The current narrative about Greenland is the victim of a 19th century illusion, a superficial mix of strategic maps, polar routes and old nationalism. To reduce the island to a mere ‘chunk of ice’, as Trump did at Davos, is to ignore the real time bomb that the Trump administration’s proposed takeover of Greenland would place under the foundations of the United States.

Apart from any possible acrobatic manoeuvre by Rutte, who seems to have temporarily frozen the urgency of the dossier, and any imaginary real estate agreement between the Danes and Witkoff, the acquisition would not be an act of territorial expansion but the trigger of an unprecedented constitutional crisis, capable of transforming the Arctic not so much into a geopolitical battlefield but into a laboratory of constitutional engineering worthy of Mary Shelley, aimed at planning a new model of federal authoritarianism for the 21st century. The challenge is not strategic-military but of public and constitutional law, and lays bare all the dangers of muscular sovereignism.

Legal-Constitutional Insight

Although at the moment the procedures and methods according to which this change of sovereignty should take place are still shrouded in the mists, also psychological, of an increasingly chaotic Washington, it is crucial, also and above all for the future evolution of law and rights, to analyse the issue from a legal-constitutional and legal perspective.

To claim that an agreement between Copenhagen and Washington would resolve the issue by tracing the precedents of Louisiana (1803) orAlaska (1867) is to ignore a century of evolution in American federal jurisprudence. While in the 19th century territory was a commodity between sovereigns, today Greenland is a subject of law that short-circuits the powers under Article II (Treaty Power) and Article IV (Property Clause) of the US Constitution.

The insurmountable limit was set by the Supreme Court in Reid v. Covert (1957): “No agreement with a foreign nation can confer on the Government powers free from the restrictions of the Constitution”. Moreover, to sign a treaty of cession today would be to attempt to alienate the political and civil rights of a people without their consent; since Greenland possesses its own internationally recognised statute of self-government, a treaty without popular legitimacy would violate the Due Process Clause of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, rendering the act void ab initio.

Greenlanders as subjects

This violation would not be a mere defect of form, but the heart of the conflict: when citizens with established rights of self-government are downgraded to subjects of an unincorporated territory without a procedure that meets American standards of individual protection, a dangerous precedent would be set that would allow the federal government to suspend the rights of any group of citizens in the name of an international agreement.

Even a pro-annexation referendum would not heal this conflict; on the contrary, it would make it enforceable and irreversible. A pro-US vote in Nuuk would immediately activate the Fourteenth Amendment, forcing Washington to make a tragic choice between two evils: guarantee Birthright Citizenship, Trump and the MAGA movement’s Black Beast, and political equality, forever altering the balance of the Senate and Electoral College, or create an Arctic Puerto Rico.

In the latter case, the US would welcome second-class citizens into an unincorporated territory, betraying its democratic promise and institutionalising a legal grey area where the federal government exercises plenary powers without representation. The referendum, far from resolving the dispute, would become the ultimate trap for the Equal Protection principle.

The MAGA paradox, between expansionism and isolationism

Here the paradox of MAGA sovereignty emerges forcefully: by seeking to expand American power, Trump would end up importing exactly what his electorate most strongly opposes, namely the Scandinavian-style Nanny State. This expansion of central power is precisely what should alarm American constitutionalists and the libertarian front.

The annexation of Greenland would be the ultimate Trojan horse forBig Government aggrandisement. For a radical Republican, this would mean importing European socialism into the American system, financing with the taxes of Midwestern taxpayers an out-of-control bureaucratic apparatus operating in an area where the Constitution ‘does not follow the flag’ automatically.

Annexation would force the American taxpayer to support a Greenlandic welfare apparatus that the US system could neither dismantle (without violating acquired rights) nor integrate without distorting its own economic model. Every dollar spent on Nuuk would become a precedent for new forms of federal social engineering, justified by an exceptional jurisdiction.

The tension between international sovereignty and federal jurisdiction

This clash between international sovereignty and federal jurisdiction becomes even more explosive when viewing the condition of native inhabitants through the prism of Inherent So vereignty. This concept defines a power of self-government that pre-exists the US Constitution and does not derive from it: it is a right inherent to an indigenous nation that Washington can recognise, but not create or sell.

