Obsessed With Greenland? You Too May Have the Wrong Map
Cartography has always shaped worldview and geopolitics, and often for the worse. So it does in the era of Donald Trump.
Feeling the pull of geopolitics.
Photographer: Gary Prior/Allsport/Getty Images
At some point in his life, Donald Trump looked at a world map and saw something he wants — something that, as president of the US, he now says he will take “one way or the other.” It’s Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark, one of America’s closest allies. “I love maps,” Trump once explained. “And I always said: ‘Look at the size of this. It’s massive. That should be part of the United States.’”
And so an obsession began, one that is now turning into a spectacle somewhere between political farce and geopolitical crisis, as an unusual — and uninvited — American delegation tours Greenland, to “check it out,” as one of the visitors, Vice President JD Vance, puts it.