On Fox News Sunday, host Shannon Bream asked Vice President-elect JD Vance: “What’s the deal with Greenland and the Panama Canal? Are we using or considering using military force in any of those situations?”
Vance laughed and replied: “We don’t have to use military force, Shannon. The thing that people always ignore is we already have troops in Greenland.”
JD Vance: “We already have troops in Greenland. Greenland is very important for America strategically.
And has a lot of great natural resources.”pic.twitter.com/FNv0FSb0PW— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) January 12, 2025
[Note: There are approximately 200 active-duty U.S. Air Force and Space Force personnel stationed at the Pituffik Space Base in Greenland, where 450 Canadian, Danish, and Greenlandic civilian contractors also live and work.]
Vance also echoed President-elect Donald Trump‘s claim that “we need Greenland for national security purposes,” and said it also “has a lot of great natural resources.”
[According to the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources, the island is rich in copper, gold, cobalt and lithium which are used in the manufacturing of batteries, electric vehicles, and wind turbines.]
Today’s cover: Why does Donald Trump want Greenland? Behind the ‘strong, deliberate’ message to China https://t.co/YRRwun1C8z pic.twitter.com/iarP5cYnBy
— New York Post (@nypost) January 8, 2025
Security analyst Alexander Khara, director of the Centre for Defense Strategies in Kyiv, Ukraine, said Trump’s claim that America “needs Greenland for national security purposes” reminded him of Vladimir Putin’s comments on Crimea when Russia seized the strategic Black Sea peninsula from Ukraine in 2014.
When Putin delivered a speech at the Kremlin in March 2014, in which he defended Russia’s treaty to absorb Crimea saying Crimeans had voted overwhelmingly in favor of rejoining Russia, the U.S. (and other Western nations) said the vote was illegal and that Moscow’s actions amounted to “a land grab and illegal annexation.”