President Trump has repeatedly raised the possibility of U.S. military forces seizing Greenland if Denmark does not agree to sell it, but so far the Pentagon has not been directed to plan for an invasion.
When asked at a lengthy White House news conference on Tuesday how far he was willing to go to acquire Greenland, Mr. Trump said, “You’ll find out.” He previously said he intended to acquire the island “whether they like it or not” and warned “if we don’t do it the easy way, we’re going to do it the hard way.”
In a Sunday morning interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent also suggested Greenland could be taken by military force if negotiations with Denmark did not pan out.
While Pentagon officials plan for all sorts of military contingencies, they have not yet been asked to plan for an invasion of Greenland or the aftermath of such an operation, the U.S. officials said on Tuesday. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters.
A U.S. military takeover of Greenland would not be difficult, military analysts say. The island is sparsely populated (56,000 people in an area about three times the size of Texas) and already has one U.S. base in the country’s far north (down from a high of 17 bases during World War II).
But Pentagon officials and senior commanders privately express dismay and exasperation that Mr. Trump continues to hold out the option of military force to grab Greenland. It is a territory of Denmark, a small but trusted NATO ally whose troops fought and died alongside American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. An attack on Greenland would be an attack on a NATO ally, threatening the alliance that has held the West together since World War II.
Last week, a group of European nations sent personnel to Greenland for military exercises — a show of solidarity with Denmark that may have angered Mr. Trump, who threatened to slap them with tariffs over the weekend unless they dropped their opposition to the U.S. acquisition of Greenland.
With European troops now in Greenland, several current and former senior U.S. officials have warned that a notion that seemed unthinkable just a few weeks ago — that the United States might attack fellow NATO members — could rupture the trans-Atlantic alliance.
“Even the threat of taking Greenland raises profound issues about trans-Atlantic relations the future of NATO,” Ivo Daalder, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, wrote last week.
Eric Schmitt is a national security correspondent for The Times. He has reported on U.S. military affairs and counterterrorism for more than three decades.
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