US concludes talks with Denmark and Greenland on Trump’s takeover demands

Closely watched talks on Donald Trump’s demands to take over Greenland have ended in Washington after nearly an hour.The vice-president, JD Vance, and secretary of state, Marco Rubio, hosted the foreign ministers of Denmark and Greenland on Wednesday in what observers worried could be an ambush meant to pressure the Danes into ceding the territory under US economic and military pressure.The Danish embassy in Washington was due to brief journalists on the results of the talks within the hour.Earlier, Trump said it would be “unacceptable” for Greenland – a semi-autonomous territory of the NATO member Denmark – to be “in the hands” of any country other than the US, reiterating his demand to take over the Arctic island hours before the 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 would become “far more formidable and effective” with the territory under US control, he claimed.“It is vital for the Golden Dome that we are building,” he said, referring to a proposed missile defence system.Trump disembarking from Air Force One on Tuesday. He has said the US ‘needs Greenland’. Photograph: Luis M Alvarez/APExpert reports suggested it could cost the US as much as $700bn (£520bn) to take over the territory, according to US media, and European officials have played down the likelihood of a direct American attack to take control of the island.As the two sides met, the Danish defence minister, Troels Lund Poulsen, said the country would establish a “more permanent” and larger military presence in Greenland and that it was “highly hypothetical” the US would launch an attack to take the territory.During the talks, the White House continued its social media offensive against its NATO ally, depicting two dogsleds headed toward either the US or Russia and China, with the caption: “Which way, Greenland man?” Trump had previously said Denmark’s defence of the territory was composed of “two dogsleds”.The president first raised the idea of a 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 important, mineral-rich island, which is covered by many of the protections offered by the two organisations because Denmark belongs to both.Denmark’s foreign minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, and his Greenlandic counterpart, Vivian Motzfeldt, initially sought the talks with Rubio but the meeting took place at the White House 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 allowed 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, said that if “the sovereignty of an EU country and ally were to be affected, the knock-on effects would be unprecedented”. France would “act in full solidarity with Denmark and its sovereignty”, he said.Rasmussen and Motzfeldt would aim to de-escalate the crisis and find a diplomatic path to satisfy US demands for more control at the meeting on Thursday, analysts said beforehand.“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, who was adviser to previous Danish prime ministers, said before the meeting that concerns were high in Denmark and Greenland that Motzfeldt and Rasmussen could be humiliated in the same way 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.Greenland’s prime minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, told a joint press conference with his Danish counterpart, Mette Frederiksen, on Tuesday that 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 Greenland’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 that US ownership was “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 take over 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, 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”.