Denmark’s leader responds after Trump says ‘we do need Greenland’ – USA Today

Denmark’s prime minister urged the White House to “stop the threats” about taking over Greenland, after President Donald Trump reiterated his wish to do so in a weekend interview with The Atlantic magazine.

Mette Frederiksen said on Jan. 4 that it “makes absolutely no sense to talk about the U.S. needing to take over Greenland. The U.S. has no right to annex any of the three countries in the Danish Kingdom.”

Trump spoke to the magazine a day after the United States captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Trump said the United States would temporarily “run” the Latin American country. The move has elevated concerns again in Copenhagen that the same could happen with Greenland, a Danish territory with limited self-rule.

“We do need Greenland, absolutely. We need it for defense,” Trump said in the interview.

Speaking later the same day to reporters on Air Force One, Trump said he would revisit the topic of Greenland in “20 days.” It wasn’t immediately clear why he chose this timeframe.

The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request to explain the timing.

Frederiksen’s comments also followed a post from Katie Miller, the wife of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. She posted a Greenland map in the colors of the American flag alongside the word “SOON.”

Greenland’s leader also issued a statement on Jan. 4.

“When the President of the United States says that ‘we need Greenland’ and links us to Venezuela and military intervention, it’s not just wrong. It’s disrespectful,” Jens-Frederik Nielsen said.

Denmark, like the United States, is a NATO member, which means that both countries are covered by the alliance’s security guarantee. Denmark also has a separate defense agreement with the United States that allows the Pentagon access to Greenland. Trump has repeatedly suggested that the United States needs to annex Greenland because of its strategic location and mineral wealth. His remarks have confounded Danish and Greenlandic officials.

Maduro is scheduled to appear in federal court at noon on Jan. 5 in New York. He faces charges connected to what the U.S. is describing as a “narco-terrorism conspiracy,” which he denies.

Officials in China and Russia have urged the United States to release Maduro and his wife, Cilia Adela Flores de Maduro, who was also captured at their home on Jan. 3 during the U.S. military attack on Venezuela.

Some European officials and legal and foreign affairs experts have expressed concerns about the legality of the U.S. operation and seizure and what signal it sends to authoritarian leaders around the world.

“Military force is justified only in response to a clear, credible and imminent threat to the security of the United States or its treaty allies,” the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a Washington think tank, said in a statement. “Venezuela, whatever its internal dysfunctions or connections to the international drug trade, does not pose such a threat. Using force absent that standard is not defense; it is aggression. It substitutes coercion for diplomacy and power for principle.”

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that the United States is not at war with Venezuela itself, only “against drug trafficking organizations.”