Greenland’s prime minister said on Monday the Danish autonomous territory was open to closer ties with the United States, in areas such as mining, a Greenlandic broadcaster reported.
“We need to do business with the US. We have begun to start a dialogue and seek opportunities for cooperation with [Donald] Trump,” Mute Egede said at a press conference in Greenland, according to public broadcaster KNR.
He added that the territory had its “doors open in terms of mining”.
“It will be the same in the coming years. We have to trade with the US,” he said, according to KNR.
However, Egede did not give any indication the island would be open to a US takeover.
US president-elect Donald Trump, who takes office on January 20, set off alarm bells last week when he refused to rule out military intervention to bring the Panama Canal and Greenland under US control.
Vice president-elect, JD Vance, in an interview with broadcaster Fox News over the weekend, noted that the US already has “troops in Greenland”, at a military base in the northwest.
In addition to its strategic location, Greenland, which is seeking independence from Denmark, holds massive untapped mineral and oil reserves, although oil and uranium exploration are banned.
Trump’s Republican allies in the US House of Representatives are trying to build support for a bill on authorising talks for the purchase of Greenland, according to a copy of the bill circulated for co-sponsors on Monday, Reuters reported.
Trump first claimed that he wanted to buy Greenland in 2019 during his first term as president – an offer swiftly rebuffed by Greenland and Denmark.
During a visit to Denmark last week, Egede said that the Arctic territory was “entering a new era, in a new year where Greenland is in the centre of the world”.
He said that Greenland would continue to cooperate with the US, but stressed that this would be on its own terms and that it was “the Greenlandic people who decide their future”.
“We don’t want to be Danes. We don’t want to be Americans. Of course, we want to be Greenlanders,” he said.
With Agence France-Presse and Reuters
