U.S. President Donald Trump said he will not use military force to acquire Greenland, but said the United States must ultimately control the vast Arctic territory for the security interests of both Washington and NATO.
Speaking in his customary blunt style at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Tuesday, January 21st, Trump said Greenland’s strategic location between the United States, Russia, and China made it indispensable to Western defence.
“We probably won’t get anything unless I decide to use excessive strength and force, where we would be frankly unstoppable,” Trump said. “But I won’t do that. I don’t want to use force. I won’t use force.”
Instead, the president said his administration would seek “immediate negotiations” with Denmark over the acquisition of Greenland, arguing that ownership—rather than a lease or defence agreement—was necessary to secure the territory.
European and NATO leaders have in recent weeks expressed their worries and frustration over Trump’s intentions regarding Greenland—an autonomous territory of NATO and EU-member Denmark—with some leaders prepared to initiate punitive trade measures against the U.S.
All we’re asking for is to get Greenland including right title and ownership, because you need the ownership to defend it. You can’t defend it on a lease.
Trump described Greenland as “a vast, almost entirely uninhabited and undeveloped territory sitting undefended in a key strategic location,” adding: “This enormous unsecured island is actually part of North America on the northern frontier of the Western Hemisphere. That’s our territory.”
He argued that no other country or alliance member was capable of protecting it. “No nation or group of nations is in any position to be able to secure Greenland other than the United States,” he said, citing America’s role in defending the island during the Second World War.
The president also accused Denmark of failing to honour commitments to strengthen Greenland’s defences, claiming Copenhagen had spent “less than 1%” of a pledged $200 million.
Trump’s remarks were accompanied by a blunt rebuke of Europe’s political direction, which he said was weakening the continent economically, socially, and militarily.
I love Europe and I want to see Europe go good. But it’s not heading in the right direction.
He criticised what he described as decades of misguided policy based on “ever-increasing government spending, unchecked mass migration, and endless foreign imports”, adding that Western leaders had abandoned affordable energy and domestic industry in favour of what he called the “green new scam.”
The result was record budget and trade deficits and a growing sovereign deficit, driven by the largest wave of mass migration in human history. Quite frankly, many parts of our world are being destroyed before our very eyes.
He singled out Germany and the United Kingdom as examples of policy failure, claiming Germany now produced “22% less electricity than it did in 2017” while prices were “64% higher.” Of Britain, he said: “They’re sitting on top of the North Sea … but they don’t use it. They don’t let anybody drill.”
Trump warned that such policies had led to “lower economic growth, lower standards of living, lower birth rates, more socially disruptive migration, more vulnerability to hostile, foreign adversaries, and much, much smaller militaries.”
“We want strong allies, not seriously weakened ones,” he said. “We want Europe to be strong.”
The president also repeated long-standing complaints about NATO, saying the United States contributed far more than its allies and received little in return.
“The United States is treated very unfairly by NATO,” he said, adding: “We give so much and we get so little.”
While reaffirming American support for Ukraine, Trump said he was pushing for an end to the war with Russia, describing it as “the worst since World War Two.”
“I’m dealing with President Putin, and he wants to make a deal,” he said. “I think President Zelensky wants to make a deal … They gotta get that war stopped. Too many people are dying.”
Zoltán Kottász is a journalist for europeanconservative.com, based in Budapest. He worked for many years as a journalist and as the editor of the foreign desk at the Hungarian daily, Magyar Nemzet. He focuses primarily on European politics.
