Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen will on Friday hold talks with her Greenlandic counterpart after a turbulent week that saw US President Donald Trump back down from his threats to seize the Arctic island and agree to talks.
Frederiksen will travel Friday to the Greenland capital Nuuk from Brussels, where she held talks early with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, who reached a purported deal with Trump on Greenland in Davos this week.
Rutte and Frederiksen agreed on Friday the alliance should boost security in the Arctic.
“Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen is traveling today from Brussels to Nuuk to meet with the Chair of the Naalakkersuisut, Jens-Frederik Nielsen,” the Danish PM’s office said on X.
Trump climbed down from his threats on Wednesday after agreeing with Rutte on a “framework” for the Danish autonomous territory.
The details remain scant but Trump said the United States “gets everything we wanted” and would be in force “forever”.
A source familiar with the talks told AFP the United States and Denmark will renegotiate a 1951 defence pact on Greenland.
The agreement, updated in 2004, already gives Washington carte blanche to ramp up troop deployments provided it informs the authorities in Denmark and Greenland in advance.
Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen, who, together with his Greenlandic counterpart held talks in Washington on January 14 with US Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, stressed Friday there had been no formal, detailed plan hammered out between Trump and Rutte.
Rather there “was a framework for a future agreement”, whereby, “instead of those drastic ideas about needing to own Greenland... (Trump) now wishes to negotiate a solution”, Lokke said.
Lokke said those negotiations would start soon.
“There was a meeting in Washington yesterday where it was reconfirmed that this is what we should do, and a plan was set for how we do it,” he said.
“We will get those meetings started fairly quickly. We will not communicate when those meetings are, because what is needed now is to take the drama out of this.”
The talks would focus on “security, security, and security”, he added.
Denmark and Greenland have stressed that sovereignty and territorial integrity would be a “red line” in the talks.
On Thursday, Greenland Prime Minister Nielsen said he was not aware of the contents of the Trump-Rutte agreement, but stressed no deal could be made without involving Nuuk.
“Nobody else than Greenland and the Kingdom of Denmark have the mandate to make deals or agreements,” he told reporters.
Frederiksen has repeatedly said the same thing.
A Danish colony for three centuries, Greenland, which has around 57,000 inhabitants, gradually gained autonomy in the second half of the 20th century and obtained self-rule in 2009.
But Denmark’s assimilation policies -- including de facto bans on the Inuit language and forced sterilisations -- have left Greenlanders bitter and angry.
While an overwhelming majority of the island’s inhabitants support a decades-long drive for full independence, Trump’s threats over the past year have led to a warming of ties between Denmark and Greenland.
“Greenlanders still have a lot of grievances concerning Denmark’s lack of ability to reconsider its colonial past,” Ulrik Pram Gad, a researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies, told AFP.
“But Trump’s pressure has prompted the wide majority of the (Greenlandic) political spectrum... to put the independence preparations -- always a long-term project -- aside for now,” he said.
Nielsen reiterated Thursday that if Greenland had to choose between remaining part of Denmark or joining the US, “we choose the Kingdom of Denmark, we choose the EU, we choose NATO.”
Meanwhile, Denmark’s public broadcaster DR on Friday reported that Danish troops deployed to Greenland were ordered to be armed and ready to fight in case of a military attack from the United States.
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