In Greenland, anxiety over US ambitions puts normal life on pause

“My nerves are in flight or fight…. I try to calm myself down, take it easy, take it easy, but it’s difficult," said Østergaard, a Ph.D. student at the University of Greenland.

Trump, who spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday, said he wouldn’t deploy the military to take control of Greenland. But his assurances did little to calm nerves on this icy island, where people have found themselves at the center of a geopolitical struggle in the era of Trumpian power politics.

Through it all, many Greenlanders have felt like pawns in a global game that has upended their politics. Before Trump renewed his bid to take over the island, the debate wasn’t if—but when—Greenland would become independent. Now that process is on hold, as the island tries to ride out the political storm.

Østergaard said her doctoral research analyzes the tragic legacy of Danish rule over Greenland, but she has been uneasy that her work might be misconstrued as a justification for Trump’s designs on the island. “It’s as if we cannot go near this conversation now," she said. “It’s such a dilemma."

Late Wednesday, Trump was moving toward an alternative arrangement with North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies, “a deal that everybody is happy with," he told reporters. He said details of the agreement would be announced soon, saying the U.S. would get everything it wanted.

Meanwhile, the island will remain on edge. The political upheaval has put a pause on normal life. In a sign of the distress that is spreading, the government was distributing a brochure to residents Wednesday, encouraging them to prepare for an unspecified emergency. Greenlandic officials were careful not to say what the emergency was while urging people to make sure they had enough food and water for five days, crank-powered radios and the phone numbers of their loved ones written down.

The country’s nerves have been frayed, Minister for Social Affairs Aqqaluaq B. Egede told a jam-packed room of local and international journalists. “The goal of our opponents, who have different thoughts, is to divide us," he said.

On the snow-covered streets, residents said they were anxious to the point of losing sleep over the possibility of a U.S. invasion. One mother described herself in a panic over what to do. She said her 11-year-old son had asked her if he needed to start learning English.

“It’s not good for our health, the stress!" she said, lowering a bag of groceries onto the ground. “Americans need to understand that we are not for sale."

In his speech Wednesday, Trump described this territory of 57,000 people as a “piece of ice, cold and poorly located." He framed Greenland as a debt that Denmark owed Washington, in return for the U.S.’s role in winning World War II and shouldering much of Europe’s security burden.

What he didn’t address was what is in it for Greenlanders to join America.

For decades, Greenland quietly incubated one of the last of the anticolonial movements chipping away at an old European empire. As Americans barely noticed, political parties in Greenland campaigned to carve out what would be a uniquely indigenous nation. If Greenland was to break from its Danish colonizer, it would become, five centuries after Columbus, the only independent nation in the Western Hemisphere whose governing language remained that of its pre-European ancestors.

Instead, the politicians who most loudly advocated for a quick and unambiguous independence now find themselves heckled in crowds—and urged to keep quiet, lest the U.S. confuse Greenland’s complaints with Denmark as a call for American conquest. In his speech Wednesday, Trump appeared to be embracing an earlier imperial era and lamenting the state of European countries that gave up their colonies.

America would obtain Greenland, he said, “just as we have acquired many other territories throughout our history. As many of the European nations have. There’s nothing wrong with it."

His remarks have spooked residents, who said they voted to break away swiftly from Denmark but now welcome Danish troops on their soil and the Royal Danish Navy patrol vessel anchored near shrimp boats in their harbor.

“A lot of the rhetoric that we’re seeing now, especially against our party, is like, ‘Cool it, don’t talk about independence now, you’re only poking the bear,’" said Juno Berthelsen, a member of Parliament with the Naleraq party, which calls for immediate independence. “We should always center the Greenlandic people in this conversation, not which two powers we’re supposed to choose between. We have to center international law."

On Saturday, leaders of his party largely refrained from joining a thousands-strong march against American conquest, which was described as the largest protest in Greenland’s modern history. When a member of the party tried to address the crowd, it shouted him down, chanting, “Greenland for Greenlanders!

If the threat of U.S. invasion has receded for now, it has left behind a fundamental reappraisal for Greenlanders who find themselves in a world whose great powers suddenly seem closed to their aspirations for an independent state in the North Atlantic. Anticolonial causes like Greenland’s once had options. Among them were Moscow, which championed the movements that sought to break from Western empires during the Cold War. These days, the Kremlin encourages Trump to seize Greenland. On Wednesday, its chief negotiator in Ukraine peace talks, Kirill Dmitriev, asked in a post on X: “Canada next?"

The work of deterring the U.S. from acquiring Greenland has fallen to Denmark, the protecting power a majority of Greenlanders had sought to escape. Three centuries of Danish colonization has spurred a range of resentments between the island’s Inuit residents and faraway Copenhagen. Danes who spend six months on the island are eligible to vote, giving them equal say over the island’s future with those who were born there.

Many Danes on the island never learn the native Greenlandic language and fill administrative jobs in Nuuk, a capital furnished with coffee shops and a new international airport. Meanwhile, many Inuit residents live in far-flung settlements, where problems with alcoholism and suicide are rife.

Denmark funds healthcare, police, courts and about half the island’s budget, prompting a debate over whether that roughly $1 billion in annual aid is staving off poverty—or entrapping residents in a Scandinavian system imposed on a culturally indigenous population.

Those frustrations built until a 2009 self-government act, approved by three-quarters of Greenland voters, which charted a path for independence. If Greenlanders vote yes in a future referendum, Denmark is constitutionally obligated to commence negotiations for the island’s departure. This past March, Naleraq, the party in favor of immediate independence, won a quarter of the vote in Parliament, double its previous share.

The party was open to an agreement in which the U.S. would have exclusive military access to Greenland, to secure its independence. These days, it is tagged in local media as turncoats, its leader, Pele Broberg, said.

“Now they’re trying to use the narrative, ‘If you talk to the Americans, you are a traitor,’" said Broberg, a pilot who joined the party after he felt that Inuit flight-crew members weren’t promoted as readily as Danes. “Who’s supposed to talk to them if whoever talks to them is a traitor?"

“What should we do?" he asked. “Should we stop following the international rule-based order? No."

Write to Drew Hinshaw at drew.hinshaw@wsj.com