Some ideas arrive not as convictions but as intrusive weather systems. They roll in uninvited, heavy with fog, and you stand there asking yourself whether you’re thinking something because it’s true or because it’s simply possible.
Lately, Greenland has been one of those ideas.
I keep circling back to it—not the postcard Greenland with icebergs and polar light, but the strategic abstraction of it. A massive, sparsely populated landmass already stitched into American military logistics, already half-imagined in Washington briefing rooms as “useful.” It’s unsettling how easily a place can become a chess square when it’s cold enough and far enough away.
What would it mean, I wonder, for the United States to fully absorb Greenland—not as a partner, not as a protectorate, but as a star-spangled extension of itself? The language alone is disturbing: taking over, integrating, securing. History teaches us that empires often cloak their expansions in language that sounds like inevitability.
And then the darker thoughts follow, because they always do.
If you had a place that remote, that controlled, that isolated from the noise of courts and cameras, what temptations would arise? Would it become a laboratory for ideas that couldn’t survive sunlight elsewhere? Vaccine testing, framed as “cutting-edge research,” is justified by urgency, necessity, and progress. Remote prisons, described as “containment solutions,” are for the people deemed too dangerous, too complex, too inconvenient for the mainland.
I hate how plausible it sounds. That’s the most frightening part.
I tell myself I’m not endorsing this thinking—I’m interrogating it. Because once you start imagining land as empty simply because few people live there, you’ve already erased someone. Greenland isn’t a blank canvas; it’s home, culture, sovereignty, memory. Ice doesn’t mean absence. Silence doesn’t mean consent.
Still, the American mind has always been magnetized by frontiers. When the West was exhausted, we turned to oceans. When oceans felt small, we looked to space. Maybe Greenland sits awkwardly between those impulses: terrestrial enough to dominate, alien enough to justify moral shortcuts.
I picture congressional hearings where ethics are reduced to footnotes. “All testing would be voluntary.” “All detainees would be afforded rights.” “All activity would meet international standards.” The words sound clean. They always do. History, meanwhile, coughs politely from the corner of the room.
There’s something deeply American about believing that control equals safety, that distance equals responsibility dissolved. If the prison is far enough away, if the experiment is cold enough, if the population is small enough, then the conscience can sleep.
And yet I can’t stop thinking about the irony: a nation obsessed with freedom fantasizing about the perfect place to put the unfree. A country built on innovation, wondering where it can innovate without being watched.
Maybe this is less about Greenland and more about us.
About how power daydreams when it’s bored. About how morality thins out at the edges of maps. About how easily progress can become an excuse when urgency is declared permanent.
I don’t have a solution here. I don’t even have a conclusion. Just a sense that if these thoughts are floating through myhead—untethered, speculative, half-ashamed—then they’re almost certainly floating through rooms with far more authority than mine.
And that, more than ice or isolation or geopolitics, is what keeps me awake.
Because the coldest places on Earth aren’t defined by temperature. They’re defined by how quiet the objections become when ambition decides it’s time to expand.