An Interview with Carla Sands
Ambassador Carla Sands serves as the Vice Chair of the Center for Energy and Environment at the America First Policy Institute. Previously, she was appointed to President Trump’s Economic Advisory Council, and in 2017, President Trump called on Sands to represent the United States as the Ambassador to Denmark, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands. In January 2021, Sands received the Department of Defense’s highest civilian honor, the Medal for Distinguished Public Service, for her work to increase security in the high north while countering Russia and China.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
SALIENT: We're currently at the 2025 core conference, where we've heard a lot of different views on topics such as American identity, foreign policy, and the economy. What does conservatism mean to you, and which figure on the national stage do you think best represents your view of conservatism?
SANDS: I'm not an academic, so when I speak, I speak mostly in real-world terms. For me, conservatism has two parts: overarching and conserving. Overarching conservatives look at their relationship with God, and then their family, and then their community, and then their country, and it sort of goes out from that faith center. It doesn't mean you can't be a conservative and not believe in God, but I think that faith, for me, is fundamental to my conservatism. There are knock-on effects of believing in conservatism. First of all, for me, it means we can conserve our resources, but it also means that we are the real progressives. Progressive means progress. Conservatives make progress. The term “progressive” in the United States has become about dismantling and destruction. They're anti-family, anti-country, anti-God, for the most part, especially the modern-day Democrat Party. And I'm not talking about the party of JFK. I'm talking about today's Democrat Party. The so-called progressives are regressive. Conservatives are progressive, especially when they have a leader like President Trump who helps us be on our front foot, not our back foot, so that we're not playing defense. We're playing offense. The key is being on the offense and moving forward.
SALIENT: President Trump has been very vocal about wanting to annex Greenland. What do you think has changed between his first and his second time in office to have made this a policy priority, and how viable do you think the plan is?
SANDS: Well, it's not a new policy priority. He's the third US president to propose this. I look at the Greenland issue as unfinished business from the first Trump administration. The Greenland issue is that we have the world's largest island just off our northeast coast, and it's unprotected and undeveloped. It has a relationship with Denmark, but Denmark “owns Greenland?” Not really. Greenland's going independent, but Denmark looks at it as their own asset. But it's like owning an asset you can't afford to own. They can't afford to defend it. They can't afford to develop it. Denmark is a country the size of New Jersey with a GDP and population like that of the state of Colorado. Can you imagine Colorado trying to defend the world's largest island? And it's not just Greenland that has to be defended. It's the seas around Greenland. It's that giant G.I.UK gap (Greenland, Iceland, and the UK). I say UK because just north of the UK are the Faroe Islands, also part of the Kingdom of Denmark.
China was attempting to coerce Greenland into becoming part of their Belt and Road Initiative, and Russia had subs and ships in the region. There are mysteriously cut cables under the sea, around Greenland, and then there are ships that turned off their transponder. We have hostile actors in the region, and the US was largely absent when I got there. We didn't really have a presence at all.
SALIENT: What was your biggest takeaway from serving as ambassador to Greenland–perhaps a lesson in leadership or a shift in your view on international relations?
SANDS: That's a great question. What was my biggest takeaway? First of all, I came from a private sector background. When I went to be an ambassador, I had to step away from a business where I was an owner-operator of enclosed regional malls, grocery-anchored centers, and Class A offices. We were largely a commercial real estate company with some private equity. My private sector experience in for-profit and not-for-profit businesses throughout the decades was essential in being successful in my work as an ambassador.
The biggest shock to me was how when there's a government building, an embassy for instance, nobody cares. Nobody cares that it's filthy. There are no light bulbs that work. There’s destruction from a natural disaster that's never cleaned up, and coming from a commercial real estate background, I took care of it, but I don't think anybody had for more than a decade.
Finding out that my team at the embassy hadn't had a raise in almost ten years was another big shock to me. Taking care of the team and the physical presence was like a side hustle I had to do while I put forward American foreign policy and defense policy. I made a card for every embassy team member– foreign-born and US-born, foreign service officer, military, didn't matter– with our three embassy goals. I found out through a survey that 40% of our team didn't know what we were there to do at the embassy. So I made a card with our three goals: security, increased trade to increase jobs, and building bridges between the kingdom and the US. And so we were largely successful. We increased our trade by 45% while I was ambassador, and because we increased our exports to Denmark by 45%, we increased our security.
