Trump floats using force to take Greenland and the Panama Canal

President-elect Donald Trump refused on Tuesday to rule out the use of military or economic coercion to force Panama to give up control of the canal that America built more than a century ago and to push Denmark to sell Greenland to the United States.

In a rambling, hourlong news conference, Trump repeatedly returned to the theme of American sacrifice in building the canal and accused China, falsely, of operating it today. When pressed on the question of whether he might order the military to force Panama to give it up — in violation of treaties and other agreements reached during the Carter administration — or to do the same with Greenland, he said: “No, I can’t assure you on either of those two.”

“We need them for economic security — the Panama Canal was built for our military,” he said. Asked again if he would rule out the use of military force, he said: “I’m not going to commit to that. You might have to do something.”

Trump’s statements propelled his repeated calls for expanding U.S. territory to a new level, one that is bound to roil three American allies — Panama; Denmark, which handles Greenland’s foreign and security affairs; and Canada, which he has mocked as America’s “51st state.” On Tuesday he made clear, though, that he was not joking, suggesting that if Canada remained a sovereign state, the financial cost to its trading relationship with the United States could be crushing.

Perhaps Trump was posturing, for negotiating advantage. Yet not since the days of William McKinley, who engaged in the Spanish-American War in the late 19th century and ended up with U.S. control of the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico, has a U.S. president-elect so blatantly threatened the use of force to expand the country’s territorial boundaries.

It was a reminder that Trump’s definition of “America First” is anything but isolationist. He comes to U.S. foreign policy with the mind of a real estate developer, with a penchant for grabbing territory.

He insisted he would not be deterred by the treaty signed with Panama, which was ratified by the Senate in 1978 by a 68-32 vote, just beyond the two-thirds majority required by the Constitution. He asserted that the return of control of the canal to Panama was a bad idea — arguing that he was reluctant to say so while the nation was burying former President Jimmy Carter, who negotiated the deal. He then returned, repeatedly, to criticizing Carter’s judgment.

“He was a very fine person,” Trump said. “But that was a big mistake,” he added. “It cost us the equivalent of a trillion dollars.”

On Canada, Trump, when pressed, threatened to use “economic force,” not the military, to join Canada and the United States together, implying that the United States would pare back its purchases of Canadian products.

He declared he would use tariffs to hamper Canada’s ability to assemble cars and sell them in the United States, and then charged that Canada contributed insufficiently to U.S. defense. He made no reference to NORAD, the combined American and Canadian defensive effort that is considered a military model for an interoperable, joint military early-warning system, run equally by two allies. It is at the core of U.S. air and missile defense.

He continued his push on Tuesday evening, posting maps on social media showing Canada as part of the United States.

He also said at the news conference he would “tariff Denmark at a very high level” if it did not give Greenland to the United States, before casting doubt on whether Denmark has a legitimate claim to Greenland at all.

The threats, vague and unformed as they may be, were only part of the series of declarations Trump made about his plans when he takes office in less than two weeks. He said the Gulf of Mexico would be renamed “the Gulf of America,” though it was unclear how serious he was about the effort.

He declared that members of NATO, who were slow to fulfill a commitment to spend 2% of their gross domestic product on defense, should now prepare for a world in which they needed to spend 5%.

“They can all afford it, but they should be at 5%, not 2%,” he said, before again threatening to not defend any NATO ally who did not, in his view, pay into the system sufficiently. Russian President Vladimir Putin has used such threats in the past to sow divisions within NATO, an alliance he has been loath to take on directly even as it helps arm Ukraine.

Trump’s critique of NATO isn’t a solitary one: Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden have all pressed the case, and the most progress in meeting the 2% goal has come in Biden’s term, a fact he celebrated at the NATO summit in Washington in July during the 75th anniversary of the alliance.

And even some European leaders, when speaking privately, say they agree that the goal should be moved to 3% if Europe is going to have any hope of assembling the military might to deter Russia in coming decades. They often add that there is no political constituency for spending at that level.

But they may be driven there by necessity if they become convinced that the United States will not come to their aid. “I would have loved to say yes, we’ll protect you even if you don’t pay, but that not the way life works,” Trump told reporters.

Trump also reiterated his threat that “all hell will break out in the Middle East” if the hostages being held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip are not released by Inauguration Day, repeating the threat four times.

But it was Trump’s views on U.S. territorial expansionism that were most striking in the news conference, and so untethered from international law.

In December, when Trump ramped up his calls for the purchase of Greenland and voiced his complaints about how U.S. shipping was treated as it traversed the Panama Canal, Ian Bremmer of the Eurasia Group noted that the case Trump was making had echoes of the justifications Putin made for invading Ukraine.

But piecing together Trump’s series of social media posts on these issues, and hearing his complaints at his private Florida club, Mar-a-Lago, one thing is clear: He is building a national security case for why a U.S. takeover of Greenland and the Panama Canal Zone is necessary.

He noted Tuesday that Chinese and Russian ships were appearing around Greenland, an apparent showing of the countries’ growing interest in shorter polar shipping and military routes after global warming loosened and shrank ice fields, making them more passable. He argued that China, which controls two ports near the canal, was operating the canal itself; it is not.

After Trump responded to the resignation of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Monday by writing on social media that “many people in Canada LOVE being the 51st State,” Bremmer noted in a post on the social platform X that “American imperialism is so back.”

In fact, it often sounded that way at the news conference, as Trump dismissed the declarations of Denmark’s leadership that Greenland is not up for sale, and similar comments from Panama. The only question now is whether he is increasing the pressure for negotiating purposes, or would actually make good on his threats.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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