, and a university—there is almost no visible litter. A new incineration plant reportedly burns roughly 90 percent of the city’s waste, converting it into heat. Environmentalism here is a cultural tradition. And though many Greenlanders no longer revere Sassuma Arnaa as a goddess, her teachings still resonate, shaping a deep and enduring respect for the purity of the land. It’s part of what bothers people most when conversations veer toward resource extraction, critical minerals, mining rights, and the thought of giving up sovereignty over any part of the island to a foreign power.

Among the Nuuk residents who described their urge to preserve Greenland’s pristine landscape was James Thiessen. Originally from Vancouver, Thiessen is one of only a handful of non-Inuk Canadians in the capital. The allure of the untouched wilderness led him to abandon a life in the Okanagan and move here in his early thirties. “It’s hard to find nature that people have not completely saturated,” he explained. Then he pulled out a map of Nuup Kangerlua, the massive fjord system that surrounds the peninsula on which Nuuk sits and cuts inland through multiple valleys that disappear beneath walls of ice.

Thiessen had explored much of the area on foot, a hunting rifle slung over his shoulder while tracking reindeer. He described the land as like nowhere else on Earth. Then he placed his finger on a small inlet in the northern part of the map and recounted the most “foreboding, nasty feeling” he had ever experienced in nature.

He had arrived in the area by boat, navigating shallow waters at high tide before tying his boat to two large rocks and venturing on foot over a hill and into mossy meadows. Though he knew he wasn’t the first person to visit the area, there was no sign anyone else had ever been there. It was his version of heaven until he rounded one more hillside and discovered an abandoned dump site. Hundreds of rusting oil drums littered the tundra, alongside massive, perfectly circular holes—evidence of huge explosions. Though he can’t be certain, he suspects he stumbled upon the remnants of an unmarked former US military site.

I was still processing Thiessen’s story—and the fact that there are scores of military dumps in Greenland, nearly all of them left by America—when Avaaraq Olsen, the forty-two-year-old mayor of Nuuk, told me: “Our way of living is about being in nature and being able to exist. If you change it too much, you change our life.” As mayor, Olsen has spent much of her term urging residents not to give in to hysteria or fear. At one point, staff at her five-year-old daughter’s school told her that children were expressing anxiety about the US. Her office drafted guidance on how to discuss the situation with children. Then they did the same for the elderly. She thought she had things under control, until 5:22 p.m. on Saturday, January 10.

It was dusk. She was walking along the wooden boardwalk that traces Nuuk’s northern shoreline. She had noticed how many residents had begun flying Greenland’s flag and stopped to photograph one rippling in the fading light. Then she looked out at the water and saw a small boat motoring through the fjord with its lights off. She knew it was just a fisherman heading home. Still, watching it cut through the water in the dark gave her a chill. If the Americans came, she thought, they would probably come when the dark hits. “We will not be able to notice them in advance.” Then another thought set in: “‘I hope if they do invade us, that we will be home so that I can know where my children are.’”

The moment passed, but for the first time she understood how the fear could just invade your mind. That evening, she and her boyfriend began talking through contingency plans in case things escalated. If all connections were lost, how would they communicate? They decided they would gather their children and meet at City Hall. Then they discussed what country they would go to if she was deposed and new leaders were installed in the city.

“I know a lot of families have had those conversations,” she said. A year ago, many residents disliked the sound of a Danish military chopper buzzing overhead. Now the military buildup gives a degree of comfort.

I HAD TIMED my reporting trip to Nuuk to coincide with an influx of NATO forces and the arrival of Canadian and French diplomats to address what was quickly becoming known as the “Greenland Crisis.”

A Republican congressman from Florida had just introduced legislation seeking congressional authorization for the president “to annex or otherwise acquire Greenland as a territory of the United States.” Lawmakers had yet to debate its particulars. It followed an earlier bill introduced by a Republican from Georgia that not only sought to authorize the acquisition but proposed renaming the island “Red, White and Blueland.”

For days, I walked through Nuuk. I stood by the docks as fishermen came and went. I watched the northern lights swirl across the night sky. I pressed my hand against icebergs that washed ashore, and I observed tanners soften reindeer hides in the Arctic air. I wandered through galleries and studios where sculptors polished soapstone and carved walrus tusks.

Most of all, I listened as Greenlanders shared elements of their culture and described their efforts to ignore the commentary coming from abroad. Over and over, people told me they longed for a stronger bond with Canada. We were Arctic neighbours, they pointed out, both facing talk of annexation. Indeed, Trump’s rhetoric raised an obvious question: If the White House could justify a hostile takeover of Greenland on the grounds that America simply needed it, what would stop them from applying the same logic to Ellesmere Island, say, or Baffin Island?

On the evening of February 5, trudging through falling snow, Tillie Martinussen, a former member of Greenland’s parliament who has long opposed independence from Denmark, told me her greatest fear was not invasion but a gradual takeover by the US. There is growing skepticism among Greenlanders, she said, toward any American offers of investment, partnership, or collaboration.

Northern lights above the Moravian Brethren Mission House, among Nuuk’s oldest buildings. Mary Simon, Anita Anand, and the rest of the Canadian delegation at the flag raising outside the new Canadian Consulate in Nuuk.

