One of the odder initiatives of Donald Trump’s second term has been his fixation on the idea of annexing Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark. “We need Greenland for national security and even international security,” he said in a speech before Congress in March. “One way or the other, we’re going to get it.” Later that month, Vice President JD Vance traveled to the island and accused Denmark of mismanagement: “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” he said, though he also claimed that America would not send in troops—at least not for now.

Then in May, Trump threatened to seize Greenland by force. “Something could happen with Greenland, I’ll be honest,” he said on Meet the Press.

The reason for this obsession is anybody’s guess. After all, Greenland is already a NATO ally, and the U.S. military already has a large base in its far north. My personal theory is that he has been looking at Mercator projection maps, which exaggerate the size of Greenland by about a factor of 14 (it looks roughly the size of Africa, when it’s actually smaller than Argentina) and thinking it would be nice to paint all that ice red, white, and blue. Wars of aggression are, after all, a typical characteristic of fascists.

But then Trump seemed to forget all about it. He stopped threatening Denmark and posting about it on Truth Social, and moved on to occupying liberal American cities.

Yet at least some in MAGA-world have not forgotten about Trump’s fantasies of conquest. In August, Danish media reported that Trump-associated figures had been conducting “influence operations” as part of a possible effort to split Greenland away from Denmark and pave the way for an American takeover. Denmark’s foreign minister summoned the American chargé d’affaires there (as Senate Republicans had not yet confirmed his nomination for Danish ambassador) for a dressing-down.

I traveled to Greenland around that time, and alas, I did not see any steroidal bearded types furtively casing the parliament building. But I wasn’t there to report on Trump’s lunatic imperialism. I was there because of a peculiar characteristic of Greenland’s economy: the state’s extensive portfolio of companies.

The government owns the fishing company Royal Greenland, which is also the country’s largest single employer; the shipping company Royal Arctic Line; the housing company INI; the ferry company Arctic Umiaq Line; the logistics and retail company KNI; the national airline Air Greenland; the telecom company Tusass; the clothing company Great Greenland; the construction and renewable-energy company NunaGreen; the investment company Nalik Ventures; the real estate company Illuut; the utility company Nukissiorfiit; and the tourism company Visit Greenland.

It is hard to get precise statistics on these companies, as the government counts them as part of the relevant industrial sectors rather than the government itself. But according to a recent report, in 2023 they collectively employed 5,117 people, close to 10 percent of the total population. That year, they were responsible for 2.6 billion kroner in wages and profits (or about $410 million), which gives a rough sense of their contribution to GDP—11 percent in 2023. In 2022, that figure was 13 percent; the decline is thanks to post-pandemic inflation and some big investment spending turning their combined net profits negative. Add the 11,633 Greenland residents who worked for the government directly in 2023, and the 9.6 billion kroner directly spent by the government, and about 66 percent of employed Greenlanders work for the state or its companies, and the public sector writ large is responsible for something like 57 percent of GDP (or 59 percent in 2022).

Why does Greenland maintain such a bafflingly large array of public companies? Isn’t that the dread socialism—a guaranteed route to mismanagement and destitution?

The answer to the first question is twofold: On the one hand, Greenland has a Nordic-style tradition, influenced by Inuit culture, of collective ownership of resources. On the other, Greenland has been pressured into direct ownership by its geography and sparse population. It has learned through experience that with difficult geography and a small internal market, it simply cannot trust the world market to provide for its needs. If the state won’t do it, then no one will.

As to the second question, it is arguably socialism—public control of the means of production, mostly of fish—but it also inarguably works. Greenland is a rich society, and its companies are successful and competitive. As a whole, they have consistently turned a profit in recent years, with the exception of 2023. Despite many challenges and setbacks, it has built up a wealthy and broadly successful economy, and this would not have happened without government control and coordination.

A major theme of Greenlandic history is mass death. Starting at about 2500 BCE, the Saqqaq, Independence I, Dorset, and Independence II cultures variously settled on the island over three millennia, eventually either departing or dying off. The Norse famously arrived in 986 under the leadership of Erik the Red, who created one of the first baldly dishonest marketing campaigns in history. Calling the island “Greenland,” he thought, would attract European settlers—even though it is almost entirely covered with a massive ice sheet, and nearby Iceland is quite a bit more hospitable. The Norse thrived for some time with hunting and subsistence agriculture, but by the mid-1400s, they too fled for, er, greener pastures, or died.

