Denmark’s foreign minister said on Tuesday that no country should be able to help another country following US President Donald Trump’s new comments about taking control of Greenland.
Trump, who took office on Monday, set off alarm bells in early January by ruling out military intervention to bring the Panama Canal and Greenland – an autonomous Danish territory – under US control.
“We certainly cannot have a world order where countries, if they are big enough, no matter what they are called, can help as much as they want,” Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen told reporters on Tuesday.
Although he did not mention Greenland in his inauguration speech on Monday, Trump was asked about it by reporters in the Oval Office afterward.
Trump responded, “Greenland is a wonderful place, we need it for international security.”
“I’m sure Denmark will come along – it’s costing them a lot of money to maintain it, to maintain it,” he said.
Locke said he was “satisfied” that Trump did not mention Greenland as a priority in his speech, but said the “rhetoric” was the same.
“I can’t rule out any crisis from this,” Locke told Danish media, as he has said other things about US territorial expansion.
Greenland’s Prime Minister Mute Egede has insisted that “Greenland is not for sale” but that the territory is open to trade with the US.
Among Danes, Greenland’s omission from the opening speech brought some relief.
“He didn’t mention Greenland or Denmark in his speech last night, so I think there’s room for diplomacy,” actor Donald Anderson, 68, told AFP.
On Monday, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said in a post on Instagram that Europe would need to “navigate a new reality.”
Noting the right of the Greenlandic people to self-determination, the head of government also stressed the need for Denmark to maintain its alliance with the US – which he described as the most important for Denmark since World War II.
Several Danish party leaders were summoned to the Prime Minister’s Office on Tuesday to be briefed on the situation.
“We have to recognize that the next four years will be difficult years,” Green Left leader Pia Olsen Dyher told reporters after meeting Frederiksen.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
