gotchanewsdaily.com 
The Danes appear more inclined to take Trump at his word. Last month, King Frederik issued a decree that edited Denmark’s coat of arms to more prominently feature the Greenlandic polar bear. Meanwhile, Greenland’s government has renewed its calls for independence.
At the least, Trump’s move was “very crude diplomacy,” said Arild Moe, an expert in Russia’s development of the Northern Sea Route from the Fridtjof Nansen Institute in Norway. “Just the idea that you can buy an autonomous territory is so outrageous. But I think you can leave that a little bit aside, and then you can talk about U.S. interests, because there is something behind this.”
The melting sea ice and the rise of China had inserted new tension into strategic decision-making in the region, he said.
Until now, O’Hanlon said, U.S. strategy for the Arctic had been less about “aggressively pursu[ing] American unilateral access” and more about preventing Russia or China from blocking “other people’s access to the Arctic, the same way the Chinese have threatened to do with the South China Sea.”
Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, told journalist Adam Rubenstein last week that he had urged the president during his first term to tone down his demands for sovereignty over Greenland, seeking instead to expand U.S. presence and influence on the island through backroom discussions with the Danes and the Greenland government. “It’s obviously a strategic interest,” he said.
That is a conversation Frederiksen appeared to be inviting in her comments to Danish media on Tuesday. Danish officials also question the necessity for the U.S. to own Greenland when its ally would be open to further American investment and military presence.
