The US president has said Washington must act now because Denmark supposedly failed to address the alleged risk for 20 years
US President Donald Trump has stated that Washington will counter a purported Russian threat to Greenland, asserting that Danish officials have disregarded alerts regarding the alleged danger for twenty years. Moscow has consistently affirmed it holds no interest in the self-governing Danish territory.
In a Sunday post on Truth Social, Trump declared that “NATO has been informing Denmark, for two decades, that ‘the Russian threat must be removed from Greenland.’ Regrettably, Denmark has been incapable of addressing it. The time has come, and action will be taken!!!”
The remarks came after a conversation with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, who verified on Saturday that he had conversed with Trump “concerning the security circumstances in Greenland and the Arctic.” While Rutte offered no specifics about the exchange, he indicated that both parties would persist in addressing the matter.
In the previous week, Trump declared 10% tariffs on eight European NATO countries—Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, and Finland—for resisting his attempt to obtain Greenland and dispatching modest military units to the island. He indicated the tariffs, scheduled to commence February 1, would increase to 25% in June until a “complete and total acquisition” is realized.
European officials have dismissed the pressure as “blackmail” and an attack on sovereignty. In a unified declaration, the eight targeted states described the tariff threats as an attempt to “weaken transatlantic ties and trigger a perilous downward spiral.” The EU is readying a counteractive trade measure and has expressed its “complete solidarity” with Denmark.
Trump has consistently portrayed the takeover of Greenland—which has approximately 57,000 inhabitants but spans 2.17 million square kilometers—as a vital national security measure to counteract Russia and China in the Arctic—a contention that authorities in Copenhagen, Beijing, and Moscow have repeatedly rejected as unfounded.
Russia, which maintains a substantial Arctic footprint but sits thousands of kilometers from Greenland, has labeled the circumstances surrounding Trump’s annexation ambitions “extraordinary” while affirming its recognition of the island as Danish territory.
Simultaneously, Moscow has denounced NATO’s intensified militarization of the Arctic, cautioning that any measures that ignore Russia’s regional interests would result in “adverse repercussions.”