US Vice President JD Vance is on Friday due to tour a US military base in Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation amid President Donald Trump’s bid to annex the Danish territory.
Trump insisted on Wednesday that the United States needed the vast Arctic island for national and international security, and has previously refused to rule out the use of force to get it.
“We have to have it,” he said.
Danish and Greenlandic officials, backed by the European Union, have insisted that will not happen.
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen denounced plans by a US delegation to visit Greenland uninvited — for what was initially a much broader visit — as “unacceptable pressure” on Greenland and Denmark.
In the end, the US visit has been reduced to Vance and his wife Usha visiting the US-run Pituffik Space Base in the northwest of the island.
Vance is to meet with US Space Force members and “check out what’s going on with the security” of Greenland, he said in a video message.
The vice president angered Danes in early February when he said Denmark was “not doing its job (protecting Greenland), and it’s not being a good ally”.
A fuming Frederiksen quickly retorted that Denmark had long been a loyal US ally, fighting alongside the Americans “for many, many decades”, including in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Key missile defence cog
The Pituffik base is an essential part of Washington’s missile defence infrastructure, its location in the Arctic putting it on the shortest route for missiles fired from Russia at the United States.
Known as Thule Air Base until 2023, the base served as a warning post for possible attacks from the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
It is also a strategic location for air and submarine surveillance in the northern hemisphere, which Washington claims Denmark has neglected.
Vance is “right in that we didn’t meet the American wishes for an increased presence, but we have taken steps towards meeting that wish”, Marc Jacobsen, a senior lecturer at the Royal Danish Defence College, told AFP.
He said Washington needed to present more specific demands if it wanted a proper Danish response.
In January, Copenhagen announced that it would allocate almost $2 billion to beef up its presence in the Arctic and north Atlantic.
The government said it planned to acquire three new specialised vessels for the polar region and two more long-distance surveillance drones, and would boost its satellite capacity.
‘Not for sale’
Greenland is home to 57,000 people, most of them Inuits, and is believed to hold massive untapped mineral and oil reserves, though oil and uranium exploration are banned.
Trump’s desire to take over the ice-covered territory, which is seeking independence from Denmark, has been categorically rejected by Greenlanders, their politicians and Danish officials.
The United States “knows that Greenland is not for sale”, the Danish prime minister said on Wednesday.
While all of Greenland’s political parties are in favour of independence, none of them support the idea of joining the United States.
A poll in late January also showed that a large majority of Greenlanders also reject the idea.
JD Vance’s visit comes at a time of political flux in Greenland.
Following elections in March, the territory has only a transitional government, with parties still in negotiations to form a new coalition government.
Initially, Vance’s wife Usha was supposed to attend a dogsled race in the town of Sisimiut, while various reports suggested US national security adviser Mike Waltz and Energy Secretary Chris Wright would also take part in the visit.
“Our integrity and democracy must be respected without foreign interference,” Greenland’s outgoing Prime Minister Mute Egede said in a post on Facebook on Monday.
He recalled that the government had not “sent out any invitations for visits, private or official”.
A visit to Greenland by Trump’s son Donald Jr on January 7 had also been seen as a provocation.
