(NEW YORK) — Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio were expected to meet Wednesday at the White House with top diplomats from the Kingdom of Denmark and Greenland, its semiautonomous territory, U.S. officials said, as tensions escalate amid President Donald Trump’s threats to “acquire” the island — possibly even by military force.

When asked about his strong personal interest in the world’s largest island, Trump repeatedly cites its rare earth minerals and other natural resources he says are critical to U.S. national security.

“One way or the other, we are going to have Greenland,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One on Sunday. He told the New York Times last week that his desire to take over the territory is “what I feel is psychologically needed for success.”

At the same time, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen argues Trump using the U.S. military to seize Greenland would mark “the end of NATO” because Denmark, a NATO ally, like the U.S., is obligated to come to the island’s defense, as are other European NATO allies.

The European Union’s defense commissioner, Andrius Kubilius, echoed her grave hypothetical scenario, contending Europe would be forced to confront the U.S. if Greenland’s NATO allies had to protect it from an American takeover attempt.

NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte has downplayed the diplomatic alarms, saying the alliance is “not at all” in crisis and offered assurances it was focused on securing the Arctic from inroads by China and Russia, something Trump has said Greenland, and Denmark, have failed to do.

Denmark’s Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen said Wednesday’s meeting was aimed at understanding the U.S. position after weeks of heated rhetoric from Trump and his deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, who has said the U.S. has a “right” to Greenland and has notably declined to rule out military force to secure it.

“Our reason for seeking the meeting we have now been given,” Rasmussen said, “was to move this whole discussion, which has not become less tense since we last met, into a meeting room where we can look each other in the eye and talk about these things.”

But Greenland’s prime minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, was more direct ahead of the Washington meeting.

“We are now facing a geopolitical crisis,” he said. “If we have to choose between the U.S. and Denmark here and now, we choose Denmark, NATO, and the EU.”

On Tuesday, when was asked about the prime minister’s comments, Trump told reporters, “That’s their problem. I disagree with them. I don’t know who he is. Don’t know anything about him, but that’s going to be a big problem for him.”

Danes shocked by US rhetoric toward Greenland
Danish and Greenlandic officials have said consistently that Greenland is not for sale, even as Rubio appeared to try to temper Trump’s strong rhetoric — and defuse congressional opposition to using force — by floating the idea of the U.S. buying the island, saying Trump has talked about doing so since his first term.

A source familiar with the emerging rift said the policy pronouncement came as a shock, and that the U.S. goal to buy the island was never communicated to Copenhagen — which the source said had never received an offer of any kind.

State Department officials under Rubio had never driven a Greenland policy aimed at acquiring it, the source said, and Copenhagen had been satisfied with bilateral relations through most of 2025.

That changed in December, when Trump appointed Louisiana GOP Gov. Jeff Landry to be his special envoy to Greenland, a move designed to steer policy from the White House instead of through the State Department, the source said.

Vance, who traveled to Greenland last March, said last Thursday, “I guess my advice to European leaders and anybody else would be to take the president of the United States seriously.”

Following some of Trump’s comments that he wanted Greenland to be part of the U.S., which came days after he ordered the American military to attack Venezuela, Danish and Greenlandic officials in Washington went to Capitol Hill to voice concerns to lawmakers.

A source familiar with those meetings said there was a tone shift among Republicans, who said they took the president’s threats seriously – not as a laughing matter.

The top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee emerged from his meeting with the Danish envoys foreclosing any suggestion the future of Greenland was in dispute.

“I think it has been made clear from our Danish friends and our friends in Greenland that that future does not include a negotiation,” Sen. Roger Wicker said.

Meanwhile, a bipartisan group of American lawmakers was crossing the Atlantic for meetings in Copenhagen at the end of this week.

Arctic security as a central argument
Trump has said the U.S. would demand sovereignty over the island for its own national security purposes, suggesting China and Russia could pose a threat to America by taking the island themselves.

“Basically, their defense is two dog sleds,” Trump said of Greenland, where the U.S. has a military base and 150 troops stationed. “In the meantime, you have Russian destroyers and submarines and China destroyers and submarines all over the place.”

Danish officials have pointed to new investments there and a willingness to work with NATO and the U.S. on protecting the island. The kingdom announced a $6.5 billion Arctic defense package last year.

Denmark’s top lawmaker overseeing defense said the threat to the island did not come from the east, but instead from the U.S., its NATO ally across the Atlantic.

“It is my job to be on top of security in Greenland and I get all relevant information about it,” Rasmus Jarlov wrote in a post on X. “I can assure you that your fantasies about a big threat from China and Russia against Greenland are delusional. You are the threat,” he wrote of the U.S. “Not them.”

Provocations from China and Russia have been more concentrated near Alaska than Greenland, said Connor McPartland, who noted China has minimal commercial interests on the island and there’s been no uptick in Russian or Chinese naval activity near the island.

McPartland, who was the deputy director of the Pentagon’s Office for Arctic and Global Security until September, said Trump’s attention to Arctic security comes as a needed focus on an overlooked region.

“Caring about the Arctic is not just caring about the Arctic,” he said. “It has ramifications for our global security, not just in this one little sliver of at the top of the world.”

“In my office, we’d like to say that the Arctic is the front door to the homeland, because most of the really existential threats to the United States that we think about [like a] nuclear missile … are going to fly over the pole to get to the continental United States,” said McPartland, who is now an an assistant director with the Atlantic Council’s Transatlantic Security Initiative.

“It’s the fastest way to get to the United States, from Russia, from North Korea, from Iran, from China.”

A 1951 treaty between the U.S. and Greenland allows the American military, which has downsized its presence to only one base in Greenland, to upscale its footprint as it wants. During the Cold War, the U.S. had 17 military installations there.

“There aren’t really problems to be solved by the United States controlling Greenland,” said McPartland. “We can build infrastructure, we can station troops, we can operate from Greenland almost at will, as long as we recognize the sovereignty of Denmark and Greenland.”

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