As Vance heads for Greenland and Trump threatens to take it, residents voice fear and mistrust of U.S.
Nuuk, Greenland — Vice President JD Vance will join his family Friday on a trip to Greenland — a vast island northeast of Canada that President Trump wants to absorb into the United States. Roughly three times the size of Texas, Greenland is covered mostly by an ice sheet and has a population of only about 56,000.
It is a semi-autonomous territory of Denmark, which is one of America's European NATO allies. On Thursday, the Danish Defense Minister said his country would not allow the U.S. to decide Greenland's future, but the giant, frozen island near the top of the world has been dragged against Denmark's will, and the will of its people, into a geopolitical storm by Mr. Trump's repeated threats to take control.
The U.S. president says American must control Greenland for security reasons, and he has refused to rule out using force to make that a reality.
But a recent poll shows 85% of Greenlanders do not want to be part of the United States, and residents who spoke with CBS News ahead of Vance's visit to a remote U.S. installation on the island — America's furthest north military base — clearly reflected the sentiments shown in that poll.
"He can't just take it like that," said Daniel Rosing, a trainee electrician who said he was proud of being a Greenlander.
Asked if he'd like to become an American, Rosing said, "No, not really. I could visit America for vacation and look around, but no."
"I think it's stupid," Nivinnguaq Rasmussen, a shop assistant in the capital city of Nuuk, said bluntly of the Trump administration's plans for his homeland.
"He says he wants national security, but I don't believe him," she told CBS News.
Asked what she thought Mr. Trump really wanted control of Greenland for, she suggested the American leader was obscuring his true motivations.
"Something else that he's hiding," she said.
The U.S. military base that the vice president and second lady Usha Vance will visit this week is critical to America's defense. It sits roughly on what would be the shortest possible route for Russian ballistic missiles to reach the U.S., over the Arctic.
But some Greenlanders told CBS News it is not Russia that worries them, it's the United States.
"It's very scary for me," said one woman in Nuuk, adding that Mr. Trump appears able to "do whatever he wants - kind of. It's very scary."
Climate change melting the ice in Greenland is expected to make the island's lucrative mineral reserves more accessible, and some residents told CBS News they believe that is what Mr. Trump is really after — and they don't trust him.
