WASHINGTON — The top representatives to the U.S. from Denmark and Greenland met with White House officials Thursday, according to a source familiar with the discussions, to seek a better understanding of U.S. policy on the semiautonomous island.
A White House official confirmed the meeting with the Danish ambassador to the U.S., Jesper Møller Sørensen, and Greenland’s representative to the U.S., Jacob Isbosethsen, but both sources declined to say who from the Trump administration participated in the discussions.
President Donald Trump has said he needs the Arctic island for national security purposes, with White House officials publicly discussing a range of options to acquire the Danish territory, from using the U.S. military to purchasing the land.
Asked about Greenland in a recent New York Times interview, Trump said that “ownership is very important.”
Ownership is “what I feel is psychologically needed for success,” Trump said. “I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do with, you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio will meet with the foreign ministers from Denmark and Greenland next week for further discussions.
Vice President JD Vance, who took questions from reporters at Thursday's White House briefing, reiterated the U.S. interest in Greenland.
“We’ll continue to deliver some of these messages in private, some of them in public, but I guess my advice to European leaders and anybody else would be to take the president of the United States seriously,” Vance said.
“Number one, Greenland is really important, not just to America’s missile defense, but to the world’s missile defense. Number two, we know that there are hostile adversaries that have shown a lot of interest in that particular territory, that particular slice of the world," he said. "So what we’re asking our European friends to do is to take the security of that land mass more seriously, because if they’re not, the United States is going to have to do something about it.”
Sørensen and Isbosethsen also met Thursday with a bipartisan group of U.S. senators.
In a social media post after the meeting with lawmakers, Sørensen said Denmark, a member of NATO, has recently invested $4 billion in Arctic security, including expanding the permanent presence of its armed forces.
He called Denmark and Greenland “strong, reliable partners” for U.S. security interests.
As for purchasing the island, Isbosethsen was blunt.
“Greenland is not for sale,” he told NBC News following meetings on Capitol Hill. “I think our prime minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, and our foreign minister, Vivian Motzfeldt, has made it very, very clear our country belongs to the Greenlandic people.”
Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker, R-Miss., a Trump ally, said Thursday that there's no avenue to acquire Greenland.
“I think it’s been made clear from our Danish friends and from our friends in Greenland that that future does not include a negotiation," he said. "There’s no willingness on their part to negotiate for the purchase or the change in title to their land, which they’ve had for so long. That’s their prerogative, and they’re right, and they’ve made that very clear to us.”
