Officials of the US, Greenland and Denmark are engaged in ‘technical’ talks regarding security in the Arctic region, said US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, on Wednesday.
The idea to create a working group to address differences between the concerned nations came up during a meeting between the foreign ministers of Denmark and Greenland with US Vice President JD Vance and Rubio in Washington earlier this month following stiff resistance to US President Donald Trump’s ambitions to seize Greenland, a Danish territory.
“It begins today and it will be a regular process,” Rubio said about the working group’s meetings, as he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he also listed out ways that the US plans to control Venezuela’s oil.
“We’re going to try to do it in a way that isn’t like a media circus every time these conversations happen, because we think that creates more flexibility on both sides to arrive at a positive outcome,” Rubio said.
While a spokesperson for the Danish Embassy in Washington declined to comment on the start of the talks, Trump’s decision to takeover Greenland has distanced Washington and its allies and created a rift with the EU nations.
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After stiff pushback from European allies to his Greenland rhetoric, Trump announced this month he would slap new tariffs on Denmark and seven other European countries that opposed his takeover calls, only to abruptly drop his threats after a “framework” for a deal over access to the mineral-rich island was reached, with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte’s help.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week, Trump seemed to have softened his stance, saying he would take off the table the possibility of using American military force to acquire Greenland. This may also have been a result of Wall Street suffering its biggest losses in months over concerns that Trum’s Greenland ambitions could spur a trade war and fundamentally rupture NATO, a 32-member transatlantic military alliance.
On the US-EU rift, Rubio said on Wednesday that there’s “a little bit of work to do”, but that they’re “going to wind up in a good place”.
“I think you’ll hear the same from our colleagues in Europe very shortly,” he said before getting into a pointed exchange with Senator Tim Kaine about Trump repeatedly referring to Greenland as Iceland while at Davos.
“Yeah, he meant to say Greenland, but I think we’re all familiar with presidents that have verbal stumbles,” Rubio said, and added, in a veiled dig at former President Joe Biden. “We’ve had presidents like that before. Some made a lot more than this one.”
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