Denmark and Greenland want to meet with Rubio as one lawmaker says Trump’s comments “offend people”
The foreign ministers of Greenland and Denmark have requested a meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio “immediately,” lawmaker Lars Christian Brask, Vice Chairman of the Danish Parliament’s Foreign Policy Committee, told CBS News on Wednesday.
He said “he guesses it will be a matter of getting the facts right, stop the false information and stop talking about wanting to find Greenland,” Brask said. “Greenland is not for sale.”
The request comes after Rubio told US lawmakers on Monday that the Trump administration’s intention was to buying an islandnot to take it by force, according to the lawyer and a source familiar with his congressional meeting.
The Trump administration has not taken the option of using the US military on the table to meet its goal of “finding Greenland,” as White House Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt put it Tuesday.
“You can’t buy another country or a population. You can’t buy people, of course. And when we see different pictures from the United States of the president, for example, laughing when he talks about Greenland … this is something that really upsets the people in Greenland, to be honest and to speak frankly,” said Aaja Chemnitz, a Greenlandic member of CBS News in Parliament on Wednesday. “If you want to cooperate with us and the Greenlanders, you need to respect us first.”
Chemnitz said the US was using “wrong tactics” to communicate with Greenland and called it “shocking” that the White House “doesn’t say that annexation of our country is on the table.”
Both politicians emphasized that Greenland has always communicated with the US that it is “open for business,” regarding American commercial interests in the region.
“Business development is something that Greenland is responsible for, so it’s something we could do today if we wanted to,” Chemnitz told CBS News.
“You can explore, of course, if you live by environmental laws, etc., all the rare earths and minerals you want in Greenland for commercial purposes,” Brask said. “There will be no holding back on that.”
Mikkel Olesen, a Danish foreign policy and communications researcher, told CBS News that US companies have so far been deterred from investing in Greenland’s minerals because of the belief that the cost of mining on the huge ice island would exceed the potential profit.
“With a few exceptions, the main reason not much has happened is that there has never been a business case for corporate America,” Olesen said.
The US wants to control Greenland, “finding strategic minerals is also strange, because nothing has prevented US companies from entering for a long time.”
As for US security interests in Greenland, President Trump has always emphasized as the main driver of his desire to control the island, Brask told CBS News that there have been few obstacles to deepening such ties in the past, and very few now.
“You put in warning systems, missile systems, military, etc., just by asking, you can,” he said, referring to the United States. “You are not in charge of the country, but you have options, possibilities to have troops, equipment … equipment in Greenland, you have to ask.”
The US maintains one military base in Greenland, the Pituffik Space Base, which supports critical missile warning and defense systems, and is home to radar and satellite monitoring systems.
“Throughout the Cold War, the US had a line of radar stations across Greenland, and the US chose to close those radar stations because the Cold War ended. So, in a sense, I think it’s worth remembering that when Donald Trump came out saying that Denmark is a bad partner and everything,” Olesen told CBS News. “They are tasks that the US was often happy to handle. That does not mean that Denmark as an alliance is not obliged to try to help the US in handling that problem, at all. I’m just saying that the situation that existed before Donald Trump was that the US was very happy to be able to have a free hand in Greenland to handle those problems.”
