Norway's defence minister to US: we're already guarding the Arctic, Greenland is Danish

Full text

ANKARA — Norway’s defense minister pushed back on Donald Trump’s renewed pressure over Greenland , saying allies watching Russia in the high north are already doing real work on Arctic security.

“I used to say to my American [colleagues], we’re doing homeland defense for you,” Norwegian Defense Minister Tore Sandvik told POLITICO in an interview on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Ankara.

The line was aimed at the heart of U.S. President Donald Trump’s argument that Washington needs more security in the Arctic and the way to do that is to own Greenland. The American leader this week said the island “should be controlled by the United States, not by Denmark.”

Sandvik did not attack Trump directly, but he underlined that Greenland is a red line.

“We are very clear about the sovereignty of Greenland. It’s a part of Denmark, the Kingdom of Denmark,” Sandvik said. “And we are pretty clear about that to the Americans as well.”

Norway sees the security problem differently, he said, because the main military threat in the Arctic is not around Greenland. “There are no movements from Russia or China around Greenland.”

Asked whether European allies should set up a more permanent presence around Greenland to make Danish and Greenlandic sovereignty harder to question, Sandvik pointed instead to the waters between Norway’s Svalbard Islands and the mainland. The danger there is from Russian submarines moving from the Kola Peninsula into the North Atlantic.

“If you’re going to go to Greenland, you have to pass here,” he said, mentioning the Bear Gap, a 650-kilometer strategic maritime chokepoint between mainland Norway’s North Cape and the Svalbard archipelago. “We are tracking the sound of silence,” he said, adding: “The way to protect Greenland starts here.”

Sandvik’s broader message was that Norway is already carrying a significant share of the alliance’s security burden — not only in the Arctic, but also on Ukraine.

The defense minister said Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, the Baltic states and Germany are doing more than their fair share to support Kyiv, while some larger European economies have done much less. “I think it’s not sustainable for Europe in the long run,” he said.

Still, Sandvik said Oslo would not scale back its support.

“We will still spend a lot of money in Ukraine and we will stay in for as long as it takes,” he continued, adding that “all the European countries have to step up.”