What follows is a work of speculative fiction. Any resemblances to actual future events are purely coincidental. This scenario is plausible, but certainly not inevitable. It is offered in the modest hope that it will inspire and inform efforts to prevent the disastrous outcome described here.

It is January 2028. Looking back, the Americans did not “take” Greenland—not in any concrete sense. There was no invasion, no purchase, not even a plebiscite. But in the shadowy corridors of Arctic politics, Washington moved deliberately to confound its opponents. The Americanization of Greenland transcended brute imperial force in the Russian mold.

Two years earlier, in the wake of U.S. President Donald Trump’s showy military ouster of Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro—and Trump’s insistence that he intended to take over Greenland next—foreign policy analysts had been scrambling to imagine how he might seize the island. Would he force Denmark to sell its semiautonomous territory? Send in the troops, effectively attacking a NATO ally? But Trump didn’t have to do either. Instead, his administration pioneered a new form of twenty-first-century imperialism in which sovereignty over territory is imposed less by force than by function, through investments, contractors, and legal ambiguities. In the process, Trump’s Greenland gambit rewrote the rules of international order and created a template that Beijing, Moscow, and others soon followed. Now known as “geo-osmosis,” what follows is the story of how it happened.

Trump originally floated the idea of acquiring Greenland in his first term. The 2019 revelation that he had inquired about purchasing the territory from Denmark was met with global bemusement and a curt “Greenland is not for sale” response from the Danish and Greenlandic governments. Few in Brussels, Copenhagen, or Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, took the threat seriously. After all, Trump had long trafficked in hyperbolic bombast.

Seasoned Trump observers noted, however, that the idea of territorial acquisition had long held a special place in Trump’s worldview. Greenland grabbed Trump’s attention as “essentially, a big real estate deal,” as he put it, an accomplishment that the journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser note in a 2022 book “might give him a place in American history like William Seward’s purchase of Alaska from Russia.”

Early in his second term, Trump revived the proposal and gave it a geopolitical rationale. His argument that the United States should control Greenland had three pillars: It would help the country secure critical resources—the island is estimated to have enormous oil and gas reserves as well as troves of rare-earth minerals such as cobalt, graphite, and lithium. It would expand the U.S. military’s reach in the Arctic. And it would limit Chinese and Russian influence in a territory key to U.S. national security.

But when Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen offered to give the U.S. president more or less anything he wanted short of sovereignty to achieve those goals, Trump simply refused. It became clear that he was not actually interested in Arctic security. Rather, Greenland became the first in a series of Trumpian territorial ambitions that included Canada, the Panama Canal, and even the Gaza Strip—acquisitions that he apparently believed might secure his place on Mount Rushmore.

As was so often the case with Trump, it was difficult to separate the trolling from the truth. But it soon emerged that Greenland........

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