REUTERS/Kevin LamarqueUS President Donald Trump has said he no longer feels obliged to think only of peace after he did not receive the Nobel Peace Prize, as he again repeated his demand for control of Greenland.
In a message to Norway’s prime minister, Trump blamed the country for not giving him the prize.
“Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper’ for the US”, Trump said in the message obtained by US media.
“The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland,” he added.
CBS News, the BBC’s US partner, confirmed the message and its contents.
Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre said he had received the text message on Sunday in response to a text he and Finland’s president Alexander Stubb had sent to Trump.
Støre said they had conveyed opposition to proposed tariff increases over the Greenland dispute, and pointed to the need to de-escalate, proposing a three-way phone call the same day.
Støre noted an independent committee, not the government of Norway, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Trump has made no secret of his desire to be awarded the annual prize.
He has increasingly insisted that the US needs to take over Greenland for national security reasons. The sparsely-populated but resource-rich Arctic island is well placed for early warning systems in the event of missile attacks and for monitoring vessels in the region.
Trump has repeated that he wants the US to buy Greenland and has not ruled out using military force against a member of the Nato security alliance to take it.
Over the weekend, he said he would impose a 10% tariff on goods from eight Nato allies starting in February if they oppose his proposed takeover, and threatened to raise it to 25% by June.
In his message to Støre, Trump said Denmark cannot protect Greenland from Russia or China, and questioned “why do they have a “right of ownership” anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also”.
“I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States,” he concluded.
UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said on Monday that any decision about the future status of Greenland “belongs to the people of Greenland and the Kingdom of Denmark alone”, and called the use of tariffs against allies “wrong”.
Danish Defence Minister Troels Lund Poulsen and Greenlandic Foreign Affairs Minister Vivian Motzfeldt are due to meet on Monday with Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte.
Last week, the Danish and Greenlandic governments, together with Nato allies, decided to increase military presence and exercise activity in the Arctic and the North Atlantic.
Several European states sent small numbers of military personnel to Greenland in a so-called reconnaissance mission.
As Trump’s recent message said, he has claimed to have ended eight wars since his second term as president began last year.
The White House has previously listed these as conflicts between Israel and Hamas, Israel and Iran, Pakistan and India, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Thailand and Cambodia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Egypt and Ethiopia, and Serbia and Kosovo.
BBC Verify has examined Trump’s claim which include a number of “wars” which had lasted just days, although were the result of long-standing tensions, and in some cases – for example Egypt and Ethiopia – there was no fighting to end.
There has also been fighting between Rwanda and the DRC, despite the two sides signing a peace agreement.
The peace prize was awarded to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado.
Later, when US forces seized and removed Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro from Caracas, accusing him of drug trafficking and other crimes, Trump did not endorse Machado as the country’s next leader and instead backed Maduro’s vice-president as the interim head of government.
Machado, who has praised Trump, met him at the White House last week and gave her medal to him. The Nobel Foundation had said the award could not “even symbolically, be passed on or further distributed”.
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