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.
President Donald Trump has argued that the US 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, and the White House has refused to rule out using military force to acquire the territory.
Rubio told a select group of lawmakers that it was the administration’s intention 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 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 that has examined or looked at how we could acquire Greenland.”
Read moreTaking over Greenland, a long-standing US obsession
Tensions with NATO members escalated after the White House said Tuesday that the “US military is always an option”.
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen warned earlier this week that a US takeover would amount to the end of NATO.
Rubio did not directly answer a question about whether the Trump administration is 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, telling reporters that every president retains the option to address national security threats to the United States through military means.
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Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen and his Greenland counterpart, Vivian Motzfeldt, have requested a meeting with Rubio in the near future, according to a statement posted Tuesday to Greenland’s government website. Previous requests for a sit-down were not successful, the statement said.
The leaders of France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom joined Frederiksen in a statement Tuesday reaffirming that the mineral-rich island, which guards the Arctic and North Atlantic approaches to North America, “belongs to its people”.
Denmark’s parliament approved a bill last June to allow US military bases on Danish soil. It widened a previous military agreement, made in 2023 with the Biden administration, where US troops had broad access to Danish airbases in the Scandinavian country.
Rasmussen, in a response to lawmakers’ questions, wrote over the summer that Denmark would be able to terminate the agreement if the US tries to annex all or part of Greenland.
But in the event of a military action, the US Department of Defense currently operates the remote Pituffik Space Base, in northwestern Greenland, and the troops there could be mobilised.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said he spoke by phone Tuesday with Rubio, who dismissed the idea of a Venezuela-style operation in Greenland.
“In the United States, there is massive support for the country belonging to NATO – a membership that, from one day to the next, would be compromised by … any form of aggressiveness toward another member of NATO,” Barrot told France Inter radio on Wednesday.
Asked if he has a plan in case Trump does claim Greenland, Barrot said he would not engage in “fiction diplomacy”.
(FRANCE 24 with AP)
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