Macron will visit Greenland this month, defying Trump

In a challenge to President Donald Trump’s vow to take control of Greenland, President Emmanuel Macron of France will visit the enormous Arctic island June 15 with the aim of “contributing to the reinforcement of European sovereignty.”

The French presidency announced the visit Saturday, saying that Macron had accepted an invitation from Jens-Frederik Nielsen, Greenland’s prime minister, and Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, with whom it said Macron would discuss “security in the North Atlantic and the Arctic.”

Greenland, a semiautonomous island that is a territory of Denmark, a NATO ally, has been thrust in recent months from a remote, uneventful existence to the center of a geostrategic storm by Trump’s repeated demands that it become part of the United States, one way or another.

“I think there’s a good possibility that we could do it without military force,” Trump told NBC in March, but added that he would not “take anything off the table.”

Macron, who has seen in the various provocations directed at Europe by the Trump administration an opportunity for European assertion of its power, will be the first foreign head of state to go to Greenland since Trump embarked on his annexation campaign this year.

Vice President JD Vance visited Greenland in March. The trip was drastically scaled back and confined to a remote military base after the threat of local protests.

The French announcement did not allude to Trump or the United States, but it was clear that the intent and symbolism of the visit is that Greenland, a vast and mineral-rich island, is not there for the taking on the whim of a U.S. president. Early this year, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot offered to send troops to help defend the island. Denmark demurred.

Macron will stop in Greenland on his way to the Group of 7 meeting in Canada that runs from June 15-17. Trump has also suggested that Canada should be absorbed into the United States as the 51st state, so the French president will be traveling from one of Trump’s targets for American territorial expansion to another.

The announcement said that discussions among the three leaders in Greenland would also focus on “climate change, energy transition and security in the supply of critical minerals.”

Greenland, with a population of 56,000, is rich in rare earth minerals that are vital to high-tech industries and a target of increasingly fierce competition. China, which dominates in the world’s critical minerals, has severely restricted the export of certain minerals to the United States. According to a recent Danish study, 31 of the 34 materials that the European Union defines as critical, including lithium and titanium, are found on the island.

Macron has long argued for “European strategic autonomy” and has appeared vindicated by Trump’s often dismissive or contemptuous view of Europe. The French leader has argued for the urgent necessity of European “rearmament” in the military sense, and also in the sense of a mental reset that casts aside the pacifism of past decades.

His relationship with Trump, forged during the U.S. president’s first term, is friendly on the surface – they call each other regularly – but subject to tensions that stem from their often adversarial world views.

Macron is a strong supporter of the EU, which Trump has dismissed as an anti-American creation designed to cheat Washington, and a strong opponent of far-right political forces in Europe that Trump has embraced.

The G7 meeting will afford an opportunity to air their differences, which may well be accentuated by Macron’s decision to visit Greenland. The visit is likely to play well in France as an assertion of French and European defiance at a time when Macron finds himself largely paralyzed on the domestic front by a deadlocked Parliament.

In Denmark, and throughout Europe and in Greenland itself, Trump’s attempt to take over the island has provoked outrage, even if some Greenlanders have expressed interest in closer cooperation with the United States. A recent opinion poll found that 85% of Greenlanders do not want to join the United States, though many Greenlanders do want independence from Denmark eventually.

In early March, a political party that has taken a cool stance toward America won first place in Greenland’s parliamentary elections. That party has drawn close to Denmark as a bulwark against the United States.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.