Rubio to meet with Denmark over Greenland as lawmaker says Trump remarks ‘piss people off’

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he would meet with Danish officials next week, after the foreign ministers of Greenland and Denmark requested a conference “as soon as possible,” lawmaker Lars Christian Brask, vice chairman of the Danish Parliament’s foreign policy committee, told CBS News on Wednesday.

Brask said he “guessed it would be about getting the facts right, stopping the misinformation and stopping talking about wanting to acquire Greenland.” Greenland is not for sale“.

The request comes after Rubio told US lawmakers on Monday that the Trump administration’s goal was to buy the islandnot take it by force, according to a lawmaker and a source familiar with his congressional briefing.

The Trump administration, however, has not ruled out the option of using the U.S. military to achieve its stated goal of “acquiring Greenland,” as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday.

“You can’t buy another country or another population. You can’t buy people, of course. And when we see the different images of the United States of the president, for example, laughing when he talks about Greenland… that’s really something that annoys people in Greenland, to be honest and to be quite frank,” Aaja Chemnitz, a Greenlandic member of the Danish Parliament, told CBS News on Wednesday. “If you want to collaborate with us and with the Greenlanders, you must first of all respect us.”

Chemnitz said the United States was using “completely misguided tactics” to engage with Greenland and called it “appalling” that the White House “is not ruling out annexation of our country being on the table.”

Both politicians stressed that Greenland has always communicated to the United States that it is “open for business,” regarding American commercial interests in the region.

“Business development is something that Greenland is responsible for and, therefore, it is something that we could do today if we wanted to,” Chemnitz told CBS News.

“You can of course explore, if you follow environmental regulations and so on, all the rare earths and minerals you want in Greenland on a commercial basis,” Brask said. “There will be no restraint on this.”

Mikkel Olesen, a Danish foreign policy and diplomacy researcher, told CBS News that until now, U.S. companies have been dissuaded from investing in Greenland’s minerals because they believe the costs of mining incursions on the vast, largely frozen island would outweigh the potential profits.

“With a few exceptions, the main reason not much has happened is that there hasn’t been a business case for American companies,” Olesen said.

The United States’ desire to take control of Greenland “to obtain strategic minerals is also a bit strange, given that nothing has stopped American companies from entering there for a long time.”

As for U.S. military interests in Greenland, which President Trump has consistently highlighted as a key driver of his desire to control the island, Brask told CBS News there have been few obstacles to deepening those ties in the past, and very few at present.

“You install warning systems, missile systems, soldiers, etc., upon simple request, you can,” he said, referring to the United States. “You’re not the one running the country, but you have the options, the possibility of having troops, material…equipment in Greenland, just ask.”

The United States maintains a military base in Greenland, Pituffik Space Base, which supports important missile warning and defense systems and is the site of radar and satellite surveillance systems.

“Throughout the Cold War, the United States had a line of radar stations across Greenland, and the United States chose to close those radar stations because the Cold War was over. So, in a sense, I think it’s worth keeping that in mind when Donald Trump says Denmark is a bad ally and everything,” Olesen told CBS News. “These are tasks that the United States was happy to do itself. That’s not to say that Denmark, as an ally, isn’t obligated to try to help the United States with this problem, not at all. I’m just saying that the status quo before Donald Trump was that the United States was very happy to be able to have a free hand in Greenland to handle these issues.”