At the moment, it almost seems as if it’s only days until US President Donald Trump wants to seize Greenland (-> How the USA, China and Russia are redistributing the world). Denmark is trying to fight back – and is happy to point to its experience: Copenhagen won the Arctic conflict over another island with Canada just a few years ago after five decades.
Practically nobody knows Hans Island. And the majority of those who do know the island, which is just 1.25 square kilometers in size, are not sailors. Situated in the Kennedy Channel between Greenland and Canada’s Ellesmere Island, Hans Island is not even really suitable as an obstacle to shipping. Because there, at 80 degrees north latitude, the sea is frozen over for most of the year.
In 1880, Canada, then part of the United Kingdom, claimed the island for itself. From 1920, Denmark claimed the whole of Greenland – internationally recognized, also by the United Kingdom. The border runs through the middle of the Kennedy Channel, and Hans Island lies directly on this border. Both sides believed themselves to be in possession. When Canada set up a camp for scientific research on Hans Island in the 1980s, the NATO-partner Denmark sent military aircraft over the island.
From 1984, a conflict began that was fought out with flags, bottles of schnapps and diplomatic notes. In the same year, Denmark’s Greenland Minister Tom Høyem hoisted a Danish flag on the island. Canada protested. Since then, a ritual was established: the respective national flags were hoisted and a bottle of local spirits was left for the other side. The conflict went down in history as the “Whisky War”.
An agreement was reached on June 14, 2022 by Canadian Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly, Danish Foreign Minister Jeppe Kofod and Greenlandic Prime Minister Múte B. Egede in Ottawa. The border treaty divides the island along an almost central gorge, with the Greenlandic part being slightly larger. On 19 December 2023, Denmark was the last of the parties involved to ratify the treaty, ending an Arctic border issue that had been fought out vigorously for decades, with humor but never with violence.
[Greenland] 🇫🇷🇩🇰🇬🇱🇪🇺
France has announced the deployment of a military detachment of advance elements as part of the “Arctic Endurance” exercise in Greenland, likely armed by the Mountain Commando Group (GCM) of the 27th Mountain Infantry Brigade(@27bim). This advance force… pic.twitter.com/PXKBbrySFl
– Louis de La Pagerie (@2lapagerie) January 15, 2026
This could well be different in the case of Greenland, but the actors involved definitely lack a sense of humor: following Donald Trump’s announcement that Greenland is “absolutely” needed to protect the USA, France, Sweden, Germany, Norway, the Netherlands, Finland and the United Kingdom have recently sent military personnel to the Greenlandic capital Nuuk for the “Arctic Endurance” reconnaissance mission.
