The Narsarsuaq Museum no longer has fixed hours. Since the airport closed in spring, hardly any visitors have arrived in this remote town in southern Greenland. However, if someone asks for Ole Guldager’s house and approaches to ask him to open it, he gladly agrees. The museum occupies one of the barracks of the old military base, a long wooden building painted red with a brick chimney. Next to the entrance, the radial engine of a World War II plane, corroded by decades of exposure to the elements, is displayed. Behind the building stretches the runway that U.S. soldiers built in record time. Today, however, that same country emerges not as an ally of the past but as a growing threat to the island’s sovereignty and natural resources, especially in places like Narsarsuaq, one of the three bases the United States would aspire to reopen.
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When Guldager turns on the lights, uniforms, rifles and carbines, field telephones, a metal stretcher from the old hospital, slot machines, and letters confiscated by censorship that recounted extreme isolation and never reached their destination emerge from the shadows. The rooms reconstruct the daily life of the thousands of U.S. soldiers, pilots, and nurses who passed through the old base. Among the hundreds of photographs, several of Marlene Dietrich, taken in 1944, stand out. For a few hours, the actress brought Hollywood’s show to that inhospitable corner between fjords and mountains to lift the troops’ spirits.
Guldager arrived in Narsarsuaq as a child. He was born in Denmark, but his father worked at the civil airport that the old military installation had become after the Americans left in the late 1950s. Historian and archaeologist — as well as one of the few beekeepers on the island — he has dedicated much of his 58 years to researching the place where he grew up and decided to stay.
The last plane landed in April. The airport was closed because another opened in Qaqortoq, the regional capital, where about 3,000 people live, and it makes no sense to maintain two for such a small population. But the reality is that since then, Narsarsuaq has been emptying out. Guldager estimates that of the 150 inhabitants it had, about 40 remain. Everything revolved around the airport, which for more than six decades was the main gateway to the south of the island, absorbing the transit of thousands of passengers every summer. Now there are weeks when barely a dozen visitors arrive. The hotel, one of the largest in Greenland, closed the same day as the airfield.
Among those who do not consider leaving is Storch Lund. Grandson of Henrik Lund — the poet who composed the lyrics of Greenland’s anthem — he grew up on a farm across the fjord and moved to this shore as a teenager to work as a mechanic apprentice. He ended up managing the airport for more than two decades, as well as running a café and a souvenir shop that closed a few months ago. He also created a company to transport tourists to other towns. Today only one of his boats remains operating with low demand; the other two remain moored. At 69 years old, he finds it hard to accept that “nothing happens anymore in Narsarsuaq.”
It is in that void that the United States now reappears.
While the town is dying, the shadow of Donald Trump lengthens over it. The U.S. president, who already tried to buy Greenland from Denmark during his first term, threatened earlier this year to take control of the island “one way or another.” The tension eased after several European allies sent troops to the Arctic territory in support of Danish sovereignty, and the crisis was channeled toward a diplomatic path. For seven months, representatives from Denmark and Greenland have been negotiating behind the scenes in Washington with the Trump Administration the terms of a military expansion of the world’s leading power on the planet’s largest island, with only 56,000 inhabitants.
In those talks, the United States demands sovereignty over the territory occupied by its future military installations on the island — a status similar to that of British bases in Cyprus — a demand that Danish and Greenlandic representatives are unwilling to accept.
Washington’s strategy relies on the bilateral defense agreement signed with Copenhagen in 1951, a treaty that allows, upon request, the expansion of U.S. military presence in this territory of the Kingdom of Denmark. General Gregory Guillot, head of the U.S. Northern Command, informed the Senate in March about the intention to establish three new “defense zones” in Greenland, aiming to strengthen surveillance over Russian nuclear submarines and counter the growing influence of China in the Arctic.
In May, four weeks after the international airport of Narsarsuaq was downgraded to a heliport, Marine Corps personnel and representatives from the U.S. Embassy in Denmark arrived to inspect the runway, the deep-water port, and other facilities of the old base.
Guldager fears that the return of U.S. troops will ultimately evict the neighbors who still endure in Narsarsuaq. “We are going to lose our homes and have to leave the place where we have lived and worked all our lives,” he laments. Author of a book about the dozens of military installations the United States built in Greenland during the Nazi occupation of Denmark, Guldager recalls that during the expansion in 1953 of the Pituffik base — the only one Washington maintains on the island, in the northwest — dozens of Inuit families were forcibly relocated 130 kilometers from their homes.
“The Americans built everything, but this is my home,” Guldager emphasizes. With nostalgia, he recalls how in just three years that uninhabited plain was transformed into a city with roads, workshops, dining halls, hospital, cinema, basketball court, and gym. At the end of World War II, about 4,000 people lived there, more than in any other Greenlandic town of the time.
Under the code name Bluie West One, the Narsarsuaq base was part of a crucial network of stops to transfer military planes from America to the fronts in Europe and North Africa. More than 10,000 aircraft refueled or were repaired there during the conflict.
The United States abandoned the base in 1958 leaving a deep environmental footprint; a toxic legacy for a population whose identity depends on balance with its environment. The coastal landscape was littered with debris, scrap, pipes, batteries, and thousands of rusted barrels. A few kilometers away, the old military hospital, with a capacity for 250 beds, was consumed by fire in the 1970s. No one removed the asbestos sheets, and small white fragments of this toxic material lie scattered throughout the valley. The neighbors fear that strong winds continue to carry dangerous particles toward the town, although today they are more worried about Donald Trump.
