Rediscover Greenland: Turn right at America

In the 1964 Beatles film, A Hard Day’s Night, after their return from their first US tour, a journalist with a toff accent asks John Lennon how he found America. Cap firmly on moptop, the Beatle replies without strumming an eyelid, ‘Turn left at Greenland.’ Fifty-seven years later, we would have been forgiven for thinking that Antony Blinken cracked a Lennonish joke when on a trip to the Danish autonomous territory this week, the secretary of State ‘confirmed’ that the US has ‘definitively ruled out any plans to buy Greenland’. It was no joke. Or, at least, it was not confirmed or denied whether it was a joke. But what can be confirmed is that as almost all things significantly absurd, the source of Greenland’s worry — and subsequent relief — is Donald Trump.

In 2019, Trump had announced — a tricky verb when it comes to him — that he was ‘considering buying the land mass’ of Greenland. Apparently, ‘the concept’ of the US procuring the land quarter the size of the US ‘came up’. Once the real estate tycoon in the White House described the potential transaction as ‘essentially a large real estate deal’, diplomatic bells were heard ringing in Denmark, a US ally. Blinken’s reassurance of a non-invasive takeover of Greenland not happening means things are, for the citizens of largest island, no longer so rotten in the state of United States.