My Take | Autonomous or independent, Greenland should stay away from America

Name: ‘This plan has historic origins’: Putin says Trump’s plan to annex Greenland is ‘serious’
Uploaded: 2025-04-11T07:00:16.000Z
Duration: 1 min 29 s
Description: ‘This plan has historic origins’: Putin says Trump’s plan to annex Greenland is ‘serious’

Trump wants to take the world’s largest island to ‘new heights’. It’s already much better off compared with US overseas territories and associated states

Reading Time:4 minutes

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US Vice-President J.D. Vance tours the United States military’s Pituffik Space Base in Greenland on March 28. Vance accused Denmark of failing to do enough to “keep the people of Greenland safe”. Photo: Reuters

Alex Loin Toronto

Published: 3:00pm, 11 Apr 2025

During his widely ridiculed visit to Greenland, US Vice-President J.D. Vance took aim at Denmark for not doing “a good job” and failing to allocate sufficient resources to “keep the people of Greenland safe”.

It’s hard to know what exactly he meant by that.

Development economists generally agree that the world’s largest island enjoys living standards and free health and education systems comparable to other developed nations on the OECD membership list. Greenlanders can study at universities in Denmark for free. But Vance’s boss, President Donald Trump, has vowed to take Greenland to “new heights” with a territorial takeover.

In terms of GDP per capita, Greenland ranks lower than the United States, Denmark and Australia, but higher than the United Kingdom, France and Japan. It is on par with Germany, Belgium and its neighbour Canada.

One reason is that it has the financial support of Denmark, which covers a quarter of Greenland’s GDP as an annual block grant to the autonomous but still dependent territory, which was a Danish colony until the early 1950s.

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‘This plan has historic origins’: Putin says Trump’s plan to annex Greenland is ‘serious’

American GDP per capita is roughly US$86,000, compared with Greenland’s US$54,400. But wealth is distributed unequally across different US states; Greenland’s is actually higher than at least 14 American states out of 50.