WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump and his advisers are discussing “a range of options” for the United States to acquire Greenland, including potential military action, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday, escalating tensions with key NATO allies just days after American forces stormed the Venezuelan capital and seized President Nicolás Maduro.
Use of military force in Greenland is “always an option,” Leavitt told MS NOW, though she declined to specify what other approaches the administration was exploring.
The administration’s continued focus on Greenland — a self-governing part of Denmark, a NATO member state — has drawn criticism from lawmakers in both parties and alarmed European officials already rattled by Maduro’s arrest.
During a classified briefing with congressional leaders on Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio downplayed the idea of seizing Greenland by military action, telling lawmakers the president was interested in buying the territory, according to two people familiar with the discussion, which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal. Reuters earlier reported that Trump is also considering proposing a “pact” that would give him expanded control of the island.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., brushed off Rubio’s comment when asked about it on Tuesday, saying he did not remember and suggesting the secretary of State “might have said it in jest or something.” Johnson said he does not think military action in Greenland is appropriate.
The governments of Iceland and Denmark requested that Rubio immediately meet with the foreign ministers of Greenland and Denmark to discuss Trump’s recent remarks about Greenland’s sovereignty, Danish government officials told MS NOW.
In a social media post, Greenland’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Vivian Motzfeldt, said that her government’s prior requests for meetings with Rubio have not been accepted.
A Trump administration official familiar with the White House deliberations over Greenland said the president’s military threats should be taken seriously but suggested such a move would be “silly” and effectively make NATO “obsolete.” The official said Trump’s concerns that Greenland and Denmark were not doing enough to protect the U.S. from potential Arctic incursions by Russian and Chinese forces were genuine.
“Saturday was instructive to take him at his word,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, referring to the Maduro operation. “He’s for real about hemispheric defense. We’re past the point of relying on the figments of Denmark-NATO’s ability to indirectly provide for U.S. national security.”
The official said any American annexation of Greenland would still require negotiations and would likely preserve some level of independence for the island, perhaps similar to Puerto Rico’s territorial status.
“It just seems hard to imagine,” the official said, referring to the notion that the U.S. military could seize Greenland by force. “It seems silly. It renders NATO obsolete at that point. That’s brinksmanship that doesn’t make the bigger alliance make any more sense.”
Matthew Whitaker, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, did not respond to multiple requests for comment on whether he had assured alliance members that the United States will not violate its commitments by militarily seizing Greenland.
In a rare bipartisan statement, Senators Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire, and Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, who lead the Senate NATO Observer Group, warned against fracturing the Western alliance.
“With an active war in Ukraine and rising threats from Russia and China in the Arctic and Indo-Pacific, we cannot afford distractions or divisions within NATO,” they said. “We must stay focused on the real threats before us and work with our allies, not against them, to advance our shared security.” Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said Republicans in Congress have privately drawn a sharp distinction between the Maduro seizure and any potential action in Greenland. “I think that if Donald Trump actually did try something kinetic on Greenland, I think it would. I think it would split the Republican Party in a potentially irreparable way,” he said. Martin Breum, a Danish author who has written on Arctic history, said that Trump and his aides’ questioning of Denmark’s sovereignty over Greenland runs afoul of legal agreements made between the two countries. “There is either a will to be ignorant, or there is simply a lack of knowledge that just suits the purpose of when you want to question the status quo,” Breum said. The U.S. signed a joint defense agreement with Greenland in 1951 that provided the U.S. the ability to defend the Arctic region with its NATO partner, Denmark. In 1916, when Denmark formally ceded what are now the U.S. Virgin Islands to the United States, then-Secretary of State Robert Lansing declared that the U.S. would “not object to the Danish Government extending their political and economic interests to the whole of Greenland.” A European official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said European countries were uncertain whether Trump’s statements about Greenland were serious. “This really is a question of whether it’s just words, as with [annexing] Canada, or if it’s for real — which would be insane,” they told MS NOW.
David Rohde
David Rohde is the senior national security reporter for MS NOW. Previously he was the senior executive editor for national security and law for NBC News.
Vaughn Hillyard is a senior White House reporter for MS NOW.
Julia Jester covers politics for MS NOW and is based in Washington, D.C. Recommended
