Trump could move for Greenland in ‘weeks’ while moving at ‘high speed’ | World | News
Donald Trump could launch meaningful US action to annex Greenland within “weeks or months”, a senior administration official has warned.
Tensions between Mr Trump and NATO have skyrocketed over recent weeks over the desire from the US President to annex the Arctic island. Thomas Dans, Mr Trump’s Arctic commissioner, said the President wants to move at “high speed” on the issue and that “things could move on an express basis”. He told USA Today: “This is a train route with multiple stops. Things could move on an express basis, skip the local stops and go direct to the main station. That’s where President Trump wants to move it − at high speed.”
Dans also said that while he thinks there could be noticeable progress on negotiations or a deal on Greenland sooner rather than later, he ultimately expects the acquisition to take longer than that to complete.
“We need to get the people of Greenland on board,” he said, referring to polls that show while the majority of Greenland’s 57,000 inhabitants want to eventually secede from Denmark, the vast majority do not want Greenland to become the 51st U.S. state. Denmark and Greenland have said Greenland is not for sale, USA Today also reported.
The assessment from Dans comes as the foreign ministers of Denmark and Greenland are set to visit Washington on Wednesday for a meeting with US Vice President JD Vance and secretary of state Marco Rubio.
The meeting was requested by Denmark amid Trump’s threatening insistence that the U.S. must “have” Greenland − and was supposed to be with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But in one sign that momentum on Greenland could be gathering pace, Vance will now steer the discussion.
Meanwhile, Greenland’s energy minister Naaja Nathanielsen told a press conference in Westminster on Tuesday that American military action would represent “the breakdown of the rule of law” and leave Western allies having to “figure out what is this new world order about”.
Ms Nathanielsen added that Greenland felt “betrayed” by Donald Trump’s demands to annex the semi-autonomous Danish territory. She said: “We feel that the rhetoric is offensive, as we have said many times before, but also bewildering because we have done nothing but support the notion that Greenland is a part of the American national self-interest.”
On Monday, a member of Donald Trump’s Republican Party introduced legislation to annex Greenland as the 51st US state. The US president claimed over the weekend that he needed to “take Greenland” to prevent Russia or China from doing so.
