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Haley Ott is the international reporter for News themezone Digital, based in the News themezone London bureau.
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President Trump backed down on Wednesday of his insistence that the United States needs “own” Greenland to ensure the national security of the United States.
After speaking with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, he dropped his threat to impose tariffs against eight of the United States’ closest allies and later said the outline of a plan to resolve his administration’s standoff with Europe had been reached.
Trump called it a “final, long-term deal” on Greenland and said it’s “really great for the United States, it gets everything we wanted, including especially real national security and international security.”
But he offered few details. Here’s what we know about the status of negotiations:
- In his speech at the World Economic Forum, Trump took US military intervention to take control of Greenland off the table.
- Trump then met with Rutte and later said they had come up with “the framework for a future agreement.”
- Trump took his threat to impose 10% tariffs on all imports from eight European allies off the table.
- Rutte told Reuters that the framework agreement agreed with Trump would require NATO to step up security in the Arctic, but that Greenland’s mineral resources had not been discussed.
- A NATO spokesman said Rutte’s meeting with Trump was “very productive” and that the framework the president referred to would focus on the allies’ collective efforts to ensure Arctic security.
- The NATO spokesman also said negotiations between the United States, Denmark and Greenland would continue to ensure that neither Russia nor China gained a military or economic foothold in Greenland.
- UK Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said the new framework could include a new NATO “Arctic Sentry” security partnership.
“I’m actually more hopeful today than I have been in more than a year,” Mikkel Runge Olesen, senior foreign policy fellow at the Danish Institute of International Studies, told News themezone on Thursday from Copenhagen. “There is a cautious sense of optimism, maybe even a little relief in Denmark and Greenland right now. But it’s cautious, because we’ve seen things go wrong before.”
Olesen said it seemed that, after Trump’s meeting with Rutte, things were “moving away from that impasse where Trump wanted something that was completely impossible for Denmark and Greenland to give voluntarily, right, to something that could become a more classic negotiation about base rights, about authority, about ground rules for a possible agreement on a greater American presence.”

In a statement issued early Thursday, Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen appeared to support Rutte and the outcome of his meeting with Trump, noting that she had spoken with the NATO leader before and after his meeting with the US president.
“NATO is fully aware of the position of the Kingdom of Denmark. We can negotiate on everything political: security, investments, economy. But we cannot negotiate on our sovereignty,” Frederiksen said. “I have been informed that this has not been the case either.”
“The Kingdom of Denmark looks forward to continuing to engage in constructive dialogue with its allies on how we can strengthen security in the Arctic, including the United States government. Golden Dome“as long as this is done while respecting our territorial integrity,” Frederiksen said, referring to Trump’s plan for a new national missile defense system.
However, Aaja Chenmitz, a Greenlandic lawmaker in the Danish parliament, told the BBC on Thursday that “NATO in no way has the right to negotiate anything without us, Greenland. Nothing about us without us.”
In an interview with News broadcast Thursday, Trump said the agreement with the United States’ NATO allies would allow “a portion” of the Golden Dome system to be located in Greenland.
“And it’s a very important part, because everything happens over Greenland, if the bad guys start shooting, it happens over Greenland,” he said. “So, we took it down… it’s pretty foolproof.”
Finland’s Prime Minister Petteri Orpo told News themezone that he also thought Rutte had done “a really good job of reducing tension. Many of us were working together with American senators and the American administration to achieve this. But of course, this is not over. We still have a process going on, Danes, Greenlanders and Americans negotiating over the status of Greenland.”
“There is no need to aggravate the situation further. Now it is good to lower the temperature,” Orpo said.
Britain’s Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper offered a little more detail about what might have been agreed between Trump and his NATO partners, telling the BBC on Thursday that the UK had proposed working “through NATO on a new Arctic Sentry, which is similar to what we already have through NATO: a Baltic Sentry and an Eastern Sentry,” referring to existing regional security partnerships between NATO allies.
“Those are really combined operations programs that bring NATO countries together to work on a shared threat,” Cooper said. “So what we have proposed is to do an Arctic sentinel through NATO as well. What I understand from the discussions we have had with the NATO secretary general, who has made some of the points that he talked about yesterday, is that this will now be a focus of work across NATO with different Arctic countries coming together and supported by other NATO countries on how to achieve that shared security.”
While Trump has framed security concerns in the Arctic as a key factor in his push to acquire Greenland (specifically stating that Russia and China would seize the island if the United States did not do so), he has also repeatedly cited the Danish territory’s yet-to-be-tapped mineral resources as a priority.
Asked if the tentative agreement reached Wednesday included any mention of those resources, Cooper said he was “not aware of any discussion of that.”
Olesen, the Danish analyst, said he hoped the current long-standing defense agreement between the United States, Denmark and Greenland would be the starting point for negotiations.
“This could actually end up in something that will be an update to the defense agreement, maybe a little more of that is needed. Maybe we will see some negotiations on rare earth metals. Maybe we will see some kind of negotiation on agreements to limit the influence of China and Russia, something like that. But that in the negotiation, for the first time in a long time, a negotiated agreement seems to be within reach,” Olesen said.
In:
- Green Earth
- donald trump
- Russia
- Denmark
- Porcelain
- NATO


