Rubio: Trump wants to buy Greenland, not invade it. He will meet with the Danes next week

The White House's tough lobbying campaign is nevertheless publicly keeping alive the road to a warlike conquest if necessary. Spokespersons have still asserted in recent hours that the use of armed forces is always among the President's prerogatives, remains 'among the hypotheses considered', and that Trump has made it clear that he considers the annexation of Greenland a top priority for national security.

As if this were not enough, the influential advisor Stephen Miller openly flirted with forceful intervention, stating that 'no one will fight the US for Greenland'.

Trump had already announced his intentions to get his hands on Greenland for strategic and economic reasons during his first term in office; now he has relaunched and intensified the campaign, accelerating it even further after the success of his military blitz in Venezuela and after the publication of a foreign policy doctrine calling for Washington's absolute domination of the Western Hemisphere. Trump has declared that the island would now be at the mercy of Chinese and Russian ships despite the fact that the only military presence in Greenland is actually American.

Interest in controlling Greenland is not new, but it has rarely been so aggressive and uncovered. The US had already secretly offered a hundred million dollars for the purchase in 1946. Between 1941 and 1945 they had instead controlled the island to take it from the Germans when Denmark was occupied by Hitler. In the 1950s an agreement with Denmark, which had rejected surrenders, had finally allowed Washington to open a military base there.