Denmark pins hopes on Rubio meeting to ease Greenland spat

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

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U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he will meet with Danish officials about Greenland after President Donald Trump rattled Europe with fresh comments about taking control of the vast Arctic territory.

Speaking on Capitol Hill after briefing US lawmakers about Venezuela on Wednesday, Rubio downplayed alarm over the president’s comments and said Trump’s desire to purchase Greenland dates back to his first term. Rubio said he’ll meet Danish officials next week.

“We’ll have those conversations with them then,” he told reporters.

Denmark is banking on that meeting in Washington to defuse the U.S. president’s renewed push on Greenland and to help reset strained ties with the U.S. over the strategic island. The spat has prompted Trump to level fresh criticism toward other members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, after Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said a Greenland takeover would destroy the alliance.

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.

“The next two weeks, they’re critical,” Lars-Christian Brask, vice-chairman of the Danish foreign policy committee, told Bloomberg TV in an 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,” he said.

In an interview with Danish broadcaster TV2, Denmark’s 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 NATO.

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