Usha Vance in the eye of Trump’s Arctic storm

WASHINGTON - Mrs Usha Vance was due to be watching a traditional dog sled race in Greenland, promoting US soft power.

Instead, she found herself at the centre of spiralling tensions over the Danish autonomous territory.

The US “Second Lady” was forced to abandon plans for her first major solo foreign trip, and is now accompanying her husband, Vice-President J.D. Vance, to a remote US space base on March 28.

In reality, it was always going to be tough for the relative political newcomer to navigate the diplomatic minefield created by President

Donald Trump’s insistence that the US must “have” Greenland

.

A former lawyer and registered Democrat, Mrs Usha Vance has been eased into the spotlight by the White House.

She has appeared mostly at her husband’s side since he took office, but earlier in March, the 39-year-old led a US presidential delegation to the 2025 Special Olympic Winter Games in Turin.

Her planned Greenland trip

, however, was a far bigger deal.

In a carefully scripted video announcing it last week, Mrs Usha Vance said she was “particularly thrilled to visit during your national dog sled race”, adding that she had been “reading all about it with my children”.

She hailed the “long history of mutual respect” between the US and Greenland and expressed “hope that our relationship will only grow stronger in coming years”.

But the political subtext to the scripted comments could not have been clearer: Mr Trump has made it unambiguous that he believes Greenland must be owned by the US for reasons of national security in the contested Arctic region.

If the White House had hoped to use Mrs Usha Vance to soften Mr Trump’s message, it failed, as politicians from Greenland and Denmark alike condemned her plans to visit as exerting “unacceptable pressure”.

Protests were also planned for the Second Lady’s visit to Sisimut, Greenland’s second-biggest town, following another anti-US protest outside the US consulate in the capital Nuuk on March 15.

“We are now at a level where it can in no way be characterised as a harmless visit from a politician’s wife,” Greenland’s Prime Minister Mute Egede said in a newspaper interview on March 23.

The White House responded by simultaneously climbing down and escalating.

“I decided that I didn’t want her to have all that fun by herself,” Mr Vance said in his own video on March 25 as he announced that he, too, would travel to Greenland.

But it was left to a White House press release to quietly announce that their joint visit would be drastically downgraded, cutting out the dog sled race and cultural exchange to leave just a trip to the remote Pituffik Space Base.

Denmark and Greenland both welcomed what they called a de-escalation.

Mr Trump himself stayed above the fray on the Vances’ visit, even as he doubled down on his Greenland threats.

“Usha’s great,” he said simply on March 26 when asked why the plans had changed.

The US Second Lady is, however, unlikely to keep a low profile for long, despite the Greenland row.

First Lady Melania Trump’s almost total absence from the limelight has left a vacuum that the White House needs to fill.

The ambitious J.D. Vance is also keen to boost his profile in the administration, but his sometimes abrasive style may need a foil that she provides.

Despite their radically different upbringings – she is the child of Indian immigrants who grew up in San Diego, while he is a self-styled “hillbilly” – the couple have spoken of how supportive they are.

“Usha brings me back to earth a little bit,” Mr Vance said in a 2020 interview. AFP