As the U.S. president revives his push for Washington’s control of Greenland, Norway’s defense minister says Oslo is helping defend America in the Arctic.
Chris Lunday
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.
