Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen of Denmark arrived in Greenland on Friday for an unannounced visit, as the crisis over Greenland’s future and the alarm over American designs on it seemed to ease but not end.
Ms. Frederiksen landed around midday and met privately for about an hour with Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen of Greenland, a semiautonomous island that has been part of the Danish kingdom for 300 years. The two visited the waterfront of Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, went to a kindergarten and met with other Greenlandic officials before a short evening walk through the city.
The trip came amid continued pressure from President Trump, who has said the United States needs Greenland for national security, and it appeared to have been meant as reassurance to the 57,000 people who live in Greenland.
“I am first and foremost in Greenland today to show Denmark’s strong support for the Greenlandic people,” Ms. Frederiksen told reporters. “It has been a very difficult time. Anyone can see that.”
Greenlanders have bristled at Mr. Trump’s designs on their homeland since he floated the idea of buying it from Denmark during his first term, and they have been adamant that they do not want to be part of the United States.
Ms. Frederiksen described the visit as a working meeting and stressed the need for close coordination between Copenhagen and Nuuk. This week has been a blur of political developments for Greenland. Mr. Trump sharpened his threats to take the island, threatening tariffs against European countries that opposed him and then on Wednesday suddenly changing course and saying he was working out a compromise with NATO officials.
Greenlanders seemed to appreciate the Danish prime minister’s visit.
“It’s good to see her out on the street; it makes us feel safer,” said Makkak Markussen, a retired municipal administrator. “But for me, it’s still a bit unclear whether anything has really changed.”
Before flying to Greenland on Friday, Ms. Frederiksen met with Mark Rutte, NATO’s secretary general, in Brussels. Mr. Trump suggested on Wednesday that a conversation with Mr. Rutte had produced a breakthrough on Greenland, a claim that Danish officials disputed.
They have also pushed back publicly against any suggestion that Greenland’s sovereignty could be subject to negotiation. Western officials have said that one possible compromise under discussion was a proposal for the United States to own pockets of land in Greenland for military bases. Currently, there is one active U.S. base.
“We can negotiate on everything political — security, investments, economy,” Ms. Frederiksen said in a statement on Thursday. “But we cannot negotiate on our sovereignty.”
Decisions concerning Greenland’s future, she said, could be made only by Denmark and Greenland. A senior Danish official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy, said there had been no direct discussions with the United States about granting sovereign territory to Washington. All of this has unsettled Greenlanders, who said they were a little more hopeful than they were earlier this week that the crisis had passed, but still on guard.
“You can’t relax when positions keep changing all the time,” said Dorthe Teling, 70, a retired employee of one of Greenland’s largest commercial banks. “They say there’s a framework agreement, but it looks as if only Trump is continuing to work on it. I think it would be reassuring to know what has actually been agreed.”
In an interview with the Danish news organization DR, Ms. Fredericksen addressed such concerns. “We are still in a serious situation, but we now have a path that we are beginning to test with the Americans,” she said. “We have said all along that we are, of course, willing to reach an agreement.”
Asked during her visit to Nuuk whether the crisis over Greenland’s status had passed, Ms. Frederiksen did not respond.
She and Mr. Nielsen instead turned from the microphones and set off through central Nuuk in a highly choreographed walk, followed closely by an enormous scrum of Danish and Greenlandic reporters. They passed Nuuk’s open-air fish market before stepping into Greenland’s Parliament building, which both left without further comment.
Jeffrey Gettleman contributed reporting.
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