When the incoming US President Donald Trump announced on his Truth Social platform on December 22nd that Ken Howery, US ambassador to Sweden between 2019 and 2021, would be his ambassador to Denmark, he used the announcement to reiterate that "ownership and control of Greenland" was "an absolute necessity".
Howery responded with a post on X, formerly Twitter, saying he was honoured to be chosen for the role and stressing the responsibility involved in it.
Elon Musk, the owner of the latter, social media platform was among the first to comment. "Congrats! Help America gain Greenland" he wrote, alongside a 'tears of joy' emoji.
Was this a serious comment? The laughter emoji would suggest not.
But Trump's statements over the last two weeks on a possible Greenland takeover increasingly indicate that, at some level at least, he really means it.
If he does, who is Ken Howery and how exactly might he be of help in Trump's Greenland ambitions?
Who is Ken Howery?
Ken Howery was one of the five original founders of the online payment service PayPal, alongside Musk, Peter Thiel, Luke Nosek, and Max Levchin, serving as CFO of the the company from 1998 until it was bought by eBay in 2002.
He has remained close to Musk ever since with Musk reportedly spending time at Howery's home in Texas in 2021. He has also developed a connection to Trump, spending November 5th, the night of the US election, at Mar-a-Lago, the Florida mansion and country club that is Trump's main home, along with the prominent tech investor Marc Andreessen.
Howery was appointed Ambassador to Sweden in September 2019, a full 30 months after Trump took office in January 2017, resigning after President Joe Biden took office in January 2021 with a tweet describing his tenure as "the honour of a lifetime".
He continues, however, to be registered as living in the country, with the Eniro address service recording him as living in an apartment on Strandvägen in Stockholm, perhaps the most prestigious street to live on in the country.
Has he been appointed to deliver Greenland into US hands?
It doesn't look like it. Howery's own response on social media to Trump's and Musk's posts about his role in their Greenland project has been muted and conventional.
"I look forward to working with the dedicated teams at US Embassy Copenhagen and US Consulate Nuuk in Greenland to deepen the bonds between our countries," he posted.
There was no suggestion that those deeper bonds might involve Greenland becoming the 51st state.
This is in line with how Howery represented Trump when ambassador to Sweden, when he described the then president as "undeniably unconventional" in an interview with Sweden's TT newswire.
"As ambassador to Stockholm in the last Trump administration [Howery] is both trained and supposedly loyal," Ulrik Pram Gad, a Greenland expert at the Danish Institute for International Studies, told The Local in a written comment.
While ambassador to Sweden, Howery did, however, develop a keen interest in the Arctic and in Arctic security.
He wrote a debate article in the Svenska Dagbladet newspaper in February 2020, in which he warned of increasing military activity from Russia and China in the Arctic region.
Russian ships and submarines, he wrote, were now stationed near the so-called GIUK gap between Greenland and the UK, which he described as a "bottleneck which plays an important role in Nato's and Europe's defence".
Again, he made no mention in this article of Trump's ambition to buy Greenland, saying only that the US had reopened its consulate in the Greenlandic capital and provided a $12m dollar financing packet to support Greenlandic society.
During his time as Sweden's ambassador he also helped set up the Arctic Initiative between the Arctic Harvard Kennedy School of Government and Sweden's Luleå University of Technology.
So, is his appointment powerful evidence that Trump's designs on Greenland are for real? Probably not -- but neither does it act as counter to the speculation.
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