The president Trump backtracked on Wednesday in his insistence that the United States needs “your” Greenland to ensure US national security.
After talks with the Secretary General of NATO, Mark Rutte, on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, stopped his threat to impose tariffs on eight close allies of the United States and said that the framework of the plan to solve the problem of his administration with Europe has been reached.
Mr. Trump called it “the last long-term agreement” in Greenland, saying “it’s really good for the USA, it’s getting everything we wanted, including real national security and international security.”
But he gave few details. Here’s what we know about where the negotiations stand:
- In his speech at the World Economic Forum, Mr. Trump has taken US military intervention to take control of Greenland off the table.
- Mr. Trump then met with Rutte and, afterward, said they had come up with “an outline for the future deal.”
- Mr. Trump has taken his threat to impose 10% tariffs on all goods from eight other European countries off the table.
- Rutte told Reuters that the framework agreement agreed with Mr.
- A NATO spokesperson said that Rutte’s meeting with Mr. Trump has been “very productive,” and the framework the president talked about will focus on joint efforts to ensure Arctic security.
- The NATO spokesman also said that negotiations between the US, Denmark and Greenland will continue, to ensure that Russia or China does not gain military or economic ground in Greenland.
- UK Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said the new framework could include NATO’s “Arctic Sentry” security partnership.
“I’m actually more optimistic today than I’ve been in over a year,” Mikkel Runge Olesen, a senior foreign policy researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies, told CBS News Thursday from Copenhagen. “There’s a cautious sense of optimism, maybe even a little relief in Denmark and Greenland right now. But it’s cautious, because we’ve seen it go bad before.”
Olesen said it seems that, after the meeting of Mr. Trump and Rutte, things were “from that deadline when Trump wanted something that was completely impossible for Denmark and Greenland to give voluntarily, on the right, to something that could be an old discussion about basic rights, about authority, about the basic rules of the agreement of the American presence that may increase.”
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In a statement released early Thursday, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen appeared to support Rutte and the outcome of his meeting with Mr.
“NATO is fully aware of the position of the Kingdom of Denmark. We can discuss everything political; security, investment, economy. But we cannot discuss our sovereignty,” said Frederiksen. “I have been informed that this was not the case.”
“The Danish government wishes to continue a constructive dialogue with partners about how we can strengthen security in the Arctic, including the US. The Golden Domeas long as this is done with respect for our territorial integrity,” Frederiksen said, referring to Mr. Trump’s plan for a new national missile defense system.
Aaja Chenmitz, a Greenlandic representative in the Danish parliament, told the BBC on Thursday, however, that, “NATO has no right to negotiate anything without us, Greenland. There is nothing about us without us.”
In an interview with Fox News that aired on Thursday, Mr. Trump said the deal with America’s NATO allies would see “an episode” of the Golden Dome system located in Greenland.
“And it’s a very important part, because, everything comes over Greenland, if the bad guys start shooting, it comes over Greenland,” he said. “So, we drop it … it’s infallible.”
The Prime Minister of Finland, Petteri Orpo, told CBS News that he also thought that Rutte had done, “a really good job in terms of kind of easing things. Many of us were working with the US senators and the US administration to do that. However, it is not over. We still have a process going on, the Danes, the Greenlanders, and the Americans are discussing the situation in Greenland.”
There is “no need to escalate the situation. Now it’s just good to lower the temperature,” Orpo said.
British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper gave more details about what could have been agreed between Mr.
“Those are joint operations programs that bring NATO countries together to work on a common threat,” Cooper said. “So what we intend to do is to make an Arctic envoy through NATO again. What I understand from the discussions we had with the NATO Secretary General, who put forward some of the points he was talking about yesterday, is that this will now be focused on work with NATO and the different Arctic countries coming together and supported by other NATO countries in terms of how we do that through security cooperation.”
While Mr. Trump, who has put Arctic security concerns as the main driver of his push for Greenland – specifically saying that Russia and China would take the island if the US didn’t – has repeatedly cited the mineral resources still to be exploited in the Danish territory as a top priority.
Asked if the tentative agreement reached Wednesday included any mention of those resources, Cooper said he was “not aware of any discussions about that.”
Olesen, the Danish analyst, said he expects the current, long-standing defense agreement between the United States, Denmark and Greenland to be the starting point for negotiations.
“This may actually end up in something that will be a revision of the defense treaty, maybe a little bit more than it will need to be. Maybe we’ll see some negotiations about rare earth metals. Maybe we’ll see some kind of negotiation about reducing the influence of China and Russia, that kind of thing. But that in the negotiations, for the first time in a long time, the negotiations that have been discussed seem to be reaching Oleen.
