COPENHAGEN: After weathering Donald Trump’s repeated threats to take control of Greenland, Copenhagen and Nuuk want to restore a bit of calm ahead of the Danish general election this month, observers say.
“The tensions were very high in January with arguments flying... There needed to be some kind of de-escalation,” Astrid Andersen, a historian at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS), told AFP.
The war of words over the territory, which Trump has said that the United States needs for its “national security,” has eased somewhat.
Denmark and Greenland hope that a NATO mission to bump up defense cooperation to counter Russia and China influence in the Arctic, as well as a diplomatic working group taking in Washington, Nuuk and Copenhagen, might take some of the sting out of the issue.
“The meetings on a diplomatic level take the temperature a notch down. And so the strategy now seems to be to keep it there and try to avoid arguing through the media and social media,” Andersen said.
