Last Tuesday, delegations from the Danish Parliament and their Greenlandic counterparts logged into an unsecure Teams chat. They were there to discuss recent threats and bellicose rhetoric coming out of Washington.
When President Trump declared, following the removal of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, that “we need Greenland” – effectively threatening Danish sovereignty over the Arctic island – more than a century of national defense interests, transatlantic partnership, and established security alliances were summarily terminated. Then over the course of the week ahead, Trump said he might consider purchasing Greenland and, according to one report in a British tabloid, sought military options for securing the Arctic island.
Before the tensions crescendoed late last week, before Secretary of State Marco Rubio planned to announce he would meet to discuss ways to make Greenland Great Again, the Danish and Greenlandic representatives met for the emergency meeting during which they hoped to reaffirm their longstanding partnership and to disavow Washington’s discord between them.
The opposite happened. And the little-known meeting concluded before the Trump Administration seemed to make Greenland its primary focus after Venezuela. The question most representatives had was whether or not the Americans had been listening.
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