Denmark and Greenland seek meeting with Rubio as one lawmaker says Trump’s remarks “pissing people off”

The foreign ministers of Greenland and Denmark have requested a meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio “as soon as possible,” lawmaker Lars Christian Brask, Vice-Chair of the Danish Parliament’s Foreign Policy Committee, told CBS News on Wednesday.

He said he was “guessing that it will be a matter of putting facts right, and stop the misinformation and stop talking about wanting to acquire Greenland,” Brask said. “Greenland is not for sale.”

The request comes after Rubio told U.S. lawmakers Monday that the Trump administration’s goal was to buy the island, not take it by force, according to a lawmaker and a source familiar with his congressional briefing.

The Trump administration has not, however, taken the option of using the U.S. military off the table to meet its stated objective of “acquiring Greenland,” as White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt put it on Tuesday.

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

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

Both politicians emphasized that Greenland has always communicated to the U.S. that it is “open for business,” as far as American commercial interests in the region.

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

“You can explore, of course, if you live up to environmental regulations, etc., all the rare earths and minerals that you want in Greenland on a commercial basis,” said Brask. “There won’t be any hold back on that.” 

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

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

The U.S. seeking control of Greenland, “to get the strategic minerals is also a bit strange, given that nothing has prevented U.S. companies from going in for a long time.”

As for U.S. defense interests in Greenland, which President Trump has always stressed as a primary driver of his desire to control the island, Brask told CBS News there have been few hurdles to deepening such ties in the past, and very few at present.

“You put up warning systems, missile systems, soldiers, etc., just by asking, you can,” he said, referring to the United States. “It’s not you running the country, but you have the options, the possibility of having troops, material … equipment in Greenland, you just have to ask.”

The U.S. has maintained one military base in Greenland, the 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 U.S. had a line of radar stations across Greenland, and the U.S. chose to close down those radar stations because the Cold war ended. So in a sense, I think it’s just worth keeping that in mind when Donald Trump is out saying Denmark is a bad ally and everything,” Olesen told CBS News. “It’s tasks that the U.S. used to be happy to handle itself. That’s not to say that Denmark as an ally isn’t obligated to try to help the U.S. handling that problem, not at all. I’m just saying that the status quo before Donald Trump was that the U.S was very happy about being able to just have a free hand in Greenland to handle those issues.”