How Big Does Donald Trump Think Greenland Is?

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Analysis How Big Does Donald Trump Think Greenland Is? Map projections may be key to understand a presidential obsession. February 14, 2025, 3:00 PM Comment icon View Comments ( 0 ) By Nick Danforth A collage illustration shows a red measuring tape lassoing Greenland Foreign Policy illustration/Rand McNally and Company/David Rumsey Historical Map Collection My FP: Follow topics and authors to get straight to what you like. Exclusively for FP subscribers. Subscribe Now | Log In Geopolitics Military United States With his renewed threats to annex Greenland, President Donald Trump has not only inspired alarm and despair over the future of American foreign policy, he has also revived a niche cartographic debate about the Mercator projection. Discussing his interest in acquiring the Arctic territory, Trump previously explained : “I love maps. And I always said, ‘Look at the size of this. It’s massive.’ That should be part of the United States.” Yet many commentators have pointed out what any true map-lover knows: Greenland is not actually as big as it appears on most maps. The Mercator projection, originally designed by a 16th century cartographer, stretches the northern and southern latitudes in order to plot the round earth on a flat surface. As a result, it exaggerates the size of the Northern Hemisphere and notoriously makes Greenland appear larger than Africa. In reality, Africa is 14 times larger. With his renewed threats to annex Greenland, President Donald Trump has not only inspired alarm and despair over the future of American foreign policy, he has also revived a niche cartographic debate about the Mercator projection. Discussing his interest in acquiring the Arctic territory, Trump previously explained : “I love maps. And I always said, ‘Look at the size of this. It’s massive.’ That should be part of the United States.” Trump’s Second Term Ongoing reports and analysis Yet many commentators have pointed out what any true map-lover knows: Greenland is not actually as big as it appears on most maps. The Mercator projection, originally designed by a 16 th century cartographer, stretches the northern and southern latitudes in order to plot the round earth on a flat surface. As a result, it exaggerates the size of the Northern Hemisphere and notoriously makes Greenland appear larger than Africa. In reality, Africa is 14 times larger. For critics of Mercator, the consequences of this distortion are more than just geographic. By exaggerating the size of North America and Europe, they charge , the Mercator projection gives Americans and Europeans an exaggerated sense of their own importance relative to the rest of the world. Mercator’s map is thus both a product of Western imperialism and an implicit promotor of it. A map of the world in a historic text book. Greenland appears larger than the U.S. A Mercator map projection from 1924 with an oversized Greenland at the top. Rand McNally and Company/David Rumsey Historical Map Collection Trump may have been misled by the Mercator. But ironically, his nakedly imperialist turn shows how the projection’s relationship with Western hegemony has always been more complicated than critics suggests. It turns out you really don’t need biased maps to have bad ideas. For one thing, the Mercator projection may make Greenland look huge, but it’s actually terrible at showing the island’s real geographic importance. For that, projections like this polar azimuthal equidistant one are far more effective. A world map shows the North Pole at the center. An azimuthal equidistant map published in Time magazine in 1950. Wikimedia Commons Not surprisingly, these maps became increasingly popular with the start of the Cold War. While the standard Mercator relegates Greenland to the isolated edge of the map, polar projections show its centrality in an age of air travel or intercontinental ballistic missiles. If you want to see why your flight from Los Angeles to Istanbul is passing so close to the pole or appreciate Canada’s role in missile defense, these are the maps to use. With the expansion of Arctic maritime travel in an era of melting icecaps, if you want to plot out potential sea routes from Europe to China, a polar projection is also going to be more helpful. If you want to understand Greenland’s strategic significance, rather than just coveting grand real estate, you need to look at a map that puts it in the middle. But then, anyone truly interested has already concluded that cooperating with Denmark—of which Greenland is a territory—is a better way to achieve U.S. Arctic interests than antagonizing a NATO ally in pursuit of an unnecessary land grab. Read More Joint forces take part in the Nordic Response 24 military exercise, part of the larger NATO exercise Steadfast Defender, near Sorstraumen, above the Arctic Circle in Norway. Joint forces take part in the Nordic Response 24 military exercise, part of the larger NATO exercise Steadfast Defender, near Sorstraumen, above the Arctic Circle in Norway. NATO’s New Map On NATO’s new map—with all of Scandinavia now in the alliance—everything has to be connected. Feature | Jack Detsch For most of history, being in the middle of the map was what mattered. Size has always been one way to show cartographic significance , but so has centrality. That’s why throughout the medieval period, most Christian maps of the known world depicted the continents expanding out in equal proportions around Jerusalem. During the Renaissance, however, mapmakers began to realize just how far east the Asian continent went. This shifted the center away from Jerusalem and disrupted their elegantly pious geography. Some historians have even suggested that, before Galileo’s insistence that the Earth revolves around the sun, this represented one of the first big scientific challenges to the Church’s worldview. Thankfully, a few religiously minded mapmakers, like the 16 th century pastor, theologian, and cartographer Heinrich