Washington: US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he plans to meet with Danish officials next week after the Trump administration doubled down on its intention to take over Greenland, the strategic Arctic island that is a self-governing territory of Denmark.
Since the capture of former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, President Donald Trump has revived his argument that the United States needs to control the world’s largest island to ensure its own security in the face of rising threats from China and Russia in the Arctic.
Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen and his Greenland counterpart, Vivian Motzfeldt, had requested a meeting with Rubio, according to a statement posted Tuesday to Greenland’s government website. Previous requests for a meeting were not successful, the statement said.
Rubio told a select group of US lawmakers that the Republican administration intended to eventually purchase Greenland, as opposed to using military force.
The remarks, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, were made in a classified briefing Monday evening on Capitol Hill, according to a person with knowledge of his comments who was granted anonymity because it was a private discussion.
On Wednesday, Rubio told reporters in Washington that Trump has been talking about acquiring Greenland since his first term. “That’s always been the president’s intent from the very beginning,” Rubio said. “He’s not the first US president who has examined or looked at how we could acquire Greenland.”
European leaders express concern
The leaders of France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom joined Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen in issuing a statement this week reaffirming that the mineral-rich island, which guards the Arctic and North Atlantic approaches to North America, “belongs to its people.” Frederiksen warned that a US takeover would amount to the end of NATO.
“The Nordics do not lightly make statements like this,” Maria Martisiute, a defence analyst at the European Policy Centre think tank, told The Associated Press Wednesday. “But it is Trump whose very bombastic language bordering on direct threats and intimidation is threatening the fact to another ally by saying, I will control or annex the territory.’”
Rubio, who was on Capitol Hill for a classified briefing Wednesday with the entire US Senate and House, did not directly answer reporters’ questions about whether the administration was willing to risk the NATO alliance by potentially moving ahead with a military option regarding Greenland.
“I’m not here to talk about Denmark or military intervention. I’ll be meeting with them next week, we’ll have those conversations with them then, but I don’t have anything further to add to that,” Rubio said. He added that every president retains the option to address national security threats to the United States through military means.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday that using the military to acquire Greenland was an option, though she told reporters Wednesday that “the president’s first option always has been diplomacy.”
Some Republican senators said they saw strategic value in Greenland, but they stopped short of supporting military action to acquire it.
Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall said he hoped “we can work out a deal,” while North Dakota Sen. John Hoeven said some of the discussion about taking Greenland by force has been “misconstrued.”
“One of the things about President Trump, you may have noticed, is he keeps our adversaries off balance by making sure they don’t know what we’re going to do,” Hoeven said.
But Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski said she hated “the rhetoric around either acquiring Greenland by purchase or by force,” adding, “I think that it is very, very unsettling.”
Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, co-chairs of the bipartisan Senate NATO Observer Group, said the US needs to honour its treaty obligations to Denmark.
“Any suggestion that our nation would subject a fellow NATO ally to coercion or external pressure undermines the very principles of self-determination that our Alliance exists to defend,” the senators said in a joint statement.
This is America now’
Thomas Crosbie, an associate professor of military operations at the Royal Danish Defence College, said an American takeover would not help Washington’s national security.
“The United States will gain no advantage if its flag is flying in Nuuk versus the Greenlandic flag,” he told the AP. “There are no benefits to them because they already enjoy all of the advantages they want. If there’s any specific security access that they want to improve American security, they’ll be given it as a matter of course, as a trusted ally. So this has nothing to do with improving national security for the United States.”
Denmark’s parliament approved a bill in June to allow US military bases on Danish soil. It widened a previous military agreement, made in 2023 with the Biden administration, in which US troops had broad access to Danish air bases in the Scandinavian country. Denmark’s foreign minister has said that Denmark would be able to terminate the agreement if the US tries to annex all or part of Greenland.
In the event of military action, the US Department of Defence operates the remote Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, and the troops there could be mobilised.
Crosbie said he believes the US would not seek to hurt the local population or engage with Danish troops.
“They don’t need to bring any firepower. They don’t need to bring anybody,” Crosbie said Wednesday. “They could just direct the military personnel currently there to drive to the centre of Nuuk and just say, This is America now,’ right? And that would lead to the same response as if they flew in 500 or 1,000 people.”
The danger in an American annexation, he said, lies in the “erosion of the rule of law globally and to the perception that there are any norms protecting anybody on the planet.”
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