Senate readies vote on Venezuela war powers

NUUK: Along the narrow, snow-covered main street in Greenland’s capital, international journalists and camera crews stop passersby every few meters (feet), asking them for their thoughts on a crisis which Denmark’s prime minister has warned could potentially trigger the end of NATO.

Greenland is at the centre of a geopolitical storm as US President Donald Trump is insisting he wants to own the island — and the residents of its capital, Nuuk, say it is not for sale. Trump said he wants to control Greenland at any cost, and the White House has not ruled out taking the island by force.

US Vice President JD Vance will meet Denmark’s foreign minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen and his Greenlandic counterpart Vivian Motzfeldt in Washington on Wednesday to discuss the Arctic island, which is a semiautonomous territory of the United States’ NATO ally Denmark. Tuuta Mikaelsen, a 22-year-old student, told The Associated Press in Nuuk that she hoped American officials would get the message to “back off.”

Greenland’s Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen told a news conference in the Danish capital Copenhagen on Tuesday that, “if we have to choose between the United States and Denmark here and now, we choose Denmark. We choose NATO. We chose the Kingdom of Denmark. We choose the EU.” Asked later Tuesday about Nielsen’s comments, Trump replied: “I disagree with him. I don’t know who he is. I don’t know anything about him. But that’s going to be a big problem for him.”

Greenland is strategically important because, as climate change causes the ice to melt, it opens up the possibility of shorter trade routes to Asia. That also could make it easier to extract and transport untapped deposits of critical minerals, which are needed for computers and phones.