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Donald Trump has said it would be “unacceptable” for Greenland to be “in the hands” of any country other than the US, reiterating his demand to take over the Arctic island, a semi-autonomous territory of Denmark, hours before high-stakes talks on its future.
“The US needs Greenland for the purpose of national security. Nato should be leading the way for us to get it,” the US president said on social media. The alliance “becomes far more formidable and effective” with the territory under US control, he said.
“It is vital for the Golden Dome that we are building,” he said, referring to a proposed missile defence system.
Trump’s remarks came as the Danish and Greenlandic foreign ministers prepared to meet the US vice-president, JD Vance, and the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, in Washington to discuss the territory amid rising tensions after weeks of US pressure.
The US president first raised the idea of a US takeover of Greenland in 2019, during his first term, but has ramped up his rhetoric significantly since returning to the White House last year, saying the US would take it “one way or the other”.
Trump has jolted the EU and Nato by refusing to rule out military force to seize the strategically located, mineral-rich island, which is covered by many of the protections offered by the two organisations because Denmark belongs to both of them.
Denmark’s foreign minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, and his Greenlandic counterpart, Vivian Motzfeldt, initially sought the talks with Rubio but the meeting will take place in Washington after Vance asked to attend and then to host the talks.
Greenland and Denmark have repeatedly said the territory is not for sale, that the US is exercising “unacceptable pressure” on a longstanding ally, and that a 1951 bilateral agreement already allows the US to massively expand its military presence on the island.
Several EU leaders have backed Denmark, pledging their support for its territorial integrity and right to self-determination. The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said on Wednesday that the island “belongs to its people”.
“For me it’s important that the Greenlanders know and they know this by the deeds, not only by the words, that we respect the wishes of the Greenlanders and their interests and that they can count on us,” she said in Brussels.
France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, also said that if “the sovereignty of an EU country and ally were to be affected, the knock-on effects would be unprecedented”. France was would “act in full solidarity with Denmark and its sovereignty”, he added.
Rasmussen and Motzfeldt are due to meet Vance and Rubio at about 10.30am local time (3.30pm GMT) and will aim to de-escalate the crisis and find a diplomatic path to satisfy US demands for more control, analysts said.
“The end goal is to find some form of accommodation, or make a deal that would satisfy that need, or at least calm down the rhetoric sufficiently from Donald Trump,” Andreas Østhagen of the Oslo-based Fridtjof Nansen institute, told Reuters.
Noa Redington, a former adviser to previous Danish premiers, said concerns were high in Denmark and Greenland that Motzfeldt and Rasmussen could be humiliated in the same way as Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, was last February.
Penny Naas of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a Washington thinktank, said that if the US continued with “we have to have Greenland at all costs”, it could be a very short meeting, but “a slight nuance” could change it entirely.
The Danish defence minister, Troels Lund Poulsen, sought to ease US concerns, telling Agence France-Presse that Denmark was boosting its military presence in Greenland and was in talks with allies on “an increased Nato presence in the Arctic”.
Greenland’s prime minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, told a joint press conference with his Danish counterpart, Mette Frederiksen, on Tuesday that “we choose Denmark” and the island would not be owned or governed by Washington.
“If we have to choose between the US and Denmark here and now, we choose Denmark, Nato and the EU,” Nielsen said, adding that the island’s “goal and desire is peaceful dialogue, with a focus on cooperation”.
Frederiksen said it had not been easy for Denmark to “stand up to completely unacceptable pressure from our closest ally” but the fact was that “borders cannot be changed by force, and that small countries should not fear large countries”.
Trump has said “if we don’t do it the easy way, we’re going to do it the hard way” and insisted that US ownership “is psychologically needed for success” and “gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document”.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll on Wednesday found just 17% of Americans approved of Trump’s efforts to acquire Greenland and that substantial majorities of both Democrats and Republicans opposed using military force to annex the island.
About 47% of respondents to the poll disapproved of US efforts to acquire the territory, while 35% said they were unsure. Only 4%, including just one in 10 Republicans and almost no Democrats, said military force would be a “good idea”.