Clearly Greenland is a tough place to scrape out an existence. From the menacing tooth-like peak of Sermitsiaq mountain to the trackless immensity of the 700,000 cubic miles of the Greenland ice sheet, it’s not the coziest spot on Earth. Yet the capital city of Nuuk, with about 20,000 residents, has some attractive features, like the 170-year-old Nuuk Cathedral and the rather good national history museum.

One day, I trekked 20 miles up to the peak of the nearby mountain Kuanninnguit and around the Qallussuaq reservoir, listening to a grisly history of the Greenlandic Norse. It was about the nicest weather Greenland ever gets—which is to say, sunny in the high 50s—and even then, the mosquito swarms were utterly relentless. I managed to avoid many bites, but I probably swallowed at least two dozen of them.

Modern Greenland’s history starts with the Thule people, ancestors of modern Greenlandic Inuit, who arrived in the 1300s. With their development of dogsleds, harpoons, and highly insulated clothing, they managed to survive. To this day, about 90 percent of the population is Inuit.

Denmark-Norway (then part of a single kingdom) maintained a claim to Greenland through the 1700s, despite the fact that no European lived there for almost 300 years, and established the Royal Greenland Trading Department, which governed Greenland as a colony and directly ran its economy, with the usual panoply of imperialist abuses. Greenlanders were exploited with unfair terms of trade—prevented from trading with other nations, charged outrageous markups on imports, ripped off on their export prices, and so on.

When Denmark and Norway split in 1814, Denmark got the Atlantic colonies. It controlled Greenland until the Second World War, when Denmark was occupied by the Nazis and Greenland was briefly a de facto American protectorate. After the war, with imperialism in distinctly bad odor, Greenland was changed into a formal part of Denmark, complete with representatives in parliament.

In the 1950s and ’60s, the Danish government attempted to “modernize” the island, with mixed results. Infrastructure and health care were drastically improved, and Greenland’s government got a large ongoing subsidy. But Danish authorities also undertook a paternalistic campaign to make Greenlanders behave like Europeans.

The population was pressured to abandon the migratory hunter lifestyle that had sustained them for over 600 years and settle in cities. Little effort was paid to the transition, leading to the usual problems of despair, alcoholism, and domestic violence, as seen on many American Indian reservations. Danish doctors even conducted a campaign to put IUDs in Inuit women and girls, sometimes without their consent or knowledge, which became a massive scandal when it was fully uncovered by Danish media in 2022.

As a likely consequence, to this day Greenland has a chronic problem of relatively low labor force participation. Though unemployment is a rock-bottom 2.7 percent as of the end of 2023, “there is quite a large amount of people outside of the workforce,” said Anders Blaabjerg, an economist at Statistics Greenland.

Greenlanders naturally wanted more autonomy, and petitioned for home rule, which was granted in 1979. And contrary to JD Vance’s slurs against Denmark, since then it has, by and large, attempted to do right by Greenland. In contrast to most former Belgian, British, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, or Russian colonies—particularly nonwhite ones—Denmark has granted Greenlanders the vote, provided immense funding for infrastructure and services, and made it clear that if they wish, they can declare independence. The idea that the Trump administration would do better is preposterous—witness the appalling mistreatment of the extant American colony of Puerto Rico, which has no votes in Congress and has still not recovered from Hurricane Maria in 2017.

No doubt things could be better. But the fact of a European nation maintaining a reasonably decent, cordial, and mutually beneficial relationship with a former colony that is 90 percent nonwhite is practically unique in world history. And Greenland’s vote is not meaningless—in the 2022 Danish elections, the winning center-left coalition got over the line thanks to lefty parties winning three seats in Greenland and the Faroe Islands.

The main motivation for home rule was to protect Greenland’s fish. Residents worried that if they were part of the European Union trading bloc, highly efficient foreign fishing companies would sweep in and clean out the local stocks, leaving Greenlanders with nothing and taking all the profits for themselves. So it left the European Economic Community in 1985.

This fits well with Nordic traditions—Norway also claimed collective ownership of North Sea oil reserves when they were discovered in the 1960s—but also with Inuit views. Like many migratory peoples, the Inuit have traditionally found the idea of private ownership of natural resources odd and unfair. Surely the Earth’s bounty should be broadly shared with the entire community, as they have for thousands of years. Hence Greenland’s prohibition on private ownership of land, which can only be leased from the government, and hence the reliance on public companies.

Remarkably, the Royal Greenland Trading Department persisted until the home-rule period; when it was reformed and split up in the mid-1980s, it formed the nucleus of the state-owned sector. Royal Greenland, Royal Arctic Line, and KNI are all direct descendants of that ancient colonial institution.

