Trump asks Denmark to go from one to four bases in Greenland to renounce its annexation

“I am working with our department and other actors to try to develop more ports, more airfields, which offers more options to our secretary and the president, if we need them in the Arctic,” announced the general, a powerful voice in the Pentagon.

“They have been very, very cooperative partners,” Guillot celebrated, a few days before Danish public radio and television. DR revealed that Copenhagen had prepared the soldiers it deployed in Greenland in January to blow up the main landing strips for fear that Trump would order an invasion.

According to Guillot, however, the US president wants “greater access to various bases in Greenland, given the growing threat and strategic importance” of the island. Specifically, the Pentagon seeks to regain access to two bases whose troops abandoned during and after the Cold War, and control an additional facility.

If Copenhagen gives in to the Trump Administration’s demands, the United States would have up to four military bases on the island at its disposal. Currently, only one operates, the Pituffik air base, on the northwest coast of Greenland, where about a hundred soldiers remain deployed.

According to The New York Timesthe spokesperson for the Northern Command, Teresa Meadowsspecified that US military planners are targeting the villages of Narsarsuaq, located in the south of the island, which has a deep-water port, and Kangerlussuaq, in the southwest, which has a landing strip.

The United States already controlled military bases in these two locations. He abandoned the first in the 1950s and the second in the 1990s. Much of the infrastructure was dismantled after his departure.

Guillot’s statements in Congress shed light on the announcement that Trump made in January after meeting in Davos with the Secretary General of NATO, Mark Rutte. It was then that he claimed to have sealed “the framework for a future agreement with respect to Greenland and, indeed, the entire Arctic region.”

At the end of the meeting with the former Dutch prime minister on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum, Trump clarified that the “solution” they had just discussed “will be very positive for the United States of America and for all NATO nations.”

Questioned shortly after during an interview with the CNBCthe Republican president limited himself to saying that it was a “somewhat complex” agreement that will not have “any temporal limitations” and whose content will be known “later.” “It’s a long-term agreement,” he insisted then. “It’s the definitive long-term deal, and I think it puts everyone in a very good position, especially when it comes to security, minerals and everything else.”

However, the expansion of the US military presence in Greenland is one of the clauses included in the defense agreement that Washington and Copenhagen signed in 1951, after World War II, when the United States assumed the defense of the island.