Vice President JD Vance traveled to Greenland to promote President Donald Trump’s claim that America has to have the Danish territory—and that Greenlanders would be more secure under U.S. protection.
President Trump “has repeatedly suggested the U.S. should take over Greenland ‘one way or the another’ for national security purposes,” ABC News reported. On Friday in the Oval Office, Trump said: “We have to have Greenland. It’s not a question of: Do you think we can do without it? We can’t.”
During his visit to Greenland, Vance added, “We can’t just ignore the president’s desires.”
The original plan appeared to be a charm offensive: Second Lady Usha Vance would travel to Greenland with one of the couple’s sons to attend cultural events in a show of support to pave the way for the administration’s efforts to annex one of the world’s largest islands.
85% of Greenlanders oppose any form of U.S. takeover of Greenland, CNN has reported. But when the advance team could find not a single Greenlander to welcome Vance and her son, that mission was scrapped.
“Amid the lack of enthusiasm among Greenland residents about the Americans’ visit, JD Vance announced in a video on X that he would be joining his wife on the trip,” USA Today reported.
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“There was so much excitement around Usha’s visit to Greenland this Friday that I decided that I didn’t want her to have all that fun by herself, and so I’m going to join her,” Vance said, a remark that was “at odds” with reports stating that the “Americans’ charm offensive mission has failed.”
It was the first of several calculated claims the Vice President has unleashed about Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark.
“The president has said clearly he doesn’t think that military force is going to be necessary,” Vance told reporters while speaking at Pituffik Space Base, a U.S. military base operating under NATO. “But he absolutely believes that Greenland is important part of the security, not just of the United States, but of the world, and of course, the people of Greenland, too.”
“It’s very simple. Greenland really matters for the security of the United States,” Vance continued. But he claimed that Greenland is “extremely vulnerable right now, and if the people of Greenland were willing to partner with the United States and I think that they ultimately will partner with the United States, we could make them much more secure, we could do a lot more protection, and I think they’d fare a lot better economically as well.”
The Vice President’s remarks were made on the same day the stock markets in the U.S. crashed, reports show inflation rising, experts are warning of “stagflation” and increasing unemployment all in anticipation of President Trump’s tariffs, more of which are set to be introduced next week.
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“This has to happen, and the reason it has to happen,” Vance threatened. “I hate to say it is because our friends in Denmark have not done their job in keeping this area safe. They they just haven’t done It . it it’s very simple for for all of our our friends in the American media who attack the administration for pointing out the obvious, what is the alternative to give up the North Atlantic, to give up the Arctic to China, to Russia, and other regimes that don’t have the best interest the American people at heart.”
“We have no other option, we need to take a significant position in Greenland to keep the people here safe, but to keep our own country safe too.”
Vance went on to say, “our friends in Denmark, I hate to say it, have not done their job in keeping this area safe.”
Dr. Jana Puglierin, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), asked why the Vice President ignored NATO.
NATO solves all the concerns Vance listed. As the New York Times columnist David French explained: “We don’t have to own Greenland to protect our interests. Denmark is part of NATO. We’re bound to defend each other, and we have every ability to defend our interests without an absurd and unlawful annexation.”
“As China and Russia have taken greater and greater interest in Greenland, in this base, in the activities of the brave Americans right here,” Vance also said, “we know that too often our allies in Europe have not kept pace. They haven’t kept pace with military spending. And Denmark has not kept pace in devoting the resources necessary to keep this base, to keep our troops, and in my view to keep the people of Greenland safe from a lot of very aggressive incursions from Russia, from China and from other nations.”
CBS News’ Jim LaPorta, who has written extensively on the military, remarked: “82 years ago. That was the last ‘aggressive incursion’ by a military force in Greenland.”
Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday warned that President Trump’s frequent rhetoric promoting a U.S. takeover of Greenland is not “just some eccentric talk of the new American administration.”
Veteran and veterans activist Paul Rieckhoff blasted Vance.
“Another ridiculous and nationally embarrassing statement, position and photo op,” Reikhoff wrote. “Vance is becoming more ridiculous and shameless by the day. He makes Dan Quayle look like a superstar. This charade is a perfectly terrible bookend to the week after Noem’s disgusting debacle. Dear Greenland (and world), please know that he does not speak for most Americans.”
“This is called blatant aggression,” warns economist and former Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council, Anders Åslund, responding to Vance’s claim that the U.S. has “no other option.”
“Hitler did the same before attacking Poland in 1939 & so did Putin before his full-scale attack on Ukraine in 2022,” Åslund said.
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