Press reports report a heated telephone conversation between Donald Trump and Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen. The American president is said to be determined to take control of the island.
Should we really take Donald Trump’s repeated threats seriously regarding his desire to appropriate Greenland for reasons of national security?
Yes, answers Financial Times in its Friday edition. The daily reports the recent remarks exchanged between the American president and Mette Frederiksen, the Danish Prime Minister, during a telephone conversation held last week.
According to the newspaper, citing several highly placed European sources, the conversation would have gone very badly.
Donald Trump would not only have insisted on his determination to take control of the island, but, faced with the resistance of the Prime Minister, the president would have been aggressive when she told him that the island was not his. sell.
Trump stayed “very firm”explains a source. And to declare: “Before, it was difficult to take it seriously. But I think it’s serious and potentially very dangerous.”
According to a former Danish official, Donald Trump threatened to take specific measures against Denmark, such as targeted tariffs.
Contacted by the FT, however, Mette Frederiksen’s office declared that it “did not recognize the interpretation of the conversation given by anonymous sources.”
Even before becoming president again,* Donald Trump already threatened, in early January, to impose customs duties in Denmark. The billionaire had also created a new controversy by refusing even to exclude the use of military force to take control of the island in the name of protecting the free world.
But why so much interest in Greenland? The island is a hotbed of essential raw materials and rare earths populated by just 57,000 inhabitants. The island is also located at a strategic crossroads as global warming will allow the opening of new maritime routes across the Arctic, an area also highly coveted by Russia and China.
And what do the Greenlanders think? An autonomous territory historically attached to Denmark, the island has its own institutions. Múte Egede, the Prime Minister of Greenland, has repeatedly recalled that the inhabitants of the island wanted independence rather than American or Danish citizenship. But he welcomed the interest of American companies in mining and tourism.
Faced with threats from Donald Trump, Europe has not yet reacted unanimously even if, taken separately, the reactions of the chancelleries, or of the head of European diplomacy, underlined the inviolable nature of the borders of the nations of the European Union.
