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US secretary of state Marco Rubio will meet with his Danish counterpart next week, as the White House said it was considering all options to acquire the semi-autonomous territory of Greenland, including military force.
“I will be meeting with them next week. We will have those conversations with them then,” Rubio said after briefing lawmakers on the recent US military operation to seize Venezuelan authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro.
Asked about comments from the White House on Tuesday that Washington had not ruled out “utilising the US military” to seize Greenland, which is rich in natural resources, Rubio said that all US presidents retain the option to address perceived threats to national security “through military means”.
“As a diplomat, which is what I am now and what we work on, we always prefer to settle it in different ways,” he added.
The request to meet came from officials in Denmark and Greenland. The territory’s foreign minister, Vivian Motzfeldt, told Danish broadcaster DR that she would also attend the meeting.
“Nothing about Greenland, without Greenland,” she said.
President Donald Trump on Sunday said he would take action against a number of countries in the western hemisphere following the capture of Maduro, and reiterated his desire to acquire Greenland.
“We need Greenland,” he said. “It’s so strategic.”
At a briefing on Wednesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that senior administration officials were discussing a potential purchase of Greenland. Trump sees US control of the territory as “in the best interest of the United States to deter Russian and Chinese aggression in the Arctic region”, she told reporters.
Greenland is part of Denmark, which is a Nato ally. Leavitt said the president remained committed to the military alliance and its collective defence agreement. “We will always be there for Nato, even if they are not there for us,” she said, echoing Trump’s remarks on social media on Wednesday.
But Leavitt did not rule out a military intervention.
“All options are always on the table for president Trump as he examines what’s in the best interest of the United States, but I will just say that the president’s first option always has been diplomacy.”
The Trump administration’s suggestion that it could use military force to seize Greenland has prompted alarm among its allies in Europe.
“The national security of some cannot come — and has never come — at the expense of the sovereignty of others. And even more so, when we are talking about long-standing mutually supporting allies,” a spokesperson for the European Commission said in response to the White House’s statement.
The suggestion of taking the Arctic island by force has also received a cool reception from lawmakers in Trump’s Republican party.
“All this stuff about military action and all of that. I don’t even think that’s a possibility. I don’t think anybody is seriously considering that, and in the Congress we are certainly not,” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said on Wednesday.
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Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, who has criticised a number of Trump’s foreign policy moves, said that seizing Greenland by force would be a “catastrophic act of strategic self-harm to America and its global influence”.
“The northernmost reaches of the globe may well shape our strategic competition with major adversaries like Russia and China for decades to come. But if America behaves as though winning that competition requires trampling the sovereignty, respect and trust of our allies, we will surely lose it,” he said.
Additional reporting by Richard Milne
