President Trump stepped back on Wednesday from his insistence that the United States needs to “own” Greenland to ensure U.S. national security.
After talks with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, he dropped his threat to impose tariffs against eight of America’s closest allies and then said the framework of a plan to resolve his administration’s standoff with Europe had been reached.
Mr. Trump called it an “ultimate long-term deal” on Greenland, saying it’s “really fantastic for the USA, gets everything we wanted, including especially real national security and international security.”
But he offered few details. Here’s what we know about where negotiations stand:
- In his speech, Mr. Trump took U.S. military intervention to seize control of Greenland off the table.
- Mr. Trump then met with Rutte and, afterward, said they had come up with “the framework of a future deal.”
- Mr. Trump took his threat to impose 10% tariffs on all imports from eight European allies off the table.
- Rutte told Reuters the framework deal agreed with Mr. Trump would require NATO to step up on Arctic security, but that Greenland’s mineral resources had not been discussed.
- A NATO spokesperson said Rutte’s meeting with Mr. Trump was “very productive,” and the framework the president referred to would focus on collective allied efforts to ensure Arctic security.
- The NATO spokesperson also said negotiations between the U.S., Denmark and Greenland would continue, to ensure that neither Russia or China get a military or economic foothold in Greenland.
- U.K. Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said the new framework could include a new NATO “Arctic Sentry” security partnership.
“I’m actually more hopeful today than I have been for over a year,” Mikkel Runge Olesen, a foreign policy senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies, told CBS News on Thursday.
Olesen said it seemed that, after Mr. Trump’s meeting with Rutte, things were “moving away from that deadlock where Trump wanted something that it was completely impossible for Denmark and Greenland to give willingly, right, to something where it might become a more classical negotiation about base rights, about authority, about ground rules for a likely increased American presence agreement.”
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In a statement released early Thursday, Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen appeared to support Rutte and the outcome of his meeting with Mr. Trump, stressing that she had spoken with the NATO leader both before and after his meeting with the U.S. president.
“NATO is fully aware of the position of the Kingdom of Denmark. We can negotiate on everything political; security, investments, economy. But we cannot negotiate on our sovereignty,” Frederiksen said. “I have been informed that this has not been the case either.”
“The Kingdom of Denmark wishes to continue to engage in a constructive dialogue with allies on how we can strengthen security in the Arctic, including the U.S.’s Golden Dome, provided that this is done with respect for our territorial integrity,” Frederiksen said, referring to Mr. Trump’s plan for a new missile defense system.
Finland’s Prime Minister, Petteri Orpo, told CBS News that he also thought Rutte had done, “a really good job in sort of de-escalating things. Many of us were working together with American senators and the U.S. administration to do that. But of course, it’s not over. We still have a process going on, Danes, Greenlanders, and Americans negotiating on the status of Greenland.”
There’s “no need to escalate the situation any further. Now it’s just good to bring down the temperature,” Orpo said.
Britain’s Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper offered a little more detail on what might have been agreed between Mr. Trump and his NATO partners, telling the BBC on Thursday that the U.K. had proposed working “through NATO on a new Arctic Sentry, which is similar to what we already have through NATO — a Baltic Sentry and an Eastern Sentry,” referring to existing regional security partnerships among NATO allies.
“Those are really combined operations programs that draw together NATO countries to work on a shared threat,” Cooper said. “So what we have proposed is to do an Arctic sentry through NATO as well. What my understanding is from the discussions we’ve had with the NATO general secretary, who has set out some of the points that he was talking about yesterday, is that this is now going to be a focus of work through NATO with different Arctic countries coming together and supported by other NATO countries on how we do that shared security.”
While Mr. Trump has framed Arctic security concerns as a key driver of his push to acquire Greenland — specifically claiming Russia and China would take over the island if the U.S. didn’t — he has also repeatedly cited the Danish territory’s yet-to-be exploited mineral resources as a priority.
Asked if the tentative deal reached on Wednesday included any mention of those resources, Cooper said she was “not aware of any discussions on that at all.”
Olesen, the Danish analyst, said he expected the long-standing defense agreement between the United States, Denmark and Greenland to be the starting point for negotiations.
“This could indeed end in something that will be an update of the defense agreement, perhaps a little bit more than that will be needed. Perhaps we will see some negotiations about rare earth metals. Perhaps we will see some sort of negotiation about limiting Chinese and Russian influence agreements, something like that. But that in negotiation, for the first time in a long while, a negotiated settlement does seem to be within reach,” Olesen said.