Denmark floats NATO mission on island

Despite Trump’s louder calls to take control of Greenland, the US has not prioritized the Arctic island in terms of military investment in recent years, argued Jeppe Kofod, who served as Denmark’s foreign minister between 2019 and 2022 and worked with the former Trump administration on the Greenland file.

Speaking to DW on Monday, Kofod looked back on how he worked with the first Trump administration, with Mike Pompeo as US Secretary of State, to appease Trump the first time he floated the idea of buying Greenland during his first term in office.

He remembered the initial idea as “a shock.”

Kofod went over the efforts he exerted to give the US an alternative deal at the time. This involved reopening a US consulate in Nuuk in 2020 as well as an economic cooperation agreement between the US and Greenland.

“So something that started as a conflict ended as closer cooperation, which we all were very happy about,” Kofod said.

The former foreign minister, who is now CEO of consulting company Kofod Global, noted the Danish investment in Greenland in recent years, contrasting it against what he said was a US scale back of investment.

“Denmark has [in] recent years put more troops in Greenland, more military assets. And alongside other NATO countries, we are, as we speak, deploying much more assets to the High North and Greenland,” he noted.

Meanwhile, he argued, the US “in the last decades has really, really scaled back.”

“I mean, when there was most troops and soldiers, military staff from the US, this was around 10,000 in the high days of the Cold War, maybe 15 to 17 bases in Greenland, US bases. Now they’re down to one military base, space base and only 150 troops. So [the] US has not prioritized to put more troops in Greenland,” Kofod said.

Kofod reiterated warnings that the NATO alliance would come to an end should Trump deliver on his threat.

He said if the US were to take Greenland against the will of fellow NATO member Denmark, “that will be the end of NATO and it will lead to open conflict over the Atlantic between all of Europe and [the] United States and also [the] United States and most of the rest of the world.”