I was able to put a consulate in Greenland. Working with different agencies and the Trump White House, I was able to get a Coast Guard billet for Arctic security. But that was a drop in the bucket of what we really needed. I was able to sign a trading cooperation agreement with both Greenland and the Faroe Islands, and that was really to counter China and their debt trap diplomacy with the Belt and Road Initiative efforts–both in Greenland, but also in the Faroe Islands. It was not just China but also Russia that had a big presence. Their number one trading partner is Russia, and it was an effort to get them to look more to the West than to the East.
SALIENT: You mentioned Russia and China here. In your opinion, who do you think is a bigger threat to democracy and Europe? Do you think it's the Chinese, or is it the Russians?
SANDS: Of course it's the Chinese. The Russians are a minor player. They're basically a vassal state now to China because the two have signed this defense pack without limits–Biden really enabled this. President Trump had solidified a pretty good relationship with Vladimir Putin. Vladimir Putin would never have invaded Ukraine if President Trump had been in the Oval Office in 2021, but with Biden being weak, corrupt, and feckless, Putin saw three things that enabled that war to start:
Number one, my team and I had worked with the Trump White House to stop the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. That was the Russian gas pipeline that was supplying a majority of the gas for a lot of Europe. And we were able to stop it the whole time I was there by working with the Danish government and the White House. We had the threat of sanctions, but then Biden said from the podium, “I'm not going to sanction that Russian gas pipeline if Putin decides to finish it.” Number two, he said from the podium, “if there's an incursion or two into Ukraine, we're going to let that go American, meaning you can go in with permission.” And then the third thing that Vladimir Putin had, the piece of the puzzle that he got from Biden to enable him to invade Ukraine, was the disastrous and deadly withdrawal from Afghanistan by the Biden administration.
The point is that leadership matters. Under President Trump’s leadership, America is already safer. Already we have the ceasefire under President Trump's leadership between Hamas and Israel. He said that it will take longer to get the Ukraine-Russia war resolved, but he's going to find a way. He will find a way to end this war and end the killing on both sides, which he's been adamant about. And I appreciate that.
SALIENT: The two big issues on college campuses today are free speech issues and anti-Semitism. Do you think there are any other issues that conservatives need to be wary of when it comes to our college campuses?
SANDS: Well, I think that you can't let anti-Semitism or the lack of free speech go unaddressed. You have to take care of it. But I think that the biggest issue is actually the lack of diversity of opinion or outlook. The fact that most of the faculty is on the left is a disservice to students. If there's one area in which you need diversity at every university, it's in thought; most students at Harvard will never hear from a conservative professor and never hear conservative ideas. If they did, many of them would become conservative, because it's glorious. The ideas in the conservative universe are wholesome. They're pro-family. They're pro-success and prosperity. They're pro-security for your family, state, and nation. I think they're essentially good, and I hope that in the future, every student at Harvard will be able to hear about conservative ideas and have the opportunity to choose for themselves.
SALIENT: Energy and environmental policy are a key part of your job at the American First Policy Institute. Overall, what do you think a Republican and America First environmental policy should look like?
SANDS: They look like common sense policies. Our air got cleaner during President Trump's term while we increased our energy production. It's largely because of American natural gas. We harvest cleaner in the United States than anywhere in the world, and we process cleaner in the United States than anywhere in the world. We are highly regulated, but we need common sense regulations, not regulations that have been put in place by far-left administrations that are there to end our domestic energy production.
And then there's the permitting reform that President Trump is going to do in this executive order because for many energy companies, there's been denial by delay. They simply ask for those permits, and the government slow-walks it so they never get the permit. And then, at the end, there are these far-left organizations that sue to stop the project. A company sinks hundreds of millions of dollars into a project, literally to have it taken away. It’s because of lawfair against them by these leftist organizations. Now we're exposing them.
USAID is just the beginning. A lot of these far-left organizations were funded by our tax dollars and by our adversaries. China and Russia helped to fund some of these green organizations. The agenda came largely from leftists and places like the UN and the World Economic Forum. These organizations are anti-human with their deindustrialization agenda. If they weren’t, they would be promoting nuclear energy all around the world. But they're not.
SALIENT: Any final thoughts?
SANDS: As we’ve talked about the US and getting things right, I think we can see that President Trump and his administration, and all of the wonderful and intelligent people that he’s brought around him to help execute, have really begun what may be the best days in American history. We are part of a wonderful time to be alive, especially for the Harvard students that are reading this. It’s a wonderful time to be young.