Bünting, continued to prize symbolism over verisimilitude. The hyper-stylized result, below, may not be useful for getting anywhere, but it certainly looks good. An illustrated map shows three ovals extending out from Jerusalem at the center. A cloverleaf map with Jerusalem at the center by medieval cartographer Heinrich Bünting, published in his book Travel Through Holy Scripture in 1581. Wikimedia Commons The irony, of course, is that while the Mercator projection is routinely criticized for diminishing the size, and thereby importance of Africa, it foregrounds Africa in a different way. When the map is arranged with America in the top left and prime meridian in the center, Africa takes pride of place right in the middle. That points to another overlooked fact about the politics of map projections. The problem with imperialism was never Europeans ignoring Africa—to the contrary. In fact, the Mercator map was particularly popular in the period when European powers were carving up the African continent for themselves after 1880 or so. While Mercator emphasized Africa’s centrality, imperial propagandists were eager to call attention to Africa’s size with maps that dramatized the scope of their own territory. Consider this gem of colonial cartography from the not-at-all insecure Portuguese in 1934. Under the title “Portugal Is Not a Small Country,” it superimposes Portugal’s remaining African colonies over a map of Europe. Sure enough, they’re big. Mozambique and Angola easily stretch across the continent and overshadow Portugal’s neighbors. A map with Portuguese wording on it shows Angola and Mozambique overlayed in red atop Europe. “Portugal is not a small country,” a map based on one produced by Henrique Galvão in 1934 supporting the imperial policies of Portuguese dictator António Salazar. Cornell University/PJ Mode Collection of Persuasive Cartography It wasn’t just Portugal though. Most of those neighbors either had or wanted colonies as well. In Britain, most famously, empire-building was spurred on by concerns about the country’s small size relative to other, continental powers. Yet at the same time, the geographic disparity between the United Kingdom and its empire also became a point of pride. From a perversely imperialist perspective, the ability of a small country to dominate a much larger swaths of the globe was the ultimate proof of racial, technological, and cultural superiority. As it happens, by the time the United States came into its own as a world power, it had largely stopped using the Mercator map as a default. For all the vitriol directed at this particular projection, it was never actually all that widespread. National Geographic , for example, says it adopted the very round Van der Grinten as its projection of choice in 1922 before switching to the more elliptical Robinson in 1988. Likewise, the makers of this 1919 classroom map celebrating “The Greater United States” also opted for a circular projection. Apparently as long as you include insets proudly displaying your new colonies on a different scale, it doesn’t really matter what projection you use. Looking at old National Geographic or classroom maps raises another issue. Anti-Mercator criticism, particularly online, often takes on a conspiratorial tone. Headlines warn that maps have been “ misleading ,” “ deceiving ,” or even “ lying ” to you. In fact, “ every map you’ve ever seen is a damn lie .” The implication is that somebody, presumably the public education system, has been out there pushing the Mercator in an effort to warp innocent young minds. (Don’t look at the CIA. Whatever they were up to in the 1950s, they were probably plotting it on a Lambert conformal conic projection.) A classroom map shows two circular projections of the world atop an array of islands below. A classroom map from 1919. Modern School Supply Company/Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division But is blaming the schools really fair? Or is it a bit like people angrily asking why the media isn’t covering a story they just read about in the New York Times ? In fact, no one tried harder to teach kids about map projections and their shortcomings than elementary school geography books. Consider, for example, Hammond’s Illustrated Atlas for Young America , an unbelievably earnest primer from 1956. With language and graphics that could appear in an internet critique today, the book explains that the Mercator “was not good for showing the correct size” closer to the poles. Greenland, it specifically notes, “is much larger on the flat maps of the world, than it appears, in its true proportions, on the globe.” Then, for good measure, the book tells kids how to do their own experiment with a naval orange to understand the concept better. Big Geography, in other words, is not trying to mislead anyone. If Trump didn’t do the reading, that’s on him. Perhaps the saddest irony, though, is that in touching off another round of Mercator debate, Trump has also rendered the whole subject moot. We are entering an era where worrying about subtle biases, be they on our maps or anywhere else, feels increasingly quaint. Whether or not the Mercator projection implicitly fosters imperialist attitudes doesn’t really matter when the president is explicitly fostering them himself. When Trump shared an image showing Canada as part of the United States, he appears to have used an Albers equal area conic projection. At that point it’s safe to say that the problem, like Africa, is way bigger than Greenland. This post is part of FP’s ongoing coverage of the Trump administration . Follow along here . Nick Danforth is a fellow at Century International. He is currently writing a book on maps, history, and politics tentatively titled The Curse of Cartography . X: @NicholasDanfort Read More On Education | Geopolitics | Greenland | Military | United States Join the Conversation Commenting on this and other recent articles is just one benefit of a Foreign Policy subscription. 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