Fishing is by far the most important industry for Greenland, accounting for over 95 percent of its exports, which mostly go to Denmark, and thence to China and Europe. This foothold in Asia took years of research and market development to build up.

Maliina Abelsen, Royal Greenland’s chairwoman of the board—Greenland’s public companies are organized like ordinary private ones, to provide something of an arm’s-length relationship to the state—explained that as a public company, it has certain obligations in addition to turning a profit. To protect the livelihoods of dispersed settlements, it runs some money-losing factories and processing facilities in these areas that are cross-subsidized by the profitable operations. “We are sometimes the only workplace in a small community and people rely on us in the small villages. It’s a place where they can fish and then they can sell the fish to us, or whatever they are catching,” she said. “So for them, it’s like a live nerve that goes through the whole country.”

Something similar holds for Royal Arctic Line, which charges the same price for shipping even to dispersed settlements, and KNI, which subsidizes retail prices for them as well. It is a costly trade-off, to be sure, but Greenland’s government has decided it is worth it.

If Royal Greenland were ever to be fully privatized, the new owner would immediately close all its unprofitable facilities, likely destroying many settlements. They also might try to overfish for short-term profit, or it might be bought by a private equity company and driven into the ground—or I should say sea.

In short, these companies are basically too big or important to fail, and Greenland’s internal market is too small to rely on entrepreneurs or foreigners to step in if they do. But unlike the American approach to such critical companies—like when the big banks blew themselves up in 2008 betting on subprime mortgages, and in response got a $700 billion bailout, with prosecutors looking the other way at the thousands of crimes committed before, during, and after the crisis—Greenland’s government takes direct responsibility. If a company cannot be allowed to fail, better to face that fact and run it directly, with the inevitable business problems that crop up under open public scrutiny.

Indeed, Greenland learned this the hard way. As Birger Poppel, an emeritus professor of economics at the University of Greenland told me, in the early 2000s the government attempted to privatize the state-owned ferry service Arctic Umiaq Line, and sure enough the new foreign owner, in an attempt to lower costs, immediately ceased several routes to small settlements, virtually cutting them off from contact in the process. “It was privatized, and within a year, it totally failed and flopped out, so the government bought it back for one krone,” he said. It took a lot of money to get it going again, though the state did not restore all the canceled services, alas.

Greenland’s public companies have more or less the same relationship with the local unions as private companies do, with the usual Nordic tradition of nearly universal contract coverage. Even when hiring outside contractors for big infrastructure projects (as there are not nearly enough workers to construct a hydroelectric dam), companies are required to follow Greenlandic law about unions, pay, and working conditions.

“Overall, the relationships between the organizations and the unions is very good,” said Christian Keldsen, the director of the Greenland Business Association, which actually has some of the government companies as members. “It’s very important for us that we have proper working conditions, proper salaries, obviously remain competitive, but not necessarily at the cost of the welfare of our employees.”

Jess Berthelsen, who has been chairman of SIK (Greenland’s largest labor union) for 33 years, was less enthusiastic. Both private and government companies are “equally bad,” he said sardonically—and sometimes, he said, the private companies are actually easier to deal with. Still, this is by Nordic standards, where labor rights are taken for granted. Any American union would kill to have Berthelsen’s issues.

Greenland’s reliance on fish might sound rather risky, and it is. The local stocks of cod, halibut, shrimp, and so on have collapsed before, and are likely to do so again with climate change hitting the far north especially hard. But Greenlanders are quite aware of this. “Fish in the whole world are not increasing,” Berthelsen said, and Greenland is no exception.

Greenland’s large stock of mineral resources has been the subject of wide discussion—some think that it may be why Trump wants to steal the country—but sources told me that its location makes this idea dubious. Almost all the mapped deposits are far from any settlements, so companies would have to construct ports, roads, power facilities, and much else before they could even start production, in locations that can routinely reach minus 40 degrees and whose surrounding waters are regularly choked with ice. After decades of effort, just two mines are currently in operation.

“The short story is that many things have been attempted and explored and so on,” economist Torben Andersen, who is also co-chair of the Greenland Economic Council, told me. “There has not been a business case for these mines.” Surely some could be built, but it will be a tall order to compete with other sources.

