Nato should be helping the United States acquire Greenland, President Trump has said ahead of closely-watched negotiations between Danish, Greenlandic and US officials in Washington.
The alliance would be “far more formidable and effective” with the territory in US hands, the President said in a post on Truth Social on Wednesday.
Trump added that the US needs Greenland for its proposed Golden Dome missile defence system, a global network designed to detect and destroy enemy missiles before launch or in flight.
It comes as President Macron warned of “unprecedented” consequences if the sovereignty of a European country and ally were affected. “France is monitoring the situation very closely and will act in full solidarity with Denmark and its sovereignty,” a spokesperson said.
The Danish and Greenlandic foreign ministers will sound out the scope for compromise on Trump’s ambition to seize the island in a meeting at the White House on Wednesday with Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, and JD Vance, the vice-president.
Yet there is so far scant evidence of common ground between the two sides.
During a trip to Copenhagen on Tuesday, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, the Greenlandic leader, baldly stated that “Greenland does not want to be owned by the US” and would rather remain in Denmark if it were forced to choose between the two, despite the territory’s aspirations to independence.
Jens-Frederik Nielsen: “Greenland does not want to be owned by the US”
LISELOTTE SABROE/RITZAU SCANPIX/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Asked about Nielsen’s comments, Trump said: “Well, that’s their problem. I disagree with him. I don’t know who he is. Don’t know anything about him. But that’s going to be a big problem for him.”
Since decapitating the Maduro regime in Venezuela on January 3, Trump has doubled down on his pursuit of Greenland.
He said that he felt a “psychological need” to obtain the territory, likening it to a piece of real estate and insisting that the US would acquire it “either the easy way or the hard way”.
Expectations of a diplomatic breakthrough on Wednesday are limited. Rubio has been signalling that he favours a course of comparative restraint, telling his French and German counterparts that the US was not seriously contemplating an invasion of Greenland.
Yet the Danes are alarmed by the addition of Vance, a more obviously confrontational politician, to the meeting.
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Per Stig Moller, a former foreign minister, said he suspected the vice-president had been brought in to ensure that the option of using military force against Denmark clearly remained on the table.
“It could be that Vance and Trump are a little uncertain about Rubio because he’s said there will be no military invasion, while Trump and Vance are keeping that open,” Moller told Danmarks Radio, the Danish public broadcaster. “So [Vance] is probably there because they want to make sure that Rubio doesn’t make any promises that [Trump] doesn’t intend to keep.”
JD Vance and his wife, Usha, second from left, toured the US military’s Pituffik space base in Greenland in March last year
JIM WATSON/AP
Trump has repeatedly been adamant that nothing short of owning Greenland will satisfy him. He has also intimated that he might be prepared to break up Nato by attacking Denmark in order to achieve this objective.
Kurt Volker, who served as the US special envoy for Ukraine during Trump’s first presidency, warned against misinterpreting the president’s words as mere bluster.
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“He thinks, as a real estate guy, you don’t invest in something that you don’t own. You have to own it,” Volker told the Politico Brussels Playbook newsletter.
The Danish and Greenlandic strategy appears to consist of two elements. First, they hope to test the waters: to determine what is truly driving Trump’s obsession with Greenland and work out whether his concerns can be appeased by a deal that falls short of annexation, such as expanded access to the island’s mineral wealth.
Greenlanders protesting in in March last year against Trump’s remarks on the sovereignty of their country
AHMET GURHAN KARTAL/ANADOLU/GETTY IMAGES
Second, they are attempting to build up a critical mass of opposition within the Republican Party, with some success. A number of senior figures in the party, including John Thune, the majority leader in the Senate, have broken cover to warn against a military intervention.
This dispute is likely to play out on the floor of Congress. This week one Trump loyalist has introduced a bill that would authorise the president to add Greenland to the US.
In response, Republican senator Lisa Murkowski last night joined her Democratic colleague Jeanne Shaheen in drawing up a bipartisan rival bill that would prohibit the use of government funds in any military operation against a Nato ally.
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Murkowski said: “The mere notion that America would use our vast resources against our allies is deeply troubling and must be wholly rejected by Congress in statute.”
For their part, Vance and Rubio will be trying to identify any divisions between the Danes and the Greenlanders that might allow them to isolate the latter.
Last week Vivian Motzfeldt, Greenland’s foreign minister, who will represent her territory at the White House meeting, suggested that she would like to cut Denmark out in future and conduct bilateral relations with the US. Since then, however, the territory’s government has aligned itself assiduously with Denmark.
Nielsen and the Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, gave a statement in Copenhagen on Tuesday
LISELOTTE SABROE/EPA
Moller, the former Danish foreign minister, said any sign of a fault line between Denmark and Greenland could be fatal.
“The most important signal you can send is unity,” he said. “If the Americans get a sense that Denmark and Greenland are at it like cats and dogs, and that the Greenlanders would rather be rid of us, then the game is up … The Americans will exploit that division and drill down into it.”