The first meeting of the working group with the US on Greenland has gone so well that the parties are now "back on track".
This is what Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen (M) says about the first meeting of the working group in Washington D.C.
- I just want to confirm what Secretary of State Marco Rubio said yesterday. We have had the first meeting at senior official level in Washington.
- It went well. There was a very constructive atmosphere and dialogue, and new meetings are planned. It's not like things are resolved, but it's good because we're back to what we agreed on in Washington, says Lars Løkke Rasmussen.
A major detour and escalation
With "back on track", Løkke believes that it has been possible to return to the agreement to discuss possible solutions in a working group that Løkke and naalakkersuisoq Vivian Motzfeldt (S) made during the visit to Washington 15 days ago.
- After that there was a big detour and things escalated. But now we are back on track. And as I have said many times, we of course share the US's concerns about security.
- We want to resolve this in close cooperation within NATO and in a discussion between the USA, Greenland and Denmark, says Lars Løkke Rasmussen.
According to Løkke, the agreement in Washington was that the parties should have a "constructive dialogue" that must both meet American security interests and respect the kingdom's "red lines", which are "our sovereignty and territorial integrity and the self-determination of the Greenlandic people".
A little more optimistic
- It's not like we can conclude anything, but I'm a little more optimistic than I was a week ago, says Lars Løkke Rasmussen about the meeting in Washington D.C. on Wednesday.
The working group was agreed upon at a meeting in Washington on January 14 between Lars Løkke Rasmussen and the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Greenland, Vivian Motzfeldt, on the one hand, and the US Vice President, J.D. Vance, and the US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, on the other hand.
However, the very day after the agreement was signed, the Trump administration began to escalate threats to take over Greenland.
But at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Trump made an agreement with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte to strengthen security in the Arctic.
Trump also agreed to drop tariff threats, and thus the working group in Washington D.C. is apparently back where it was after Løkke and Motzfeldt's visit to the city in early January.
- That's good, and I'm sincerely glad that we've now entered into a sensible dialogue, and I don't want to challenge that by speculating about how this might end.
- The case is not resolved yet, but we have started working on it, and it is constructive, says Lars Løkke Rasmussen.
/ritzau/
