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00:00U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance announced on Wednesday that his trip to Greenland this week will be confined to a U.S. military base,
00:07and that he and his wife will not attend a popular dog sled race as originally scheduled.
00:12Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen had called the planned visit to the race part of unacceptable pressure by the White House on Greenland,
00:20which Donald Trump has vowed to annex.
00:22Her foreign minister, Lars-Logge Rasmussen, welcomed the move to revise the plans, calling it a de-escalation.
00:28Under a 1951 agreement, U.S. officials are free to visit the Betufik space base without an official invitation.
00:36Here's Trump speaking yesterday.
00:39We need Greenland for national security and international security, so I think we'll go as far as we have to go.
00:48We need Greenland, and the world needs us to have Greenland.
00:53And for more on this, I can bring in Matt Kvortorp, who is a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Studies at the Australian National University.
01:02Good morning, Matt, and thank you for joining us.
01:04J.D. Vance made a very public announcement of this trip on Tuesday, and he rather quickly scaled it back to just visiting the U.S. Betufik space base.
01:15So it seems he got a bit of a rap on the knuckles.
01:18Is this a humiliating climb down for the U.S. Vice President?
01:22I think it's diverting attention away from the story you had before, but it is adding insult to injury.
01:30This is not just on diplomatic or against common decency.
01:34Also, Betufik is the place where, in 1968, an American bomber crashed with nuclear bombs on board, which exploded.
01:42One of those bombs is still there, means that the local population are not able to fish or hunt there.
01:48Lots of people were forcibly removed.
01:51So the agreement to have the Betufik base, or Thule base as it used to be called, was taken by the Danish ambassador back then without involving the people, the population of Greenland, the economy at the time.
02:05So to go to that place, a place that has been literally nuclear contaminated by the Americans,
02:13really explains why more than close to 90 percent of all Greenlandic people or immigrants do not want to be part of America.
02:22What is also, if you like, insulting is that the Danes have sent 90 police officers from Copenhagen up to to to protect this,
02:32which of course is the Danish taxpayer's money to pay for this uninvited visitor.
02:38Yes, the Danish government is trying to de-escalate this, but the fact that Trump is saying it must be ours is sort of rather reminiscent of what Saddam Hussein said about Kuwait in 1990.
02:50And it does, or indeed what other countries said about Austria in 1938, frankly.
02:57And we are really living in a time which is frankly unbelievable.
03:00When I've lived in Canada, I've lived in Denmark, and the fact that those two countries I have lived in are now threatened by a so-called ally is rather shocking.
03:12Now, there has been, as you say, this escalating rhetoric.
03:15We even saw in the week of Donald Trump's inauguration, his son, Donald Trump Jr., visiting Greenland in what seemed like a direct taunt to both Greenland and Denmark.
03:25Vance's visit elevates it to semi-official level, albeit without the need for an official invite.
03:31Is the Trump administration making serious moves here, or is it simply trolling of another nation-state, however serious it might seem?
03:40I think we should be prepared for the worst, which is a shocking thing that when Trump says it must be American,
03:48this has technically been, in some ways, part of the Danish realm since 982.
03:57That is, you know, it's getting, you know, it's over a thousand years, frankly.
04:03But that counts for nothing.
04:05I think the former Danish Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said if it was just dealing with defense, the Americans already have a base there.
04:14If we're talking about critical minerals, of which there are quite a lot in Greenland, albeit under the glacier, that can also be negotiated.
04:23But if it's just the Americans to literally expand territories and look big, then it's different.
04:31It is interesting to see when Vance put out his statement, he was talking about how Greenland has been threatened by many countries and America is there to protect them.
04:43And one rather thinks back to other countries have talked about being protectors.
04:49So, you know, in 1940, Norway was protected by Germany, supposedly, and those are the protection forces one should always be wary of.
05:01So I think we frankly and sadly have to expect the worst.
05:06And then especially going to pick a fig is, as I said, you know, probably probably worse than the Americans actually appreciate.
05:16It's still sort of under wraps, the whole story about the bomb that the plane that crashed there.
05:21Technically, the Americans are not supposed to have nuclear weapons there, but they have been doing things in defiance of that.
05:29So also, it comes at a time when there's now municipal elections this weekend in Greenland.
05:35There was, as you know, elementary elections for the devolved assembly there a few weeks ago.
05:43They're still in the process of forming a government.
05:46So we only have a caretaker government really at the moment.
05:49So I think one frankly has to prepare for what the Americans might do.
05:56There's relatively small population in Greenland.
05:58It is a large territory, the size of Mexico.
06:02But for the Americans to physically invade, it would be very difficult for anybody, frankly, to do anything against it.
06:08I know the European Union is stepping up its efforts.
06:11Greenland, which is a thing that a lot of people don't know, it's part of Denmark in the same way as Scotland is part of the UK.
06:18But Greenland is not a member of the EU.
06:21Greenland actually in the early 1980s had a referendum on leaving the EU.
06:26So there are sort of escalated talks to see if Greenland could rejoin the EU.
06:32And some people in Greenland, of course, want independence from Denmark, but under a sort of arrangement, which is like an independent Scotland in a united Europe.
06:43Thank you very much for that, Matt Forthorp, Senior Research Fellow at the Centre of European Studies at Australian National University.