European leaders rally to support Greenland

European leaders have dramatically rallied together in support of Denmark and Greenland after one of Donald Trump's leading aides suggested the US might be willing to seize control of the Arctic territory by force.

- Miranda Bryant Dan Sabbagh

Keir Starmer, the UK prime minister; Emmanuel Macron, the French president; and Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, declared that Greenland, a semi-autonomous territory of the kingdom of Denmark, “belongs to its people” in a rare European rebuke to the White House.

“It is for Denmark and Greenland, and them only, to decide on matters concerning Denmark and Greenland,” the three leaders said yesterday in a statement made jointly with the prime ministers of Denmark, Italy, Poland and Spain.

Later in the evening, at a press conference in Paris where Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, were present, Starmer said: “I’ve been very clear as to what my position, the position of the UK government is.”

The declaration by European leaders was made in response to renewed US demands to seize control of the self-governing territory in the aftermath of the capture of Venezuela's president Nicolás Maduro by the US military.

On Monday, Stephen Miller, the US president's influential deputy chief of staff for policy, said "nobody [was] going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland" when asked to rule out using force.

In an interview with CNN, Miller said military intervention would not be needed in order to gain control over Greenland because of its small population.

A day earlier, Trump had said that the US needed Greenland "very badly", renewing fears of a US invasion of the largely autonomous island, in an effort to take control of its oil, gas and rare earths as the polar ice cap melts.

It prompted alarm in Denmark, and a warning from Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, that an attack on Greenland would risk the collapse of the Nato military alliance. It would, she said, be the end of "everything".