WASHINGTON, 20 January. - (ANA) - Donald Trump’s rhetoric around Greenland has reached an astonishing level of fervour.

 

On Monday, when asked whether the United States would use force to seize the vast Danish Arctic territory, the president replied: “No comment.” He has previously promised to take the world’s largest island “the nice way or the more difficult way”.

 

Greenland has seemingly become an obsession for Trump, who claims that the US must “own” the island to fend off security threats from Russia and China.

 

His position threatens to undermine not only US-Danish relations, but the entire post-war settlement between Europe and the US. As the argument over the island’s future ramps up, eyes have fallen on one of Trump’s oldest friendships.

 

The president has known Ronald Lauder, an 81-year-old New York billionaire, and heir to Estée Lauder, for more than 60 years. And according to John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, it was Lauder who first sowed the seed of US ownership of Greenland in the president’s mind in 2018, during his first term in office.

 

“Trump called me down to the Oval Office one day in late 2018,” Bolton recalls. “He said, ‘A very prominent businessman has suggested that we buy Greenland, what do you think?’”

 

Bolton soon learnt that said businessman was Lauder, a long-term sparring partner of Trump’s in Manhattan society.

 

Bolton did not dismiss the idea of buying Greenland, which has been part of Denmark since 1721, out of hand. “I had been concerned about security in the Arctic and particularly Greenland,” he says. “There are strategic interests there.”

 

Following the conversation with Trump, Bolton asked the National Security Council to do “extensive” research on the history of the island, looking at what their options might be. Under existing agreements signed after the Second World War, the US already has a wide scope for military bases on Greenland.

 

The island has long held interest for military planners concerned about Russian or Chinese influence in the Arctic, especially as temperatures rise and ice caps shrink, opening up strategically important shipping lanes. More recently, its deposits of fossil fuels, minerals and rare earths – used in everything from smartphones to military hardware – have become a strategic consideration.

 

US attempts to buy Greenland go back centuries, but no president before has approached it as directly as Trump.

 

While the Lauder theory has been widely reported, Trump has also claimed to have had the idea to buy, or seize, the island for the US himself.

 

In an interview for a 2022 book on Trump, The Divider, the president said he had long been of the view that the island should belong to America. “I always said, ‘Look at the size of [Greenland],’” he told the authors, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser. “It’s massive. That should be part of the United States.”

 

But echoing Bolton’s claims, the same book reported that Lauder had also offered to act as a back channel during any possible negotiations with the Danish government.

 

In August 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported on Trump’s designs on Greenland for the first time, with the president confirming that he was interested in purchasing the territory. The Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, dismissed the idea as “absurd”. Trump lashed out, cancelling a planned trip to Denmark and calling Frederiksen “nasty”.

 

Weeks later, Bolton was out of Trump’s administration. As the pandemic took over global politics, Greenland talk faded.

 

Eight years later, it is back on the president’s agenda. Speaking elsewhere, Bolton has said the renewed interest is typical of Trump’s approach. He told the Guardian: “Bits of information that he hears from friends, he takes them as truth, and you can’t shake his opinion.”

 

It follows that the spotlight is back on the man said to have come up with the idea. Lauder was approached for comment.

 

Born in February 1944, Lauder was the second of two sons of the cosmetics magnate, Estée, and her husband Joseph. His older brother, Leonard, died last June, leaving him the sole heir to a fortune estimated to be worth $4.7bn (£3.5bn). While Leonard was given control of the business, Ronald was put in charge of the philanthropic aspects of the family interests.

 

Ronald has known Trump since they were near-contemporaries in the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1960s. He donated $100,000 to Trump’s first presidential campaign. In a speech in 2017, Trump referred to “many years of friendship” between the pair.

 

A year later, Lauder released a statement defending the president’s mental health after it came into question following the publication of Michael Wolff’s bestselling book, Fire and Fury, which made allegations about the president’s erratic mental state. Lauder said Trump was “a man of incredible insight and intelligence”, who annoyed his critics because he “refuses to speak in stale platitudes”.

 

He also said overlapping time at university was the start of a half-century of friendship, which had culminated in “working with [Trump] on some of the most complex diplomatic challenges imaginable”, which some observers took to mean Greenland.

 

Despite the friendship, however, the two men are said to be contrasting characters. “[Lauder] is very personable, he’s approachable, articulate and interested in culture,” says Roger Kimball, a prominent conservative art critic and commentator, and editor and publisher of The New Criterion, which gave Lauder the Edmund Burke Award, for services to culture and society, in 2024.

