
Danish officials fear Trump is much more serious about acquiring Greenland than in first term
CNN
When President-elect Donald Trump mused about buying Greenland from Denmark during his first administration, the Danish prime minister called the idea “absurd” and rebuffed him outright.
When President-elect Donald Trump mused about buying Greenland from Denmark during his first administration, the Danish prime minister called the idea “absurd” and rebuffed him outright. Now, Danish officials are being warned by Trump allies and advisers that he is serious, multiple Danish officials told CNN. And they’re carefully weighing how to respond without sparking a major rupture with a close ally and fellow NATO member. “The ecosystem supporting this idea is totally different now” than it was in 2019, when Trump first proposed it, said one senior Danish official. “This seems much more serious,” said another senior Danish official. Trump said on Tuesday that “we need Greenland for national security purposes.” “People really don’t even know if Denmark has any legal right to it, but if they do, they should give it up, because we need it for national security,” he said at a news conference at Mar-a-Lago. Asked about Trump’s comments on Wednesday, outgoing Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that “the idea expressed about Greenland is obviously not a good one, but maybe more important, it’s obviously not going to happen, so we probably shouldn’t waste a lot of time talking about it.”

More than two decades ago, on January 24, 2004, I landed in Baghdad as a legal adviser, assigned an office in what was then known as the Green Zone. It was raining and cold, and my duffle bag was thrown into a puddle off the C-130 aircraft that had just done a corkscrew dive to reach the runway without risk of ground fire. Young American soldiers greeted me as we piled into a vehicle, sped out of the airport complex and then along a road called the “Highway of Death” due to car bombs and snipers.












