Government proposes military alliance with US as Vance heads to Greenland
The biggest story of this week in Denmark was the visit by a US delegation to Greenland. Vice President JD Vance and his wife Usha Vance are on their way to the Pituffik space base at the time of writing.
The visit is quite different to the one originally announced last weekend, in which Usha Vance would have travelled to Nuuk and Sisimiut in Greenland and attended a dog sled race.
Following strong criticism of the uninvited, unofficial visit by both the Greenlandic and Danish governments, the schedule was changed with JD Vance’s presence added but any contact between the delegation and Greenlandic society removed.
The Vances will now only go to the US military base. That came after reports of planned demonstrations against the United States in the two Greenlandic towns.
Broadcaster TV2 meanwhile reported that the Nuuk Art Museum rejected a visit from Usha Vance, and that US representatives knocking on doors of local residents in the capital to ask if they wanted to be visited by the second lady were also roundly rejected.
“If you’re being analytical, you have to interpret this as a sign that someone in the US has realised that the narrative about a Greenlandic population standing with open arms and desperate ambitions to become Americans is a false one,” Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen noted.
Rasmussen also said he hopes Vance will get “a good briefing” on Greenland during his visit to Pituffik.
“Because the level of knowledge on this issue needs to be improved,” he told reporters in Copenhagen on Thursday.
It remains to be seen what statements Vance will actually make about Greenland and Denmark during and after his visit, but you can probably expect something that will do little to improve relations between the two countries and the US.
Against this backdrop, the government on Friday tabled a bill for a new defence cooperation with the United States.
The bill will now go into a hearing phase and will get its first reading in parliament on April 11th.
The agreement was initially made with the Biden administration and was announced in December 2023.
At the time it was fairly uncontroversial and seen in context of the Ukraine war, but events since have resulted in opposition politicians questioning whether it is in Denmark’s interest to go through with it.
It’s not just this particular deal with the US that has come under question, either. Earlier in the week, Defence Minister Troels Lund Poulsen defended the decision to go ahead with Denmark’s purchase of F35 jets from the United States.
"It's completely unrealistic to think that we could stop cooperating with the United States and buying its military equipment.
"It's problematic to see a new US administration say things with which we don't agree but to pull the plug on more than 75 years of cooperation is, in my opinion, completely wrong," he said.
Conservative Danish politician Rasmus Jarlov is one of the most outspoken critics of the Trump administration generally and has also commented on the F35 deal.
“As one of the decision makers behind Denmark’s purchase of F35’s, I regret it,” Jarlov said in a post on X.
“I can easily imagine a situation where the USA will demand Greenland from Denmark and will threaten to deactivate our weapons and let Russia attack us when we refuse (which we will even in that situation),” he continued.
“Therefore, buying American weapons is a security risk that we can not run,” he concluded.
While that might sound like a far-fetched hypothetical scenario, Trump’s aggressive “have to have” stance on Greenland also provoked a reaction from Defence Minister Poulsen this week. Poulsen called the President’s latest comments a “veiled threat” in an interview with broadcaster TV2.
But the bill states that the defence agreement is "a natural development of the long-term cooperation between Denmark and the United States on security and defence."
The agreement "sends a clear signal that Denmark is taking even greater responsibility for European security,” according to the text of the proposal.
Poulsen recently reiterated that the bill will proceed as planned despite the deteriorating relations between the two countries.
The agreement cannot be cancelled during the first ten years, after which either country can terminate it with one year’s notice. It does not apply to the Faroe Islands or Greenland.
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