President Trump says Greenland is essential to Golden Dome and national security
The foreign ministers of Denmark and Greenland will meet with Vice President J.D. Vance at the White House.
A senior Russian official said Moscow was ready to respond militarily if the United States followed through with plans to deploy its Golden Dome missile defense program to Greenland.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov made the comments on February 3 during a visit to China, according to Russian state news agencies. His comments came ahead of the expiration of the last remaining bilateral nuclear disarmament agreement between Washington and Moscow, known as the New START Treaty, on February 5.
“This is a new moment, a new reality. We are ready for it,” Ryabkov said in Beijing. Although he did not elaborate on what kind of military response Russia is considering to the United States’ missile defense plan for Denmark’s autonomous Arctic island once New START expires, he did seem to rule out the possibility of an arms race.
“I guarantee you, that’s not going to happen,” he said.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for clarification on the matter.
Greenland and Newstart.
President Donald Trump last month agreed to a “framework for future agreements” with NATO on Greenland, which he said included discussions on missile defense programs “as they relate to Greenland.” The agreement appears to have eased the immediate heat of months of escalating tensions between Denmark, Greenland, their European allies, and President Trump’s White House, which has vowed to gain control of the vast territory. However, few details about the deal, which appears to have been concluded without Denmark’s involvement, have been made public.
President Trump said more will be revealed about the deal as negotiations between Denmark and Greenland progress.
The New START Treaty was signed in 2010 under the Obama administration, when Dmitry Medvedev was President of Russia. The treaty limits the use of strategic nuclear weapons to 1,550 on each side in the event of nuclear war.
On February 2, Medvedev, currently deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, told Russian state media that the world should be “on high alert” if the New START treaty expires without an alternative. He said this means the world’s largest nuclear state will have no limits on its nuclear forces for the first time since the early 1970s.
The treaty’s impending expiration is one reason why the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists recently set the so-called Doomsday Clock at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest ever to catastrophe.
In a statement announcing the decision, the paper’s board said the White House’s plan to deploy Golden Dome, a multilayered missile defense system that includes space-based interceptors, “increases the potential for conflict in space and is likely to fuel a new space-based arms race.”
The Trump administration envisions the Golden Dome project, inspired by Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system, as a defensive shield of space and ground technology spanning all of Greenland.