Later that evening, I watched as Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers and Global Affairs Canada staffers assembled in the fifth-floor lounge of the same hotel where Trump Jr. had hosted his lunch a year earlier. Canada was preparing to open a consulate in Nuuk the following day. Governor General Mary Simon and Minister of Foreign Affairs Anita Anand were scheduled to fly in from a diplomatic stopover in Copenhagen. Anand would hoist the Maple Leaf outside the Icelandic consulate, where a lone Canadian diplomat would henceforth share a bit of office space.

It was a small diplomatic gesture with outsized consequence—a non-event in ordinary times. But these were not ordinary times. The Canadian Coast Guard had dispatched an icebreaker from St. John’s to join with the diplomatic mission and to serve as a floating backdrop for a press conference with the foreign ministers of Canada, Greenland, and Denmark. Standing with the Canadian vessel behind him, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, who led Denmark from 2015 to 2019 and was now tasked with his country’s foreign affairs, declared that Canada, Greenland, and Denmark had united “to stand up for a world order where might isn’t right,” before later conceding, “We are not out of the crisis.”

More important was a far less scripted arrival. Eighty Inuit from northern Quebec and Labrador had flown in from Montreal on the eve of the consulate’s opening. I watched from a distance, sensing that the larger meaning of the circumpolar reunion risked being overshadowed by the constant flutter of Canadian and Greenlandic flags. Nivi Rosing, Greenland’s youngest parliamentarian, a twenty-three-year-old who had lived and studied in Ottawa, described the unity felt among Inuit across Russia, Alaska, Canada, and Greenland. “We’ve always been closely tied,” she said. “We want to be connected. We’ve been really traumatized by these colonial borders.”

On the morning of February 6, the day the Canadian consulate opened, I rose early to meet members of the Canadian Inuit delegation. Many said they felt compelled to come because they, too, felt threatened and insulted by what had recently unfolded. Johannes Lampe, president of Nunatsiavut, the autonomous Inuit region of Labrador, told me that Inuit have been ignored for decades. It should not take a cry for help just to be heard, he said.

At dawn, I set out on foot. Køhler had sent me a photograph that morning, released by Greenland Police, showing a site at the edge of town where the Danish military had begun storing defensive equipment. Residents were unclear what exactly was there. I stopped short of the site when I reached the port and saw Danish soldiers disembarking from their cruise ship. The tripwires were becoming harder to miss.

By early afternoon, a small throng of foreign correspondents had gathered on a snow-covered sidewalk near the Greenlandic legislature. France had announced that it, too, would open a consulate that day, though Paris had yet to secure office space for its envoy. Soon, the French consul joined us on that sidewalk, flanked by the French ambassador to Denmark, declaring that their presence was not merely a signal to the American administration but a symbol of solidarity with the people of Greenland.

The virtual French consulate had been operational less than an hour when it was Canada’s turn.

By then, the eighty Inuit who had travelled from Montreal stood outside the consulate beneath the setting sun, waving hand-held Canadian flags as Canada’s governor general—an Inuk woman—arrived alongside Anand. The crowd broke into “O Canada” as Anand stepped to the flagpole and raised the Maple Leaf. Later, she would tell me the ceremony was among the most important of her time in government. “It really shook me to my core,” she said. “The people of Greenland and Denmark need our support.”

That evening, Canadian and Greenlandic leaders gathered in the hotel ballroom for a reception. Simon spoke first, in English, French, and Inuktitut, of Arctic ties that predate diplomacy and even Canada and Greenland themselves. Later, she looked on as Natan Obed, president of the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, warned that old ideas were returning, Manifest Destiny among them. “We might have small populations within geographically large territories,” he said, “but we use and occupy and know and cherish every single centimetre of this entire space.” Simon applauded and embraced him as he left the stage. Later, she told me simply: “Once colonized, you know what happens. We never want this to happen again.”

It felt as though a new alliance had been forged. One rooted less in statecraft than in ancient history. Aqqaluk Lynge told me the day left him feeling that Greenland was no longer isolated on the world stage. Greenland’s foreign minister, Viviane Motzfeldt, said something similar.

Afterward, alone in my hotel room, I opened an email from the Canadian Armed Forces responding to questions I had sent a few days earlier and then forgotten. I, and others, had been pressing officials on whether Canada would commit forces to a Danish-led NATO mission organized in defence of Greenlandic sovereignty. Iceland, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Norway, Germany, Finland, France, and Slovenia had done so. Canada had not. Aside from the US and Russia, it was the only other Arctic nation absent.

As I read further, I began to understand why.

Despite everything I had just witnessed—all the diplomacy and gestures of solidarity—a whole other operation had been unfolding 1,500 kilometres away. One no journalist had been invited to observe. A Canadian-led deployment of military personnel and aircraft from Alaska, Canada, and the continental US had amassed at the Pituffik Space Base. Canadian and American forces had been conducting joint war games over Greenland’s airspace. They called it “Operation Noble Defender” and had sent me a link to a photo of two CF-18s and an indeterminate number of Canadian service members standing on the US tarmac.

For all the talk of a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction, and the beginning of a harsh reality, there we were. Shoulder to shoulder with American troops on Greenlandic territory just days after the American president had threatened to invade the island.

I thought of Køhler. And of the others who had told me what kept them up at night. Then I packed my bag and turned out the light.

The post I Went to Greenland and Saw a Warning for Canada first appeared on The Walrus.