On Sunday, after two and a half weeks’ reporting from Nuuk, Greenland, my team and I finally boarded a plane and said goodbye.
Leaving is hard. Greenland has me in its thrall, in rapture of its raw beauty and seduced by its quiet Inuit culture. But it’s a good thing to exit. Metric tonnes of journalists and equipment, clearing out, making space for Greenlanders to reflect on what just happened.
As our producer, Ben, sagely observed, their fever dream has broken. Residents of this giant, ice-bound Arctic island could be forgiven for thinking they might awaken back in a simpler time, before the trauma of President Donald Trump’s ratcheting up of demands to own Greenland just a few weeks ago.
But they are not back where they began, and they know it. Instead, they are living in an uneasy new reality. Trump’s capricious claims over their sovereignty are not over, and his apparently flimsy grasp of basic facts about their homeland does not appear to have improved.
Social media posts out of the White House make that abundantly clear.
Were it not for Trump’s declaration at Davos last week pulling back on the idea of a military invasion, an image posted of the President trudging across a snow field towards a Greenland flag – hand in wing with a penguin – would be triggering renewed fever for its residents.
The President’s apparent trolling is hard to fathom, much less take seriously, and penguins live exclusively at the South Pole. But such incontrovertible truths seem to be eclipsed by his expansionist ambitions.
Nic Robertson on assignment in Nuuk, Greenland (Credit: CNN)Trump says he must own Greenland for the US’s “national security” and feels “psychologically” empowered to take it for his soon-to-be-built Golden Dome missile shield. At the same time, he may deny that he covets the minerals and rare earths buried below its ice sheets, but many are sceptical.
What’s more, Denmark, of which Greenland is a semi-autonomous territory, has made it repeatedly clear that the 1951 defence agreement between these two nations grants sweeping rights for the US to base missiles and troops, as well as mine minerals and rare earths, to its heart’s content.
What I learned during my all-too-brief time in Greenland is that nature and its preservation are at the heart of Inuit culture. Locals told me they believed that Trump would have no regard for their most precious commodity.
Greenlanders, on the other hand, know exactly what they fear and why. They don’t trust Trump.
For Greenlanders, Trump is an open book, each new chapter strewn with the same falsehoods and self-aggrandisement. They saw what he did in Venezuela, a leader plucked from a country with air defences and an army, of which Greenland has neither. Instead, it relies on Denmark, and by extension Nato – and therefore America, to defend it.
Trump wants Greenland to be a key part of his ‘Golden Dome’ defence system (Photo: Sean Gallup/Getty)The night before I left, the power abruptly went out across Nuuk, its 20,000 people plunged into darkness. A few hours later, the internet came back. Plenty of well-educated and rational residents fretted they were about to experience a Venezuela redux. Relief came just before daybreak. Power lines that had come down in strong and unusual easterly winds were repaired.
In the extremes of Greenland, uncertainty is an ever-present state of being. Flights are often cancelled at the last minute. Trump has injected a fresh layer of nervousness that Greenlanders see as entirely unnecessary.
It also appears that he is back where he started, re-engaging in a dialogue that Denmark and Greenland’s foreign ministers thought they had already concluded with Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the White House almost two weeks ago.
With details of a new post-Davos agreement as scarce as penguins at the North Pole, no Greenlander is confident Trump won’t up the ante again, and many are convinced that the mercurial President may do exactly that sooner rather than later.
What Greenlanders feel most acutely is that Trump’s at-times relentless rhetoric has shown no regard for their beliefs and feelings. Never once, they say, has he even tried to assuage their misgivings in his speeches.
As if riding blind on a seaside rollercoaster, Greenlanders are now left with an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of their stomachs, and resentments that weren’t visible a few weeks ago are bubbling up.
On our way to Nuuk’s airport, we drove past freshly mounted posters of Trump next to Jeffrey Epstein with the words “Yes to NATO” and something altogether less flattering about the US President.
Trump has roiled the quiet calm that Greenlanders cherish as their birthright. It needn’t have been this way.
Nic Robertson is CNN’s International Diplomatic Editor
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