The Foreign Service Journal, April 2023

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | APRIL 2023 63 DanWhitman, a retired FSO, teaches at George Washington University. He served in public diplomacy posts in Copenhagen, Ma- drid, Pretoria, Port-au-Prince, and Yaoundé. I want to say “Dateline: Nuuk,” but that would be stretching the truth by about 35 years. “Covering” Greenland for the U.S. embassy in Copenhagen, I visited its capital, Nuuk, three times, twice in 1987 and once in 1988. In the May 2021 FSJ , Nuuk Pub- lic Affairs Officer Eavan Cully artfully describes the wonder of this place and explains what the United States lost in pull- ing back direct diplomatic contact from 1953 to 2021. Frommy first visit, I consid- ered Nuuk a dreampost, never mind that such a post did not exist at the time. As the most junior public diplomacy officer in Copenhagen, I was assigned the miscellaneous portfolio, which included covering Greenland. This was to involve sketching out public diplomacy activi- ties in Nuuk that might strengthen our relations with a mainly unknown area about the size of Western Europe or the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A Greenland Friendship BY DAN WHITMAN b To this day, the Greenland-Denmark relationship evades definition: Is the former a “colony”? A “territory”? A “prov- ince”? A “country”? “Trusteeship”? Scan- dinavian conflict avoidance has bolstered the viability of all these terms through the decades, and Denmark has liberally subsidized nearly everything that hap- pens on the island, granting Greenland representation in the Folketing and some measure of autonomy, while clinging to it sentimentally on claims of historical precedent. In 1989 Greenland celebrated 10 years of “home rule.” The United States has had strategic and programmatic interest in this land mass, though, until recent years, it seldom went beyond the maintenance of the Thule Air Base. About 936 miles south of the base is Nuuk, back then a town of 5,000 or so souls huddled around a bay, surrounded by vast snowy plains. Even from New York or Wash- ington, the way to reach it was to loop via an SAS commercial flight through Copenhagen, a detour of 5,048 miles REFLECTIONS but mercifully shorter in time and hassle than going up through various connections in Canada. b When I was in Nuuk, it had only one single institution of higher learning, the Ilinniarfissuaq, Greenlandic for “semina- rium.” It was a teachers college, what the French call an école normale . Its rector was Ingmar Egede (“EY-uh-the”), and really, my story is about him. A sharp skeptic of U.S. policy and world dominance, Ingmar showed me around the city out of courtesy. Our friendship was not immediate, but devel- oped over three visits there and beyond, when he came to see me in Madrid, then later in Washington, D.C. MATHIASRHODE/ALAMYSTOCKPHOTO JAMESDEHART/FSJARCHIVE Colorful homes dot the coastline in Nuuk, Greenland, circa 2019. In the background is the majestic Sermitsiaq mountain. (Inset) A boat rests in icy waters on a small fjord off Davis Strait, which connects the Arctic and Atlantic oceans.