Greenland has rejected any idea of selling out to Washington after US President-elect Donald Trump said control over the Arctic island would be in his country’s strategic and national interest.
The autonomous territory of Denmark is sparsely inhabited and mostly covered by snow and ice. Trump has raised the issue of buying the island in his first term at the White House.
“Greenland is ours,” the island’s prime minister Mute Egede said in a statement quoted by AFP on Monday. “We are not for sale and will never be for sale. We must not lose our long struggle for freedom.”
Announcing the nomination of the new US ambassador to Denmark on Sunday, Trump said that “ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity” for the US, “for purposes of national security and freedom throughout the world.”
Trump did not specifically mention an offer to buy Greenland and it was unclear whether his phrasing implied the willingness of his incoming government to seize the island by force from Denmark, a fellow NATO member.
In August 2019, one of Trump’s aides confirmed that the then-president wanted to “take a look at a potential Greenland purchase,” describing it as “a strategic place” with a lot of valuable minerals.
The island sits on top of several strategic trade routes in the Arctic Ocean, as well as significant deposits of uranium and precious metals. Control over the island would also allow the US to claim around 900,000 square kilometers of the adjacent continental shelf.
Though Greenland is over 2.1 million square kilometers in size, it has only around 55,000 residents, almost 90% of them Inuit. Greenland has been recognized as Danish territory since the 1814 Treaty of Kiel. It was administered as a colony until 1953 and has enjoyed home rule since 1979. Since 2009, the island has also had a parliament and a government managing internal affairs, law enforcement, and coast guard duties. Greenland has two deputies in the Danish parliament and relies on Copenhagen for its security, foreign and monetary policy, and more than half its budget.
The island formally left the EU’s economic precursor in 1985 due to a dispute over fishing rights, but remains tied to the bloc as part of Denmark.
