TOI correspondent from Washington: US vice-president JD Vance and second lady Usha Vance arrived at an American air base in Arctic Greenland on Friday on a scaled down but still unwelcome visit to Denmark’s semi-autonomous territory as President Trump’s MAGA drive continued to roil the world.
The Vances landed at the US Space Force outpost at Pituffik in Northwest Greenland in -3deg weather shortly after noon and were greeted by two US military personnel, and no Danes or Greenlanders. Rebuffed by locals to the point of humiliation amid growing anti-American sentiment across the Atlantic, they had to ditch what was to be a cultural trip to go on a politico-military sortie during which the vice-president is expected to address/ addressed personnel at the US Space Force outpost at Pituffik.
Multiple reports from the region said the US was forced to pivot to a military visit after locals turned away American officials who went door-to-door looking for hosts to stage events. But the White House said the reports were false and Trump insisted Greenlanders welcomed US interest in the territory, said to be three times the size of Texas.
Trump’s MAGA acolytes have been exulting over the prospect of forcibly adding Greenland to the US, but short of a swift military conquest, US analysts who have gamed the takeover reckon the White House will have to go through many legislative hoops in Copenhagen, Nuuk( Greenland’s capital) and Washington DC to fold the Greenland into the US.
Ahead of the visit though, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin said Trump’s plan to seize Greenland is serious, has deep historical roots, and it is evident that the US will pursue it systematically, but added that it is a bilateral issue between the US and Denmark and has no bearing on Russia.
“It would be a great mistake to believe that Trump’s plans to annex Greenland are just extravagant conversations,” Putin said at a conference in Murmansk in Siberia, describing Russia as the “largest Arctic power” which will “steadfastly safeguard it’s national interests.”
Although Putin said Russia is concerned about NATO increasingly designating the Far North as a springboard for possible conflicts, European analysts saw in the remarks a message to Trump from Putin: You take Greenland. I take Ukraine. And then we continue as the best of friends.
While attention is largely focused on strategic jousting by Trump and Vance, Usha has got sucked into the MAGA drive despite a seemingly liberal orientation in the past.
She was registered Democrat before she married Vance and her mother, Lakshmi Chilukuri has come under scrutiny of MAGA hardliners as a diversity advocate at the University of California, San Diego, where she is a professor in the Molecular Biology department and also serves as the Provost.
Ahead of the visit, MAGA world also went into a tizzy when former vice-president Al Gore’s book Earth in the Balance was spotted in the background during a video message Usha Vance taped ahead of what as to be a cultural visit.
But balance is the last thing on President Trump’s mind as he continues to push the case for acquiring Greenland, asserting that the US will “go as far as we have to” to gain control of the territory, framing it as a critical move for global security.
“We need Greenland. And the world needs us to have Greenland, including Denmark. Denmark has to have us have Greenland. And, you know, we’ll see what happens. But if we don’t have Greenland, we can’t have great international security,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.
