Jenis av Rana, foreign minister of the Faroe Islands, was excited on the morning of July 22. In his 25-year-long career as a member of the Faroese Parliament for the Christian Conservative party, he occasionally met with colleagues from Iceland or Greenland or even different Scandinavian countries. But he hadn’t even been foreign minister for a year, when on that Wednesday morning he was preparing to meet U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Pompeo was in Copenhagen, and quite untraditionally, had decided to invite the foreign ministers of the self-governing parts of the Danish Kingdom—Greenland and the Faroes—to join him and the Danish foreign minister for a meeting. For the tiny Faroese department of foreign relations, it was the culmination of many years of work that such a high-profile U.S. official was willing to talk directly to the Faroese government.
