Lisa Sólrun Christiansen gets up at 4 a.m. most days and gets to work knitting thick wool sweaters coveted by buyers around the world for their warmth and colorful patterns celebrating Greenland’s traditional Inuit culture. Her morning routine includes a quick check of the news, but these days the ritual shatters her peace because of all the stories about U.S. President Donald Trump’s designs on her homeland. “I get overwhelmed,’’ Christiansen said earlier this month as she looked out to sea, where impossibly blue icebergs floated just offshore. The daughter of Inuit and Danish parents, Christiansen, 57, cherishes Greenland. It is a source of immense family pride that her father, an artist and teacher, designed the red-and-white Greenlandic flag. “On his deathbed he talked a lot about the flag, and he said that the flag is not his, it’s the people’s,” she said. “And there’s one sentence I keep thinking about. He said, ‘I hope the flag will unite the Greenlandic people.’’’ Island of anxiety Greenlanders are increasingly worried that their homeland, a self-governing region of Denmark, has become a pawn in the competition between the U.S., Russia and China as global warming opens up access to the Arctic. They fear Trump’s aim to take control of Greenland, which holds rich mineral deposits and straddles strategic air and sea routes, may block their path toward independence. Those fears were heightened Sunday when Usha Vance, the wife of U.S. Vice President JD Vance, announced she would visit Greenland later this week to attend the national dogsled race. Separately, National Security Adviser Michael Waltz and Energy Secretary Chris Wright will visit a U.S. military base in northern Greenland. The announcement inflamed tensions sparked earlier this month when Trump reiterated his desire to annex Greenland just two days after Greenlanders elected a new parliament opposed to becoming part of the U.S. Trump even made a veiled reference to the possibility of military pressure, noting the U.S. bases in Greenland and musing that “maybe you’ll see more and more soldiers go there.” News of the visit drew an immediate backlash from local politicians, who described it as a display of U.S. power at a time they are trying to form a government. “It must also be stated in bold that our integrity and democracy must be respected without any external interference,” outgoing Prime Minister Múte Boroup Egede said. Greenland, part of Denmark since 1721, has been moving toward independence for decades. It’s a goal most Greenlanders support, though they differ on when and how that should happen. They don’t want to trade Denmark for an American overlord. The question is whether Greenland will be allowed to control its own destiny at a time of rising international tensions when Trump sees the island as key to U.S. national security. David vs. Goliath While Greenland has limited leverage against the world’s greatest superpower, Trump made a strategic mistake by triggering a dispute with Greenland and Denmark rather than working with its NATO allies in Nuuk and Copenhagen, said Otto Svendsen, an Arctic expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Trump’s actions, he says, have united Greenlanders and fostered a greater sense of national identity. “You have this feeling of pride and of self-determination in Greenland that the Greenlanders are not, you know, cowed by this pressure coming from Washington,” […]