After having bullied Canada and the president of Panama, Trump, by claiming ownership and control of the island in the Arctic, attacks not only an exemplary member of NATO, i.e. Denmark, but also the entire European Union
In early December, during a meeting at Mar-a-Lago, President-elect Donald Trump joked with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that Canada should become America's 51st state. Then yesterday, in a series of posts on his social media, Trump attacked the “ridiculous” transit fees imposed on US ships using the Panama Canal and threatened to regain control of the area which was returned in 1999. “Sovereignty of our country is non-negotiable,” responded Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino. “We'll see,” Trump insisted, posting an image of the US flag accompanied by the message “Welcome to the United States Channel.” But then the president-elect also added a third front, taking up a claim already made in 2019.”For the purposes of national security and freedom throughout the world, the United States of America believes that ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity,” he wrote, announcing the appointment of Ken Howery, co-founder of PayPal and the venture capital fund Founders Fund, as the new American ambassador to Denmark. Greenland is in fact a territory belonging to the Kingdom of Denmark, like the Faroe Islands, although self-governed and autonomous since 1978.
After having bullied Canada, a member of NATO and the North American free trade area, and the president of Panama, who was on the front line against Maduro's electoral fraud, Trump takes on not only one member example of NATO, i.e. Denmark, but also the entire European Union, which was trying to steal the largest island in the world, rich in raw materials such as gold, silver, copper, uranium, rare earths and probably also oil, from Chinese courtships ; an autonomous member of Denmark but not of the EU.
In recent years, Russia has also sought to lay claim to territory stretching as far as Greenland's Exclusive Economic Zone. And in April 2021, local elections led to the solemn rejection of a mining exploitation project in favor of an Australian company, whose main shareholder was however Chinese. In November 2023, however, an agreement was signed between the Minister of Natural Resources of Greenland, Naaja Nathanielsen, and the European Commissioner for Interinstitutional Relations and Strategic Perspectives, Maroš Šefčovič. Precisely to underline the importance of this agreement, Ursula von der Leyen flew to Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, on 15 March 2024, to sign two cooperation agreements together with Prime Minister Múte Bourup Egede, for a total of almost 94 million euros, as part of Global Gateway, the EU's investment strategy for the world. “New jobs in Greenland, greater security of supply for Europe; we can both benefit from closer cooperation in these areas”, we read in the official press release published by the European Commission, which on the occasion also inaugurated the first EU office in Nuuk.
Trump's proposal evokes an international policy from over a century ago, when, in 1917, Copenhagen sold the Virgin Islands to Washington for 25 million dollars. But they also forced Prime Minister Egede to make a statement to point out the obvious: “We are not for sale and we never will be.” It's 2016 again, hoping we don't go back to 1939 again.
