JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Juana Summers.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
And I'm Mary Louise Kelly, with a question that has dominated the week both here and across the globe - do we know what's happening with Greenland? For weeks, President Trump has made plain he wants the United States to own the Arctic island. He threatened military action. He also threatened tariffs on U.S. allies, all to get his way. President Trump appears to have backed off those threats for now. By the end of the day yesterday, speaking from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, President Trump said he had reached a framework for a deal on Greenland. What is it, and how exactly was this deal reached? Questions I put to Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman and reporter Willem Marx on NPR's weekly national security podcast, Sources & Methods.
(SOUNDBITE OF EMANUEL KALLINS AND STEPHEN TELLER'S "PLUNGED INTO CRISIS")
KELLY: So, Willem, what do we know about this deal, this framework of a deal?
WILLEM MARX, BYLINE: I'm going to disappoint you, Mary Louise. We don't know a lot for sure in terms of confirmed information from public sources.
KELLY: The U.S. does not own Greenland that we know of at this hour?
MARX: Not yet. Not yet. There may be conversations about that down the road. It's not clear. It seems like there have been these very, very key discussions between President Trump and a man called Mark Rutte, who is the secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty organization - NATO. He's the former Dutch prime minister. I have a Dutch passport. I've known the guy for years. He's very charming, very glib and very astute politically. He stayed on top of a coalition in the Netherlands for a long time, and those skills have been brought to bear, not for the first time, with President Trump this week.
The discussion seem to have unlocked some of the U.S. president's concerns about the role that Greenland would play in Arctic security. And Rutte, on behalf of NATO at least, seems to have made some sort of assurances about security efforts, potentially security expenditure and security access for the U.S. in that North Atlantic massive island, as Greenland is.
KELLY: So Rutte has somehow managed to back us up from the precipice for now. We have not seen the end of NATO - the alliance he leads - this week. But, I mean, I'll point out the obvious, which is that NATO is not Greenland, NATO is not Denmark, and Greenland is part of Denmark. Were Danish officials involved in these conversations? Are they on board with whatever has been agreed?
MARX: That is a very delicate question. There was no one from Denmark or their delegation in the room with Rutte and Trump. The Danish have made very clear that Rutte does not speak on behalf of them, even though he speaks on behalf of an alliance of which they're members. In fact, you know, we've heard from the Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, since this announcement that they can't negotiate on their sovereignty.
And in fact, the Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, has been meeting with the British prime minister in the U.K., presumably for conversations about this pretty exclusively. Very grateful that the U.K. and others stood with Denmark over the last couple of weeks after we heard those initial threats from President Trump, but it's pretty clear from what we've heard both from Danish officials and Greenlandic officials over the last few hours that essentially they haven't been that closely involved in any of these conversations, but they look forward to having further conversations with the U.S. side in the days and weeks to come.
KELLY: Tom Bowman, what are you hearing from sources here in the States?
TOM BOWMAN, BYLINE: Well, as far as this so-called framework, I talked to a European official, and he said one of the things they're looking at is providing the U.S. with another U.S. military base or bases in Greenland. Of course, they have one there now that does early warning and also operates satellites. And Trump, importantly, mentioned the Golden Dome, his missile defense system. So it's possible that this additional base or another - extra bases could be used for Golden Dome. You could have interceptor missiles there, or some high-tech equipment and so forth and so on.
Now, there are reports that - well, right now, at the current base there, it flies the Danish flag. It's -Denmark has sovereignty over it.
KELLY: OK.
BOWMAN: The reports of what the U.S. wants is, if we can't have all of Greenland, just give us a little piece so we can put this base or other bases there.
KELLY: So there is a U.S. flag...
BOWMAN: Correct.
KELLY: ...Flying somewhere over Greenland.
BOWMAN: And as Willem pointed out, the Danish prime minister, Frederiksen, said sovereignty is non-negotiable. It's not going to happen. And again, the people we all talk with say, what's the future of NATO? Is the U.S. going to walk away from NATO or are we in this on our own? I think those are the serious questions, I think.
KELLY: And you don't feel like we got an answer to that this week?
BOWMAN: I don't think we got an answer to that.
KELLY: Not a definitive one.
BOWMAN: No.
KELLY: That's NPR's Tom Bowman and reporter Willem Marx in Davos, speaking with me on Sources & Methods, NPR's weekly national security podcast. You can hear more of our conversation wherever you get your podcasts. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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