Greenland: Marco Rubio told lawmakers Trump wants to buy semiautonomous territory

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has told lawmakers that President Donald Trump plans to buy Greenland rather than invade it, while Trump has asked aides to give him an updated plan for acquiring the territory, US officials said Tuesday.

Mr Rubio made his remarks in a briefing Monday with lawmakers from the main armed services and foreign policy committees in both chambers of Congress. The same day, Trump told aides to deliver an updated plan.

The congressional briefing was focused on Venezuela, but lawmakers raised concerns about Mr Trump’s intentions on Greenland given aggressive remarks this week by the president and a top aide, Stephen Miller, two officials said.

Mr Rubio did not go into detail on what he meant by buying Greenland. Mr Trump spent decades in New York as a real estate developer, and one of his top diplomatic envoys, Steve Witkoff, comes from the same background. Mr Trump has coveted Greenland since his first term.

Greenland is a sparsely populated autonomous territory ruled by Denmark, a member of NATO.

On Tuesday, leaders of six NATO nations joined with Mette Frederiksen, the Prime Minister of Denmark, to issue a remarkable joint statement pushing back against Mr Trump’s assertions that the United States should take over Greenland. The nations that aligned with Denmark were Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Poland, all of which are close allies of the United States.

“Security in the Arctic must therefore be achieved collectively, in conjunction with NATO allies including the United States, by upholding the principles of the U.N. Charter, including sovereignty, territorial integrity and the inviolability of borders,” they said. “These are universal principles, and we will not stop defending them.”

“Greenland belongs to its people,” they added. “It is for Denmark and Greenland, and them only, to decide on matters concerning Denmark and Greenland.”

The White House issued a statement later Tuesday to news organizations that said Mr Trump had not ruled out a US invasion of Greenland.

“President Trump has made it well known that acquiring Greenland is a national security priority of the United States, and it’s vital to deter our adversaries in the Arctic region,” it said. “The President and his team are discussing a range of options to pursue this important foreign policy goal, and of course, utilizing the US military is always an option at the commander in chief’s disposal.”

On Sunday, Mr Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One that “Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place.”

Those two nations are active powers in the Arctic Circle, but Greenland is not surrounded by their ships. In fact, it is the United States that has a military base in Greenland. Vice President JD Vance visited the base with his wife, Usha, last year.

Trump has also focused on Greenland because of its potential wealth of critical minerals.

The second Trump administration’s National Security Strategy says dominance of the Western Hemisphere is a top priority. That has been brought into sharp focus with Mr Trump’s monthslong military pressure campaign against Venezuela and the seizure on Saturday by US troops of Nicolás Maduro, the country’s leader, and his wife, Cilia Flores, during a deadly attack. And Mr Trump said early last year that he planned to acquire Canada.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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