By all appearances, when the White House dispatched an uninvited delegation to Greenland, the move was intended to be a charm offensive of sorts. Vice President JD Vance, his wife and his colleagues hoped their visit to the island — which Donald Trump is apparently determined to acquire — would make a good opening impression with locals.
If that was the goal, the administration failed quite spectacularly. As my MSNBC colleague Clarissa-Jan Lim explained, officials in Greenland made a series of efforts to make clear that they did not want the U.S. delegation to be there, and as part of his visit, Vance took the opportunity to publicly and needlessly admonish Denmark — a reliable NATO ally for many years.
The Republican, as part of a press conference at a U.S. military base, added, “The president has said clearly he doesn’t think military force is going to be necessary, but he absolutely believes Greenland is an important part of the security, not just of the United States, but of the world and, of course, the people of Greenland, too.”
The word “but” did a lot of work in that sentence.
The circumstances were, by any fair measure, ridiculous. The American vice president took a sojourn to an island without an invitation, held a press conference on foreign soil, suggested the United States would acquire the island that does not wish to be acquired, and slammed a trusted ally that has done nothing wrong.
A day later, his boss made matters worse with some fresh comments to NBC News.
The president on Saturday also said he has “absolutely” had real conversations about annexing Greenland, which is currently a semiautonomous Danish territory. “We’ll get Greenland. Yeah, 100%,” Trump said. He added that there’s a “good possibility that we could do it without military force” but that “I don’t take anything off the table.”
Note, it was a couple of weeks ago when Trump, while seated alongside NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, predicted that he will ultimately succeed in his quest to take control of Greenland. “I think it’ll happen,” the president said when he asked what his vision is for the potential annexation of the island.
As part of the same set of comments, the American president also suggested that he might deploy additional U.S. troops to Greenland.
Two weeks later, the Republican White House had an opportunity to categorically reject the idea of using military force against an ally as part of Trump’s territorial ambitions. That clearly did not happen.
A day after Trump effectively guaranteed that the United States would acquire Greenland, the island’s new prime minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, said via social media, “President Trump says that the United States ‘will get Greenland.’ Let me be clear: The United States will not get it. We do not belong to anyone else. We decide our own future.”
The charm offensive, in other words, is off to a rough start.
Of course, Trump’s idea isn’t just unpopular abroad, it’s unpopular in his own country, too: The latest Fox News poll asked respondents about various parts of the president’s agenda, and the least popular idea was taking over Greenland, with 70% of Americans opposed to the president’s plan.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
