In a whiplash-inducing U-turn, U.S. President Donald Trump suddenly dropped his insistence on taking control of Greenland, mere hours after laying out at great length his rationale for ownership of the Arctic island.
For weeks, Trump stuck firmly to a take-it-or-leave-it position on Greenland, insisting that nothing short of the U.S. owning the Danish territory would address his national security concerns.
On Wednesday, Trump made a detailed case for U.S. control of the island during an hour-plus speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Then, barely four hours after leaving the stage, Trump demolished any shred of validity to his claims.
The president posted on social media that he “had formed the framework of a future deal with respect to Greenland and, in fact, the entire Arctic Region” as a result of a meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte that lasted less than an hour.
Half of his case was: “I’m mad the Norwegian government didn’t give me a non-governmental organization’s peace prize”. You can’t demolish something if it was already a pile of construction rubble.