That’s why the government, and the leaders of its public companies, are thinking about electricity. Nearby Iceland has become arguably the world’s first electro-state through a massive build-out of geothermal and hydroelectric power. It generated almost 50,000 kilowatt-hours per person in 2024—more than four times as much as America—and has leveraged that to gain a major foothold in aluminum production. This tiny nation of just 364,000 people produces more aluminum than the entire United States.

Greenland’s electricity is already mostly hydropower, with one smallish dam connected to Nuuk, complete with the largest unsupported span of high-voltage transmission lines in the world. But its theoretical generation capacity is practically infinite. With more than 27,000 miles of coastline containing dozens of glacial-fed rivers draining into deep canyons, plus extensive fjord networks ideal for tidal generation, plus consistent high winds ideal for wind power, Greenland could be a zero-carbon electricity powerhouse.

Building aluminum or steel smelters, or data centers, or other power-hungry businesses would also require a lot of additional investment in port facilities and such, but quite a bit less than mining operations (as they could be sited near existing settlements), and with much less environmental damage. The potential payoff is huge.

Plans for an electric build-out are already in development. “We regularly meet with the energy department … and we have discussions on what is the strategy that they would like to see played out,” NunaGreen CEO Aviaaja Knudsen told me. To that end, a large expansion of hydro near Nuuk is in the planning stages, with another planned to the north.

“Now we’re tendering out the expansion of the hydro power plant here for the capital—actually an additional new hydropower plant we’re going to build in the future, some 30 miles from the capital near the existing one,” she said. The project “is going to be the biggest construction project ever in Greenland, bigger than the airports.” A somewhat smaller hydro project is in the works to the north near Disko Bay.

This was a consistent theme in my interviews: the professional, yet justice-informed, approach taken by the government toward its companies. It wants them to succeed in the market, but in a way that benefits workers, consumers, and Greenland as a whole. And it wants them to invest in a way to create broadly shared prosperity.

That is not to say that mistakes are never made. Greenland recently constructed three different new airports simultaneously, and some critics argued the locations were ill-chosen. One under construction near Qaqortoq in the south will likely have “every fourth [flight] on average arrival redirected or canceled,” said Poppel, because of wind and fog. Businessmen have also complained that Royal Arctic Line is not living up to its expectations.

And it’s important to note that a big chunk of Greenland’s wealth comes from Danish subsidies. Denmark provides a block grant that funds about half of the government budget, plus additional funding for services like police and courts. It all adds up to about $600 million, or about 18 percent of Greenland’s total economy.

Still, one can’t argue with the overall results. Back in 1975, Greenland’s per capita GDP in current U.S. dollars was about $4,300, while Denmark’s was 87 percent higher at about $8,000. As of 2023, those figures were $58,500 and $68,500, respectively, meaning Greenland has become almost 14 times richer over the last 50 years and closed most of the gap with Denmark.

It would be silly to conclude that Greenland’s semi-socialized economy provides a perfect blueprint for a large, rich country like the United States. Most obviously, America lacks the punishing climate, remote location, and small population that has forced Greenland to protect and nourish its state-owned companies. There isn’t any need to create, say, a public fishing company here.

Yet I still think Greenland teaches some important lessons. The first is what government can achieve with a lot of effort and integrity. This is a place with immense disadvantages—a grueling geography, a tiny population spread out over a tremendous area, and a colonial legacy that in almost every other circumstance has led to poverty and corruption. Yes, it does get a massive Danish subsidy, but that doesn’t guarantee a rich standard of living. A lot of nations around the world have lucked into a ton of money from oil, diamonds, or other resources, only to see it disappear into a vacuum of waste and corruption.

Another way of saying that about a fifth of Greenland’s economy is provided by Denmark is that four-fifths of it is not provided by Denmark. That Greenland has thrived was not at all guaranteed and took decades of grinding effort to achieve.

It isn’t always talked about, but America does have some public institutions that operate similarly to Greenland’s. Both the U.S. Postal Service and Amtrak are public companies operating on a cross-subsidy model, where profitable parts of the business fund unprofitable ones so the whole country can (theoretically) enjoy good service. The model works, but these particular institutions are just chronically neglected.

State capacity and technical expertise are absolutely vital for any kind of leftist project, whether it’s publicly owned companies, a full-dress welfare state, businesses regulated in the name of the public good, or anything else. It’s all well and good for intellectuals to write up treatises about how a just economy should be run—societies do need those for inspiration and guidance—but when it comes to actually building that economy, one needs scientists, engineers, and above all honest politicians and bureaucrats. If Greenlanders can do it, clinging precariously to the edge of the world’s second-largest ice sheet, then Americans can too.