Tensions Are High as Vance and Rubio Prepare to Meet Danish and Greenlandic Officials

Top officials from the United States, Denmark and Greenland will meet at the White House for the first time since President Trump said he wanted to own Greenland.Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen of Greenland and Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen of Denmark in Copenhagen on Tuesday.Credit...Tom Little/ReutersJan. 14, 2026, 3:52 a.m. ETThe foreign ministers of Denmark and Greenland are expected to meet on Wednesday with Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the White House, with tensions rising over President Trump’s push to buy or take over Greenland.It will be the first such meeting between the three governments at least since Mr. Trump renewed his threats over Greenland, a semiautonomous Danish territory. Apparently emboldened by the success of the U.S. military operation that led to the capture of Venezuela’s leader on Jan. 3, Mr. Trump said last week that he was “going to do something on Greenland, whether they like it or not.”Greenland’s leader has been clear that the territory is not interested in an American takeover. On Tuesday, he made his strongest statement yet that Greenlanders would prefer to stick with Denmark.“If we have to choose between the United States and Denmark here and now, we choose Denmark,” Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen of Greenland said on Tuesday during a joint news conference in Copenhagen with Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen of Denmark.“The time has not come for internal discussions and division,” he said, speaking of its often fraught relations with Denmark, Greenland’s former colonizer. “The time has come to stand together.”In her comments, Ms. Frederiksen agreed, laying out a strategy for the White House meeting: “We come together, we stay together and we leave together.”Mr. Trump and top officials in his administration have given various explanations of how the United States might take control or ownership of Greenland. Mr. Trump has not ruled out taking Greenland with military force, but Mr. Rubio has said the president plans to buy it, rather than invade.That appears to be a nonstarter. Denmark does not have the authority to sell Greenland, and Mr. Nielsen has said repeatedly that the territory is not for sale.ImageThe Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, on Monday.Credit...Evgeniy Maloletka/Associated PressUlrik Pram Gad, a Greenland expert at the Danish Institute for International Studies, said the face-to-face meeting with U.S. officials was a sign of progress.“The bar for success is very low,” he said. “A success from this meeting would be that we had a meeting,” he said. “It’s a process. We are now talking.”Mr. Vance appears to be a new addition to the meeting, which Mr. Rubio announced last week without mentioning the vice president. Denmark’s Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday that Mr. Vance would also attend. Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at the think tank Bruegel in Brussels, said the presence of the vice president, a higher-ranking official who has shown a willingness to publicly and aggressively challenge foreign officials, raised the stakes for the meeting.“The fact that it is not just foreign ministers — that it is also JD Vance — is upping the ante a bit,” Mr. Kirkegaard said.On Friday and Saturday, a bipartisan delegation of U.S. lawmakers will go to Copenhagen, the Danish capital, to meet with political and business leaders from Denmark and Greenland. The goal of the visit, said Representative Sara Jacobs, Democrat of California, is to show that American lawmakers “oppose President Trump’s aggressive efforts to acquire Greenland.”Maya Tekeli contributed reporting from Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, and Jeanna Smialek contributed reporting from Brussels.Amelia Nierenberg is a Times reporter covering international news from London.SKIP