The administration of US President Donald Trump has not ruled out the use of military force to take control of Greenland, the White House said Tuesday, sending shock waves across Europe as Kyiv’s allies meet in Paris.
Trump’s announcement came as European leaders remained stunned at the Trump administration’s military invasion of Venezuela the week prior, yet another US grab for a sovereign country’s natural resources.
Greenland is understood to be rich in minerals crucial to the tech industry – including zinc, gold, iron ore, copper, titanium, and uranium – as well as offshore oil and natural gas deposits.
While Trump has long sustained that control of the Danish-owned, independent territory is critical to US national security as China and Russia vye for dominance of the Arctic, the move comes on the same day that Trump announced that Venezuela “will be turning over” up to 50 million barrels of oil to the US.
One of Trump’s first moves in his second term was to pressure Ukraine into sharing its own natural resources with the US, who in turn would provide extraction technology as well as at least some assumed security guarantee as American companies would need to see their investments protected.
As for Trump’s stated objective, however, that control of Greenland was crucial to national security, critics in Congress noted on Tuesday that the US already operates a number of military-use facilities there, through agreements with its NATO ally Denmark; for example, the Pituffik space base, housing about 150 US personnel.
Nonetheless, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted that “acquiring Greenland is a national security priority” for Trump to deter US adversaries like Russia and China.
The Wall Street Journal reported that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told lawmakers that Trump’s preferred option is to buy Greenland from Denmark, adding that the threats did not signal an imminent invasion.
Denmark has warned that any move to take Greenland by force would mean that “everything would stop,” including its security ties with the US via NATO. And a US attack on an allied nation effectively would spell the end of the Alliance.
Greenland and Denmark said earlier that they had asked to meet Rubio quickly as tensions rose over the issue.
“It has so far not been possible,” Greenland’s Foreign Minister Vivian Motzfeldt wrote on social media, adding that they had been pushing for a meeting throughout 2025, and Denmark’s Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen said meeting Rubio should “clear up certain misunderstandings.”
Responding to the Trump administration’s suggestion that purchasing the world’s largest island would be the preferred outcome, Greenland’s Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen has that the island was not for sale, and that only its 57,000 people should decide its future.
The leaders of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain joined Denmark in a statement on Tuesday saying that they would defend the “universal principles” of “sovereignty, territorial integrity and the inviolability of borders.”
Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, Greenland’s nearest neighbor, said in Paris that “the future of Greenland and Denmark are decided solely by the people of Denmark and Greenland.”
While even Trump’s political adversaries in Washington cast serious doubt that he would invade an allied neighbor, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller insisted on Monday that “Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.”
At the Paris summit of Ukraine’s allies, along with US envoy Steve Witkoff, cooler heads seemed to prevail as French President Emmanuel Macron said Tuesday he did not believe that the United States would move to violate Denmark’s sovereignty.
Macron said he “cannot imagine a scenario in which the United States of America would be placed in a position to violate Danish sovereignty. Greenland is a territory under Danish sovereignty, and it will remain so,” he said.