On Friday, March 28, Vice President of the United States Jay D. Vance will visit Greenland. He unexpectedly decided to accompany his wife, Usha, whose upcoming visit to Nuuk was perceived as a provocation. Ahead of the trip, President Donald Trump reiterated his desire to annex the world’s largest island to the United States. In an interview with The Vince Show, he said that Washington needs to get Greenland to ensure international security.
Trump said that the United States would go as far as it sees fit to get Greenland. “This is an island that we need from a defensive and even an offensive position, especially in the current state of affairs in the world, and we will have to get it,” the US president said in an interview. He believes that without Greenland joining the American territory, it will be impossible to protect the island, which has hundreds of ships cruising around its territory, by which he probably means the Russian and Chinese fleets.
Danish Defense Minister Troels Lund Poulsen called Trump’s statement inappropriate in relation to a close ally, which is Denmark. In his opinion, this is a hidden threat to the Commonwealth of Denmark, Greenland and the Faroe Islands. Not to mention interference in the internal affairs of Greenland, whose fate can only be decided by the Greenlandic people.
Meanwhile, the White House confirmed that Vance and his wife will visit Greenland, and clarified that they will visit the US military space base Pituffik. It is located 1.2 thousand km north of the Arctic Circle and is considered the northernmost military facility in the Pentagon’s arsenal.
Earlier, the American media reported that two delegations are going to Greenland at the end of this week. One was to be headed by the vice president’s wife, and the other was to be headed by Michael Waltz, Assistant to the President of the United States for National Security, and Chris Wright, Secretary of Energy. According to The Washington Post, Usha Vance was supposed to stay in Greenland from March 27 to March 29, visit local attractions and admire the traditional dog sledding race.
J.D. Vance jokingly explained that his wife’s study visit had caused a lot of excitement in Greenland, and he did not want to allow her to get all the pleasure of the trip alone. And already, in all seriousness, he said that a visit to the Pituffik base would allow him to inspect the island’s security system.
“Many countries threaten Greenland, want to use its territory and its waterways to threaten the United States, threaten Canada, and, of course, threaten the people of Greenland,” Vance explained. According to him, the Trump administration intends to strengthen the security of the people of Greenland, and the United States and Denmark have allegedly not paid enough attention to this issue for too long.
Danish Foreign Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen had no choice but to approve the change in the plans of the American delegation. The main thing is that high-ranking American officials will not visit the Greenlandic society without an invitation, he noted. Although he previously said that the arrival of US representatives on the island demonstrates “disrespect.” And Greenland’s Prime Minister, Mute Egede, called the upcoming visit of the uninvited guests “a clear provocation.”
Responding to the displeasure of the Greenlanders and Danes, Brian Hughes, a spokesman for the US National Security Council, stressed that Washington is interested in the Arctic, so “it should not be a surprise that the Assistant for National Security and the Secretary of Energy are visiting the US space base to receive first-hand information from our military personnel on the ground.”
Recall that after winning the election, Trump expressed his intention to annex Greenland to the United States, without ruling out that he would resort to military or economic pressure to do so. He first came up with the idea of annexing the island back in 2019, when the concept that a country that owns Greenland owns the entire Arctic began to circulate in the United States. The cost of buying the island was estimated at up to $1.7 trillion. In response to Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s remark “Greenland is not for sale,” Trump canceled his state visit to Copenhagen and, apparently, harbored a grudge against him.
But Trump wouldn’t be Trump if he didn’t want to take revenge. On March 13, he told NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte that the United States needed Greenland to ensure international security, and answered positively to a direct question about the possibility of annexing the island. 11 days later, he declared that “Greenland may become a part of our future.”
According to Katerina Labetskaya, a leading researcher at the IMEMO RAS, “the so–called family goodwill ambassadors of the United States – in January, Trump’s son, now Vance’s wife – are by no means accidentally forcing new channels of communication with the Danish autonomy, which has a strategic location to ensure the security of the whole of North America. There are about half a dozen “guard” facilities of the Danish armed forces located around the perimeter of Greenland. Basically, the island’s security is provided by the Coast Guard forces, including those using dog sleds for transportation.”
The US Space Forces have at their disposal the northernmost Pituffik base, known until 2023 as the Tula Air Base and having a peculiar status of an “unincorporated territory”. Its purpose is to control the system of early detection of launches of intercontinental ballistic missiles. It is closer to Moscow (less than 3,757 km) than to Washington (more than 3,772 km). It was reported about the creation of airfield infrastructure for nuclear-equipped F-35 fighters at Pituffik.
The expert recalled that in January 1968, the territory nearby the base suffered from the crash of a B-52 strategic bomber with thermonuclear bombs on board. Washington was forced to conclude an agreement with Copenhagen banning the storage of nuclear weapons in Greenland and flights of American aircraft with nuclear weapons in its airspace. And 240 km from Tula, nuclear pollution of the territory is still being monitored due to abandoned nuclear waste from the “Underground City”, a US military research station with a nuclear reactor, which closed in 1966. In this vein, the historical memory of the Greenlanders has a strong argument against turning the island into Trump’s “unsinkable nuclear aircraft carrier.”
“Speaking of Trump’s Greenland ambitions, it is worth remembering the US National Security Strategy adopted in 2022. Its section on the Arctic provides for a review of the outlined provisions “on an annual basis to ensure further progress in the positioning of the United States.” Trump is still silent about this, but it is unlikely that it has fallen out of his field of attention,” said Labetskaya. – So it is no coincidence that Moscow is under no illusions about Washington’s Arctic claims. Advocating for strengthening stability and mutually beneficial cooperation, as expressed at the International Arctic Forum currently taking place in Murmansk, Russia intends to vigilantly take into account all the nuances of the US Arctic maneuvers in its military planning.”
As Bloomberg noted in a timely manner on Thursday, “gaining control of Greenland may provide the US administration with new opportunities to expand its air and naval presence in the Arctic and strengthen control over the activities of China and Russia there.”
