J
anuary 21 could have served as the moment to take stock of the situation, before a possible split occurs. Instead, the day ended with Donald Trump making an unexpected about-face on the Greenland issue, which had become an obsession for him. Initially, the American president used his speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos to rule out, for the first time, the threat of using force to annex the autonomous territory linked to Denmark, a founding member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Following a meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, Trump then put forward a diplomatic solution that could potentially avert a crisis that would likely prove fatal to transatlantic relations.
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Behind Trump's Greenland reversal: The crucial role of NATO chief Mark Rutte
If it proves true, this solution would evidently involve limited transfers of sovereignty for the military base that the United States already maintains in Greenland, as well as for those it wants to reactivate. This arrangement, provided it is accepted by both the Greenlanders and the Danes, would require Trump to give up on the idea of owning the territory, which he had insisted on, even though the Arctic island's people had made it clear that they had no intention of becoming Americans.
