The United States will not take control of Greenland, the island’s new prime minister said on Sunday in response to President Trump’s latest assertion that he wants to annex the territory,
The New York Times reports.
“President Trump says that the United States ‘will get Greenland,’” Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen, who was sworn in on Friday, said on social media. “Let me be clear: The United States will not get it. We do not belong to anyone else. We decide our own future.”
On Saturday, Mr. Trump had told NBC News: “We’ll get Greenland. Yeah, 100 percent.”
In an interview with the network, Mr. Trump said he “absolutely” had had real conversations about annexing the icebound island, a semiautonomous territory that has been connected to Denmark for more than 300 years.
While there was a “good possibility that we could do it without military force,” Mr. Trump added, “I don’t take anything off the table.”
Mr. Trump’s escalating talk of seizing Greenland reflects an expansionist mind-set in his second term. His administration has also threatened to annex Canada and the Panama Canal.
Mr. Nielsen, who at 33 is Greenland’s youngest prime minister, was sworn in on the same day that an American delegation led by Vice President JD Vance arrived on the island. The territory’s political leaders had seen the trip as an aggressive escalation of Mr. Trump’s threats to seize the territory. Some officials complained about the timing of the visit, pointing out that it came just after Greenland held parliamentary elections.
