U.S. President Donald Trump has said he will send a hospital ship to Greenland, the Arctic territory at the center of months of tensions between the U.S. and many of its NATO allies.
Trump said a “great hospital boat” would be deployed to Greenland “to take care of the many people who are sick, and not being taken care of there.”
He offered no further detail and it is not clear why Trump would announce the deployment of a hospital ship to Greenland, nor when it will arrive.
Newsweek has reached out to the White House, Pentagon and Danish government for comment via email.
Why It Matters
The Trump administration has said it wants to control Greenland, which is a semi-autonomous part of Denmark rich in minerals and strategically important for intercepting long-range missiles heading for the U.S. and Canada.
Both Greenlanders and Danish officials rejected the U.S. advances, which for weeks included the threat of military action to seize the territory and deepened into a diplomatic fissure at the heart of NATO.
Trump later said he had agreed on the “framework” of a deal over Greenland last month, but officials have been tight-lipped with updates in the weeks since.
What To Know
Trump published an image of the U.S. Navy’s Mercy, a 1,000-bed U.S. military hospital ship, to his Truth Social platform late on Saturday.
The U.S. military uses hospital ships for urgent surgeries and in disaster relief or humanitarian efforts across the world. The president said on Saturday the hospital ship was “on the way.”
Ship tracking data showed the Mercy docked in Mobile, Alabama, early on Sunday. The Mercy’s sister ship, the USNS Comfort, was also tracked in Mobile earlier this month.
Jeff Landry, the Louisiana governor appointed as Trump’s envoy to Greenland, said he was “proud” to work with the president on “this important issue,” but gave no further clarification on the unexpected announcement. Landry was seen sat next to Trump during a dinner for Republican governors at the White House on Saturday.
The Danish military said earlier on Saturday a crew member aboard a U.S. submarine near the Greenlandic capital, Nuuk, was evacuated to a hospital in the city for urgent medical treatment.
Denmark’s King Frederik visited the vast Arctic island earlier this week in an apparent show of unity between Denmark and Greenland.
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