Denmark pins hopes on proposed Rubio talk to ease Greenland spat

Sara Sjolin and Francine Lacqua, Bloomberg News on Jan 7, 2026

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Denmark is banking on a proposed high-level meeting in Washington to defuse President Donald Trump’s renewed push on Greenland and reset strained ties with the U.S. over the strategic Arctic territory.

Danish and Greenlandic officials want to meet with Secretary of State Marco Rubio in the U.S. capital, Lars-Christian Brask, vice-chairman of the Danish foreign policy committee, told Bloomberg TV in an interview.

The foreign ministers of Denmark and Greenland, Lars Lokke Rasmussen and Vivian Motzfeldt, are aiming to confront what Copenhagen says are persistent factual errors and exaggerated security claims driving the debate. So far, it’s unclear whether Rubio has accepted the meeting.

“The next two weeks, they’re critical,” Brask said in the interview. “But let’s get the meeting with the three foreign ministers together, clear up the misunderstandings, try to understand what it is everybody wants to achieve, and then I’m sure we are more informed and there’s less misinformation after that meeting.”

In an interview with Danish broadcaster TV2, Lokke Rasmussen said he has a “responsibility to challenge” the arguments Trump is presenting to the American public to justify his Greenland ambitions.

“The main argument is about the security situation — that things are out of control, that Chinese warships are everywhere and that Greenland is flooded with Chinese investments,” Lokke said in the interview. “That is a flawed picture, and we have a duty to push back against it. That is of course one of the reasons we want a meeting with the U.S. secretary of state.”

Lokke Rasmussen briefed the Danish parliament’s foreign policy committee on the request for talks with Rubio at an emergency session on Tuesday, after the Trump administration stepped up its rhetoric, with the president saying he “absolutely” needs Greenland — a semi-autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark — for national security.

While the president has said he won’t rule out military force to acquire the Arctic island, Rubio late Tuesday told lawmakers the aim is to buy Greenland rather than staging an intervention that could test the future of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.