President Donald Trump and his team are considering a “wide range of options” to acquire Greenland, including “the use of the U.S. military,” White House press secretary Caroline Leavitt told CNBC on Tuesday.
The statement further escalates the Trump administration’s already aggressive rhetoric regarding Greenland, which the president has long sought to make part of the United States.
President Trump said Sunday that the United States needs Greenland for national security purposes, pointing to Russian and Chinese activities in the area near the Arctic island.
Greenland is a territory of Denmark, which, like the United States, is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, an international military alliance.
Leaders of Denmark and other European North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries issued a joint statement Tuesday morning, pushing back on President Trump’s increasingly vocal desire to acquire Greenland.
Levitt’s new comments on Greenland came after the release of the joint statement.
View from a drone shows a general view of Nuuk, Greenland, March 14, 2025.
Marco Julica | Reuters
“President Trump has made it clear that acquiring Greenland is a national security priority for the United States and that deterring adversaries in the Arctic is critical,” Levitt said.
“The President and his team are discussing a wide range of options for pursuing this important foreign policy objective, and of course the use of the U.S. military is always an option at the discretion of the commander in chief,” she said.
President Trump has frequently talked about absorbing both Greenland and Canada into the United States, as well as the Panama Canal. The controversial comments drew international condemnation, with some dismissing them as unserious and unlikely to materialize in U.S. foreign policy.
More serious concerns have been raised in recent days by the president’s renewed discussion of Greenland after U.S. forces entered Venezuela and successfully captured the country’s leader, Nicolas Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores.
After the operation, President Trump said, “I will continue to run the country until a safe, appropriate and wise transition of power can occur.”
President Trump also said that U.S. oil companies would enter Venezuela to “fix” the country’s energy infrastructure and that those companies would be “compensated” for their efforts.
President Trump told The Atlantic on Sunday morning that he would leave it to others to decide what intervening in Venezuela would mean for Greenland.
On Tuesday, Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) announced he would introduce a resolution to Congress to block President Trump’s invasion of Greenland.
“Wake up. President Trump is telling us exactly what he wants to do,” Gallego said in the X post. “We have to stop him before he invades other countries on a whim.”
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