If Trump did make good on his threat to annex Greenland by force, “that would be the shortest war in the world, there is no defensive capacity in Greenland. The Americans were in charge,” said Ulrik Pram Gad, a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies.

France and Germany have warned Donald Trump that the EU will not tolerate the US invading Greenland. The president-elect floated the idea of the US taking over the autonomous Danish territory in a lengthy press conference at Mar-a-Lago in which he refused to rule out military action to achieve his goal.

Faced with what many in Denmark are calling Trump's "provocation," Frederiksen has broadly attempted to strike a conciliatory tone, repeatedly referring to the US as "Denmark's closest partner". It was "only natural" that the US was preoccupied by the Arctic and Greenland, she added.