Trump administration officials are weighing a change that would shift responsibility for US security interests in Greenland to the military command that oversees America’s homeland defense, underscoring the president’s focus on the strategically important territory that he has repeatedly said he wants to acquire, three sources familiar with the deliberations told CNN.
The change under consideration would move Greenland out of US European Command’s area of responsibility and into US Northern Command, the sources said.
On its face, the idea of putting Greenland under NORTHCOM authority makes some logical sense given it is part of the North American continent, though politically and culturally, it is associated with Europe and is a semiautonomous territory of Denmark. Some of the discussions pre-date Trump’s return to office this year, the sources said.
US Northern Command declined to comment. CNN has reached out to the Office of the Secretary of Defense as well as Danish and Greenlandic officials for comment.
Still, several US officials expressed wariness about the move because of Trump’s repeated insistence that the US “needs” Greenland and his refusal to rule out military action to obtain it.
In an interview with NBC that aired last weekend, Trump renewed that threat.
“I don’t rule it out,” he said. “I don’t say I’m going to do it, but I don’t rule out anything.”
“We need Greenland very badly,” Trump said. “Greenland is a very small amount of people, which we’ll take care of, and we’ll cherish them, and all of that. But we need that for international security.”
US Northern Command is chiefly responsible for protecting US territory and currently oversees missions like the southern border task force.
Trump’s rhetoric has also caused major friction with Denmark and with Greenland itself.
Putting Greenland under US Northern Command would at least symbolically split Greenland from Denmark, which would still be overseen by US European Command.
Danish officials are concerned about the message that could send suggesting that Greenland is not a part of Denmark, one of the sources familiar with the deliberations said.
Proponents of the move have pointed out that despite there being a US military base there and Greenland being seen as a vital outpost in competition with Russia and China for access to the Arctic — a major bipartisan national security priority — it sometimes gets overlooked by US European Command because of its distance from the command center in central Europe, one US official said.
For US NORTHCOM, though, Greenland is an important vantage point for any potential enemy craft coming from that direction towards the United States. The unclassified version of the US intelligence community’s annual threat assessment mentioned Greenland four times, within the context of adversaries like China and Russia seeking to expand their influence there.
The discussions about moving Greenland into NORTHCOM come amid another high-profile spat between American and Danish officials over Greenland.
Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen said this week that he plans to “call in” the US acting ambassador to Denmark for talks after a Wall Street Journal report said Washington had ordered US intelligence agencies to increase spying on Greenland.
They were directed to learn more about Greenland’s independence movement and attitudes towards American resource extraction, the Journal reported.
“I have read the article in the Wall Street Journal, and it worries me greatly because we do not spy on friends,” Rasmussen told reporters in Warsaw on Wednesday, during an informal meeting of EU foreign ministers.
“We are going to call in the US acting ambassador for a discussion at the foreign ministry to see if we can confirm this information, which is somewhat disturbing,” Rasmussen added.
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