Vance to accompany wife to Greenland amid backlash
Vice President Vance said he's traveling to Greenland on Friday, a move that comes after the Trump administration provoked backlash from officials in Greenland and Denmark when it was announced that second lady Usha Vance would be heading there.
"There was so much excitement around Usha's visit to Greenland this Friday, that I decided that I didn't want her to have all that fun by herself, and so I'm going to join her," Vance said in a video released Tuesday afternoon on the social platform X.
Vance’s announcement adds another layer of tension to an already fraught atmosphere surrounding his wife’s planned visit, which officials in Denmark and Greenland reject as a provocation part of President Trump’s repeated claims of his intent to take over the arctic island for what he says are “international security concerns."
Plans for national security adviser Mike Waltz and Energy Secretary Chris Wright to also travel to Denmark are further inflaming tensions between Washington and Copenhagen and Nuuk, Greenland's capital.
Officials in Denmark and Greenland have denounced the visits. Greenland Prime Minister Múte Bourup Egede called Waltz’s visit in particular “highly aggressive.” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen called the U.S. delegation an “unacceptable pressure” and vowed resistance.
Jens-Frederik Nielsen, leader of Greenalnd's Demokraatit party and poised to be the country’s next prime minister following elections earlier this month, said the visit showed a “lack of respect for the Greenlandic people.”
The trip comes as Vance and Waltz are embroiled in a major scandal surrounding the Trump administration’s handling of classified intelligence. The vice president and national security adviser were part of a group chat on the messaging app Signal discussing attack plans against targets in Yemen, and that chat inadvertently included The Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg.
Vance said he is expected to travel to the Pituffik Space Base in Greenland, where the U.S. Space Force's 821st Space Base Group is located, to visit Space Force members, known as Guardians.
Vance said the point of his visit is to “check out what’s going on with the security there of Greenland,” saying the largely ice-covered island of 57,000 people is a primary target for adversaries looking to threaten the U.S. and Canada. He accused Denmark of failing to take Greenland’s security seriously.
“We want to reinvigorate the security of the people of Greenland because we think it's important to protecting the security of the entire world,” Vance said.
“Unfortunately, leaders in both America and in Denmark, I think, ignored Greenland for far too long. That's been bad for Greenland — it’s also been bad for the security of the entire world. We think we can take things in a different direction, so I'm going to check it out.”
Greenland is a semiautonomous country, with Denmark responsible for the island’s foreign policy and defense. Independence movements on the island are growing in strength, but there is a dispute on how quickly to separate from Denmark. The Demokraatit party, which won parliamentary elections earlier this month, is working to form a government, and its platform promises a slow break from Copenhagen.
But Trump has made acquiring Greenland a major feature of his foreign policy goals in his second term. He first proposed taking over the island during his first term but has increasingly hardened his designs, saying in a March 4 address to Congress that “we’re going to get it [Greenland]. One way or the other, we’re going to get it.”
Updated at 4:30 p.m. EDT