Jeff Landry says US president is serious about acquiring the territory as US politicians make show of solidarity with Denmark<\/b>
\nJeff Landry says US president is serious about acquiring the territory as US politicians make show of solidarity with Denmark
Donald Trump\u2019s special envoy to Greenland has said a deal for Washington to take over the island \u201cshould and will be made\u201d as a US congressional delegation visited Copenhagen in a show of support.
Governor Jeff Landry said he planned to visit Greenland in March and said the US president \u201cis serious\u201d about acquiring the largely autonomous territory, which is part of the Danish kingdom.
His comments came as a bipartisan group of 11 members of the House and Senate \u2013 including the Republican senators Thom Tillis and Lisa Murkowski and the Democrat senator Chris Coons \u2013 travelled to the capital of Denmark to meet the Danish and Greenlandic leaders, Mette Frederiksen and Jens-Frederik Nielsen, in a show of solidarity against Trump\u2019s threats of military intervention.
\u201cI do believe that there\u2019s a deal that should and will be made once this plays out,\u201d Landry told Fox News on Friday.
He added: \u201cThe president is serious. I think he\u2019s laid the markers down. He\u2019s told Denmark what he\u2019s looking for, and now it\u2019s a matter of having secretary [of state, Marco] Rubio and vice-president JD Vance make a deal.\u201d
Denmark announced it had agreed to provide support to Greenland\u2019s emergency preparedness.
Torsten Schack Pedersen, Denmark\u2019s minister for public safety and emergency preparedness, said: \u201cIt is important that we stand together.\u201d
Peter Borg, Greenland\u2019s minister for fisheries, hunting, agriculture, self-sufficiency and environment, said his government \u201cappreciates the support from Denmark to strengthen preparedness in Greenland\u201d.
This week, Greenlanders living in the capital, Nuuk, said they were so afraid of the threat from the US that they were watching the skies and seas themselves. In the absence of emergency preparedness support from authorities, many said they had been left to work out their own plans on what to do in the case of emergency evacuation or capture by US forces.
During the congressional visit to Denmark, for which the Greenlandic flag, Erfalasorput, was flown at Christiansborg Palace, the US lawmakers were due to meet Danish and Greenlandic politicians as well as Frederiksen and Nielsen.
Arriving at a lunch meeting at the Confederation of Danish Industry, the Democrat Steny Hoyer told TV 2: \u201cKeep the faith. You\u2019ve got a lot of people with you.\u201d
After Wednesday\u2019s closely watched high-stakes meeting between Rubio, Vance and the foreign ministers of Greenland and Denmark, the two sides gave starkly contrasting accounts of what was agreed.
The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, on Thursday claimed that a delegation from Denmark and Greenland had agreed to \u201ccontinue to have technical talks on the acquisition of Greenland\u201d.
But Lars L\u00f8kke Rasmussen and Vivian Motzfeldt, the foreign ministers of Denmark and Greenland respectively, contradicted her claims.
L\u00f8kke said they had not made such an agreement, but had formed a working group to investigate whether it was possible to \u201caccommodate\u201d US security wishes for the Arctic region.
Motzfeldt said Leavitt had not been at the meeting, telling the Greenland newspaper Sermitsiaq: \u201cThere is a lot of work ahead, the situation is still very uncertain, but we have a new channel, a place where we can talk directly to each other.\u201d
On Thursday, Frederiksen said Greenland\u2019s defence was a \u201ccommon concern\u201d for Nato as international troops started arriving in Greenland from across Europe.
A spokesperson for the German defence ministry said on Friday that the reconnaissance mission would assess the viability of deploying Eurofighter jets to the territory.
\u201cIt is a matter of looking at whether the Arctic is secure and to what extent we can contribute to this together with our Nato partners,\u201d the spokesperson said.<\/p>\n