 

“He and Trump are very different personalities. Ronald is quiet, he’s friendly and polite, but reserved. There are many things you could say about Donald Trump, but I’ve never heard him accused of being reserved. Ronald Lauder is.”

 

Aside from Greenland, Lauder is best known outside of business for his interest in art and Jewish affairs, as well as Republican politics. He has donated to the party for decades. In 1984, when Ronald Reagan was president, Lauder left his day job in the cosmetics business to serve as deputy assistant secretary of defence for European and Nato policy. Two years later, he was appointed as the US ambassador to Austria, but he only served for a year.

 

In 1989, Lauder ran to be the Republican candidate for mayor of New York, losing to Rudy Giuliani despite spending $10m of his own money on his campaign. He eventually stood as a Conservative, in an election won by David Dinkins, a Democrat. Perhaps his most influential political act, until Greenland, was his campaign to limit mayors to two four-year terms, which passed in 1993.

 

In 2001, Lauder opened the Neue Galerie on New York’s Upper East Side, a museum dedicated to art from Austria and Germany from the first half of the 20th century. The collection’s centrepiece is Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, which Lauder bought in 2006 for $135m, at the time the highest price ever paid for a painting.

 

The collection also includes a world-leading selection of works by Egon Schiele. Lauder has a particular interest in artworks that were looted by the Nazis. Since 2007, he has been president of the World Jewish Congress, which advocates for Jewish interests around the world. In 2023, he pledged $25m to a campaign against anti-Semitism.

 

In November of the same year, Lauder was named in a leaked letter – sent by the head of TechMet, a mining company, to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky – as a member of a consortium hoping to exploit a lithium deposit in Ukraine, where Trump has been keen to access and exploit mineral resources as part of any deal to end the war with Russia. At the time, Lauder said he had not discussed Ukrainian minerals with Trump, but had “raised the issue with stakeholders in the US and Ukraine for many years up to the present day”.

 

Last March, he reportedly gave $5m to Maga Inc, a Trump fundraising movement. The following month, Lauder was reported to be one of the guests at a candlelit dinner with Trump, where tickets were $1m each, again payable to Maga Inc.

 

To complicate things further, Lauder has reportedly built up business interests in Greenland since Trump first started discussing it. In December, Danish media reported that he was among a group of investors in a company with a New York address who were buying into the territory, which included a venture to export springwater from an island in Baffin Bay. The group is also reportedly seeking to generate hydroelectric power from Greenland’s biggest lake to fuel an aluminium smelter.

 

“Lauder and his colleagues in the investor group have a very good understanding of and access to the luxury market,” said a Greenlandic businessman quoted in the Danish press.

 

It is not only Americans who see potential in a possible deal. One of Lauder’s reported business partners is Jorgen Waever Johansen, whose wife, Vivian Motzfeldt, is Greenland’s minister for foreign affairs. While Johansen has dismissed speculation over his and Lauder’s designs for the island as “something out of nothing”, the situation has caused alarm in Denmark, which believes that the US is increasingly trying to cut it out and deal directly with Nuuk instead.

 

Earlier this month, Motzfeldt said, “From our side, it is clear that Greenland needs the US, and that the US needs Greenland.

 

“That responsibility must be taken seriously,” she added. “What would be wrong with us holding meetings with the US alone?” Bilateral meetings would breach Greenland’s agreement to leave foreign policy decisions to Copenhagen.

 

Last year, Lauder insisted that Trump’s Greenland ambition was “never absurd – it was strategic”, adding that the island was “America’s next frontier”.

 

“Beneath its ice and rock lies a treasure trove of rare-earth elements essential for AI, advanced weaponry and modern technology. As ice recedes, new maritime routes are emerging, reshaping global trade and security,” he said.

 

Not everyone agrees with such a rosy-eyed picture of the president’s thinking.

 

“It’s all about his [Trump’s] ego,” says Bolton. “I don’t know who suggested using military force, because that didn’t come up at all in 2018 or 2019.”

 

Hopes for a measured solution, such as using existing treaties to increase American presence on the island, he fears, have been ended by Trump’s confrontational rhetoric.

 

“I think Trump gave the game away last week when he said, ‘Psychologically, we need to own Greenland.’ I don’t think anybody else in America thinks that. It’s always about Trump. It’s good for his ego, but it’s destroying Nato.”

 

Lauder could be positioning himself to benefit from any US action on Greenland. But with relations between Europe and the US fraying, many may not thank him if he was the one who put the kernel of an idea into Trump’s mind eight years ago.  - (ANA) -

 

AB/ANA/20 January 2026 - - -