“We don’t want to be Americans,” Parnûna Motzfeldt, 25, said Tuesday, adding that Greenland was “not for sale,” a sentiment that has become a slogan across the island in the midst of Trump’s takeover plans. “We only want to be Greenlanders,” she added.
Jens Erik Kjeldsen, a retired carpenter who has been staging a one-man protest outside the U.S. Consulate in Nuuk since Monday despite the freezing temperatures, expressed fears that Trump is “trying to buy the world or take it with his power.”
“You might win a war with power, but you can never win the peace,” Kjeldsen, 70, who moved from Denmark in the 1970s, warned Wednesday.
Holding up flags representing Denmark, Greenland and the Faroe Islands, he said: “We never want to be American. We like the Americans, we like being there, we like being visited by them … but to be American? No, no, no.”
Fears for the future have grown in Greenland in recent days, as Trump has intensified his rhetoric about taking control of the vast territory, where around 90% of the population of roughly 57,000 inhabitants are Inuit.
In lengthy remarks at the Davos summit, Trump said Wednesday he did not plan to “use force” to take Greenland. Referring to NATO spending, he said that the U.S. “probably won’t get anything unless I decide to use excessive strength and force, where we would be, frankly, unstoppable, but I won’t do that.”
Instead, he said, Europe has “a choice,” adding: “You can say yes, and we will be very appreciative, or you can say no, and we will remember.”