Denmark’s top diplomat once again rebuffed U.S. President Donald Trump’s plan to acquire Greenland, saying that the Americans cannot simply take over the planet.
Some believe that “if [the U.S.] just owned the whole world, everything would be under control. But that’s not what the U.S. needs,” Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen said Friday, according to Danish public broadcaster TV 2.
“We have no interest in selling Greenland to the U.S., it will not happen, the Greenlanders are a people, and Greenland is a country,” he added.
Rasmussen was responding to newly sworn-in U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s comments Thursday that the U.S. had a legitimate stake in snatching Greenland, a self-ruling Danish territory since 1953 and a colony long before that.
“This is not a joke,” Rubio said on “The Megyn Kelly Show,” referring to Trump’s ambitions to take the vast Arctic island. “This is not about acquiring land for the purpose of acquiring land. This is in our national interest and it needs to be solved.”
“I would be more surprised if he said it was a joke,” Rasmussen shot back, adding the U.S. and Denmark should cooperate on Arctic security. “We need to find a different form in which we jointly take on these tasks … If we can have a substantive discussion about it, then we can find a solution.”
Trump’s increasingly trenchant remarks about Greenland — he has called the U.S. acquiring the island an “absolute necessity” and refused to rule out using military force or economic coercion to do so — have sparked crisis talks in Copenhagen and other European capitals.
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen dashed between Berlin, Brussels and Paris this week to shore up support for Denmark’s position. She and Trump reportedly clashed in a fiery 45-minute call two weeks ago in which the U.S. president made it clear he was deadly serious about taking over Greenland, with its strategic Arctic location and huge mineral riches.
Most Greenlanders are against the idea, with new polling finding 85 percent of the Danish territory’s population of about 60,000 don’t want to be American. Greenland’s pro-independence Prime Minister Múte Egede told reporters earlier this month, “We don’t want to be Danes. We don’t want to be Americans. We want to be Greenlanders.”
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