In the US, indigenous peoples are subject to the doctrine of Domestic Dependent Nations, a limited sovereignty protected by the federal government, where land is often held in trust by the state. In contrast, in Greenland, the Inuit people enjoy full inherent sovereignty, political and economic, which the US does not know how to categorise. Since Greenland already obtained Self-Government from Denmark in 2009, its sovereignty is de facto that of a quasi-sovereign state.

If Washington granted the Greenland Inuit total control over the mineral resources and territory they already possess, it would act as an enzyme capable of unhinging federal control over continental US reserves. If Washington granted the Greenlanders the sovereignty they already possess, it would immediately unhinge federal control over the reserves in the continental US, as tribes like the Navajo or Sioux would demand the same rights. If, conversely, it sought to downgrade them to a Dependent Nation, it would be committing a massive violation of a pre-existing and inherent right, exposing itself to a legal dead end with no way out.

The Greenland affair challenges American constitutional principles

What is really at stake here are not trade routes or military and strategic control over the Arctic, but the fundamental constitutional and personal rights of every American citizen and the very definition of what political rights are in the 21st century. If one were to accept that the federal government can extend its jurisdiction over an autonomous nation through legislative acrobatics, one would be accepting that the Constitution is a rubber band that can be manipulated by Reason of State.

At stake is the nature of individual liberty: can a citizen be acquired or surrendered like a piece of real estate? If the answer is yes, then the American concept of freedom is definitely dead under the sloth of those who did not oppose the MAGA movement.

Putting the protection of the individual against the arbitrariness of the central power at the centre of the discussion means remembering that the strength of a democracy is not measured by its geographical extent, but by the ability of its legal system not to create enclaves where law is suspended in the name of national security.

Putting the right back at the centre

It is necessary to transform this debate from a sterile strategic-military diatribe into a profound legal-philosophical reflection on the very concept of individual rights and freedoms in the age of muscular sovereignty, and to denounce how any proposition of expansionist aims over Greenland in the first place constitutes a fundamental danger to the civil and political rights of Americans themselves, since it legitimises the idea that the federal government can own peoples and suspend the full application of the Charter in the name of the Reason of State.

Ultimately, the US Constitution’s immune system of checks and balances and inalienable rights would reject the Greenlandic organ as too autonomous to be a colony and too structured to be absorbed without self-destructing republican identity.

The US cannot have Greenland because its system is not designed to absorb a sovereign body without self-destructing. Greenland will remain a geopolitical hallucination until Washington realises that its ultimate boundary is its own Law.

Take Greenland and then lose yourself?

Ultimately, the claim to annex Greenland reveals the profound crisis of contemporary sovereignty: a doctrine that, in its attempt to exalt the strength of the nation, ends up betraying the sanctity of the rule of law. While muscular sovereignty conceives sovereignty as a power of horizontal expansion, an extension of borders and domains, the American Constitution defines it as a vertical limit, an impassable barrier erected to defend the individual against the arbitrariness of Leviathan. Giving in to the imperial temptation would mean transforming the law from a shield of freedom into an instrument of conquest, degrading the citizen from a holder of inalienable rights to a mere variable in a geopolitical equation. The true face of sovereignty lies not in the ability to possess new lands, but in the moral strength to remain confined within the perimeter of one’s founding values.

If America chose to ignore this boundary, it would not conquer an island, but lose itself, demonstrating that in the age of new populisms, Reason of State has become the shroud under which the eclipse of individual rights is hidden. Greenland’s challenge is thus not played out on the Arctic ice, but in the sanctuary of Western legal consciousness: to remain free, a democracy must have the courage to be incomplete, rejecting any expansion that requires the sacrifice of its constitutional integrity as a price.

Read also:

Security or Independence? For Greenland and Moldova an old dilemma returns; E.Pinelli, L’Europeista

Trump and Greenland: the end of the world we know; C.Palma, The Europeanist