Greenland ‘will stay Greenland’, former Trump adviser declares

Donald Trump cannot force Greenland to change ownership, a former top adviser to the US president has told the BBC.

“Greenland will remain Greenland,” said Gary Cohn, an IBM vice president who advised Trump on the economy during his first term, attributing the need for access to critical minerals to his former boss’s plans for the region.

Cohn is one of America’s top tech moguls, a leader in the race to develop artificial intelligence and quantum computing, and served as director of the White House National Economic Council under Trump.

In a sign of how seriously business leaders are taking the crisis, he warned that “invading an independent country that is part of NATO” would be “over the top”.

He also suggested that the president’s recent comments about Greenland “could be part of the negotiation.”

“I just came from a U.S. congressional delegation meeting, and I think there’s a pretty common consensus among both Republicans and Democrats that Greenland will remain Greenland,” he said.

He said Greenland would welcome the United States to increase its military presence on the island, as the North Atlantic and Arctic Ocean “are becoming much more of a military threat.”

US may also negotiate a “purchase” agreement for Greenland huge but largely untapped resources Cohn suggested that rare earth minerals were present.

“But, you know, invading a country that doesn’t want to be invaded — it’s part of a militaristic alliance, which is NATO — seems to me to be a little bit overstepping at this point,” he said.

Cohn stated that the president may have been exaggerating his demands as part of his negotiating tactic; This is something the president has said he has done successfully in the past.

“You have to give Donald Trump some credit for the successes he’s had, and he’s tried many times to overreach to get something in a compromise situation,” he said.

“He’s gone overboard in promoting something to get what he really wants. Maybe what he really wants is a larger military presence and an exit.”

The start of this year’s World Economic Forum in the Swiss ski resort of Davos has been overshadowed by the president’s increasingly aggressive stance on the arctic region; many political and business leaders have expressed alarm about the potential geopolitical and economic impact. Trump will address delegates at the meeting on Wednesday.

While Cohn expressed reservations about some of the president’s actions, he said the U.S. administration had “a variety of different reasons” for what it did.

He said Trump’s decision to intervene in Venezuela was “a way to go.” spoil the country’s relations With China, the largest market for oil, as well as Russia and Cuba.

Cohn also thinks the president is increasingly focusing on the importance of rare earth minerals, noting that “Greenland has a pretty rich supply of resources.”

These minerals are critical to the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and quantum computing, which was also a major topic of discussion at Davos.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent responded to allegations on Monday that Trump attributed his increasing threats against Greenland to his failure to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

In his message to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, Trump blamed the country for not giving him the award and said that he no longer felt obliged to think only about peace.

Bessent said: “I know nothing about the President’s letter to Norway and I think it is completely fabricated that the President would do this because of the Nobel Prize.

“The President views Greenland as a strategic asset for the United States. We will not cede our hemispheric security to anyone else.”

Advances in quantum computing and artificial intelligence are seen as critical not only to the US economy and productivity, but also to the US’s strategic influence in the world.

Cohn said, “IBM is at the very center of what is happening in quantum today. The largest amount of quantum computers are used today,” and underlined that his company has made many of these computers available in many companies across America, from the banking sector to medicine.

“AI will be the backbone of data fueling quantum to solve problems we have never been able to solve,” he added.

“Where we’re going is AI will be part of everyone’s enterprise. AI and quantum will be working behind the scenes in the enterprise to make every company more efficient. And we’re just at the beginning of that kind of long road, and it’s probably going to take another three to five years to get there.”

Earlier this month, Google, also a US company, told the BBC that it had the world’s best-performing quantum computer. The race to advance technology is the other major talking point at the World Economic Forum, apart from Greenland.