President Trump again threatened on Friday to forcibly annex Greenland, saying that he was “going to do something on Greenland, whether they like it or not.”
In a White House event discussing his plans to have American companies exploit Venezuela’s vast oil reserves under the threat of a military blockade, Mr. Trump advanced an imperialist vision of American foreign policy, where the U.S. must dominate strategically important neighboring countries because of the perceived possibility that rival powers might do so first.
“If we don’t do it, Russia or China will take over Greenland,” Mr. Trump said, falsely suggesting that Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of Denmark, was surrounded by Chinese and Russian warships. Russia and China are active in the Arctic Circle, but Greenland is not ringed by their ships, and the United States has a military base on Greenland.
Mr. Trump delivered an ominous warning to Danish and Greenlandic officials, who have consistently opposed the president’s plans to take the island: “I would like to make a deal the easy way, but if we don’t do it the easy way we’re going to do it the hard way.”
The United States’ taking Greenland by force would rip apart the central agreement that underpins the NATO military alliance, of which Denmark and the United States are both founding members. Under that treaty, an attack on any member is treated as an attack on all members.
But Mr. Trump dismissed that central principle of the alliance as he explained why he wanted to annex Greenland, suggesting that he would defend the island only if the United States were to govern the territory directly.
“When we own it, we defend it,” Mr. Trump said. “You don’t defend leases the same way. You have to own it.”
Throughout his appearance on Friday, where Mr. Trump hosted oil and gas executives, Mr. Trump repeatedly raised the specter of Russian or Chinese incursions to justify American control of neighboring countries.
“If we didn’t do this, China or Russia would have done it,” Mr. Trump said of his bid to seize control of Venezuela’s oil indefinitely.
That justification echoes the imperialist policies of the Great Powers of the 19th and early 20th centuries. When the U.S. invaded and militarily occupied Haiti in 1915, for example, it was after American banking executives had convinced the administration of President Woodrow Wilson that Germany or France were about to move to occupy the country first.
Mr. Trump spoke of the overwhelming firepower that the American military could bring to bear on neighboring countries if they did not give him what he wanted. He suggested that he could have “obliterated” Venezuela if the country’s government did not cooperate with the United States after the raid that captured the country’s president.
“They have been very smart in the way they have dealt with us, frankly,” Mr. Trump said. “Because that whole place could have been obliterated with one more strike and we didn’t want to do that.”
The president said that Denmark only claims Greenland because of “the fact they had a boat land there 500 years ago,” appearing to dismiss both the principle of territorial sovereignty and the will of Greenland’s people.
The United States formally recognized Danish sovereignty over Greenland in a 1916 treaty that ceded possession of the Virgin Islands in the Caribbean to Washington.
Chris Cameron is a Times reporter covering Washington, focusing on breaking news and the Trump administration.
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