The consequences of the airport closure and the specter of the U.S. return are also felt on the other side of the fjord. Despite being only three kilometers away, Qassiarsuk and Narsarsuaq belong to different worlds. Although crossing that stretch of water takes barely 15 minutes, the accumulation of ice, strong winds, or dense fog can cut communication between the two shores for days. Qassiarsuk rises over the remains of the farm where Erik the Red settled at the end of the 10th century after being exiled from Iceland. There he named the territory Groenland (green land, in Old Norse) and laid the foundations of Viking colonization.
Far from the classic icy scene, Qassiarsuk dazzles in summer among hills of intense green, dotted with houses in bright red, yellow, and blue tones. Although the town has barely 50 inhabitants, it is one of Greenland’s main livestock centers. This activity, like agriculture, is concentrated almost exclusively in the strip of the island located south of the Arctic Circle.
An eight-kilometer path leads to Tasiusaq, where a single family keeps the farm and hostel running. There, Aviaja Lennert and her son’s girlfriend are busy in the kitchen preparing dinner for some German guests who are about to arrive with their backpacks after more than two hours of walking from Qassiarsuk. Getting around the island requires patience: without roads connecting towns, transportation depends on boat and helicopter, and if there is no water in between, short trips are made by buggy, snowmobile, or on foot. To replenish energy after the walk, the hosts have prepared a menu that includes homemade bread, fish soup, and roast lamb with local potatoes and wild herbs gathered by them. For dessert, rhubarb compote.
Lennert divides her time between caring for the farm’s 600 sheep, attending to travelers, and teaching the few children at Qassiarsuk’s school. Despite her efforts to diversify income, the family faces a delicate stage after the airport closure. This summer they have received far fewer travelers than in previous years. Now, a concern Lennert thought banished reappears: mining, a latent danger capable of ruining the natural resources on which their livelihood depends.
Her farm is near Kvanefjeld, a deposit that holds one of the largest rare earth and uranium deposits in the world. Lennert believed that threat had passed five years ago when she tearfully celebrated the electoral victory of Inuit Ataqatigiit, the ecological party that had promised to ban uranium extraction to stop the exploitation of Kvanefjeld. She was one of the most active voices in the Urani Naamik (No to Uranium) movement, whose orange smiling sun remains painted on one side of her barn. “It is very important for us to have a healthy nature from which we can obtain our food,” she argues to explain her strong opposition to extractive projects that could contaminate the area. Today she is worried about Trump’s interest — whom she refers to as “the unnameable” — both in controlling the island and in the immense wealth of its natural resources.
While Kvanefjeld remains blocked, Washington’s eyes are on another gigantic rare earth deposit just a few kilometers away. Tanbreez holds reserves practically free of uranium, so its exploitation is not prohibited by law. Aware of its strategic value, U.S. diplomacy maneuvered to prevent the project from falling into Chinese hands and facilitated its transfer to the New York firm Critical Metals. The operation has the firm backing of the Trump Administration, which has mobilized the state export credit agency to inject up to 120 million dollars, amid reports pointing to the interest of investors linked to the magnate’s circle — including his own son Donald Trump Jr. — in the mine’s development.
The U.S. president insists on maintaining the pressure. Although from February he toned down his threats, at the NATO summit held in July in Ankara he reiterated that the immense island “should be controlled by the United States and not by Denmark.” In early August, Trump posted an image on social media in which a giant figure of the president looms threateningly over a settlement in the Arctic territory, accompanied by a brief message: “Hello, Greenland.”
This extractive voracity clashed last week against the island’s regulatory wall. The Greenlandic government ordered the postponement of a controversial oil exploration project in the eastern territory led by Greenland Energy, a Texas firm linked to Trump’s circle. The company, which had even moved the necessary equipment, intended to start drilling without the proper permits, which caused a “serious warning” from local authorities.
The EU seeks to strengthen its influence
Faced with Washington’s advancing ambitions, the European Union is trying to stake its ground and strengthen its influence in the Danish autonomous territory. Barry Andrews, Irish MEP and European Parliament rapporteur for relations with Greenland, calls for a common front and warns against the White House’s ambitions. “We must make it clear to the Trump Administration, again and again, that Greenland’s sovereignty must be respected; we can no longer trust the United States,” he emphasizes by email. Andrews advocates doubling European investment in the island to 500 million euros in the next budget framework.
Along the same lines, Danish MEP Christel Schaldemose, vice president of the European Parliament, advocates “investing more and generating better development opportunities.” The social democrat stresses by phone that the EU must be the island’s preferred partner, but always respecting that the decision on resource exploitation and the future of mining belongs exclusively to the Greenlanders.
That right to decide is what led the southern community to mobilize en masse against the Kvanefjeld megaproject when, five years ago, they felt their way of life threatened. In that citizen resistance, Inga Gísladóttir actively participated, an unusual professional profile — social worker, computer scientist, and air traffic controller — who also travels the world as a narrator of Norse mythology. Born in Iceland, Inga has just completed 15 years in Greenland and has just spent three months in Qaqortoq, training controllers at the new airport.
Her stance on the geopolitical struggle for the island’s resources is categorical: “Just because this is a huge and very sparsely populated land doesn’t mean anyone can come and take it over; it belongs to those who want to preserve it.” In a matter of days, she will leave Narsarsuaq without knowing her next destination. After returning from a walk to see the glacier that appears a few kilometers from the town for the last time, Gísladóttir shooes away mosquitoes while evoking the deep Inuit connection with the land: “Here the relationship with nature is not extractive; it is not seen as something to exploit, but as a heritage that we must enjoy and preserve for future generations.”
