Republican Senator Rand Paul says President Donald Trump is shooting himself in the foot with his aggressive posturing towards Greenland.
Trump has escalated his threats to take over the mineral-rich island, telling reporters Friday, “We are going to do something in Greenland, whether they like it or not.” The 79-year-old president said he would “do it the hard way” if he couldn’t strike a deal to acquire the territory.
On Sunday, Paul warned that Trump’s “denigrating” saber-rattling is backfiring by alienating GOP lawmakers in Washington and people in Greenland.
“Let’s say you wanted to buy Greenland—and I’m not disputing that that might be something we might want,” the 63-year-old Kentucky senator said on ABC News’s This Week. “You don’t get there by angering and denigrating the people who live there and saying, ‘We’re going to march the Marines in and take it if you don’t sell it to us.’ It doesn’t make them very willing to sell to us.”
Paul continued, “So really, if your goal is somehow we’re going to rattle the saber, then they’re going to sell it to us, I think it’s having the opposite effect. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find someone in Greenland for it, but you’d also be hard-pressed to find somebody in Washington who’s for a military invasion on either side of the aisle.”
The senator, one of the few Republicans who regularly challenges Trump, appears to be correct.
Greenland’s party leaders issued a joint statement Friday night rejecting Trump in response to his latest assertions that the U.S. “needs” the island, a semi-autonomous territory within the Danish kingdom, and his refusal to rule out the use of military force.
“We do not want to be Americans, we do not want to be Danes, we want to be Greenlanders. The future of Greenland must be decided by the Greenlandic people,” the statement said. “We would like to emphasize once again our wish that the United States’ contempt for our country ends.”
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has also rebuked Trump, reminding him that the U.S. has “no legal basis to annex” the territory.
In Congress, several GOP lawmakers, including Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis, and Maine Senator Susan Collins, have openly condemned talk of the U.S. taking over Greenland.
Paul, who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told CBS Mornings last week that U.S. military action “won’t happen under my watch.”
“I will do everything to stop any kind of military takeover of Greenland,” he said.
ABC News’s Martha Raddatz asked Paul on Sunday, “Do you actually think he would use military force, or are we overreacting to that?”
“I would hope not,” Paul replied, reiterating his belief that Congress should decide if the military is deployed, whether in Greenland, Venezuela, or Colombia.
“It’s about whether or not the people get a say in whether we go to war,” added the senator, who was one of five GOP senators to join Democrats in advancing a resolution on the War Powers Act last week. The resolution would block the president’s ability to use military force against Venezuela.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
A White House official previously told the Daily Beast that “utilizing the U.S. military is always an option at the commander-in-chief’s disposal.”
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