President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday outlined an ambitious plan for U.S. expansion by seizing control of Greenland, the Panama Canal and maybe even Canada.
He refused to rule out military action to acquire Greenland and the Panama Canal but said he would rely solely on economic force to make Canada part of the United States.
He questioned Denmark’s legal claim to Greenland, criticized China’s role in operating the Panama Canal and the late President Jimmy Carter for transferring the canal to Panama in 1979, and said Canada gets far more than it gives in its dealings with the U.S.
“I’m talking about protecting the free world,” he said at a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.
His remarks set a muscular foreign policy tone less than two weeks before his Jan. 20 inauguration.
“You don’t even need binoculars. You look outside. You have China ships all over the place. You have Russian ships all over the place. We’re not letting that happen,” Mr. Trump said.
As Mr. Trump spoke, his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., arrived in Greenland for a private visit. He had no planned meetings with officials.
Since his first term, Mr. Trump has set his sights on Greenland to give the U.S. a strategic Arctic foothold and improve its posture against Russia and China.
Greenland is home to a large U.S. military base.
Mr. Trump’s beef with Panama stems from China’s presence and the high fees for U.S. ships, including Navy vessels, to use the canal.
Panamanian President Jose Raul Mulino has insisted China isn’t running the waterway, but a China-based company has a significant stake in ports on the Atlantic and Pacific ends of the canal.
Mr. Trump proposed buying Greenland during his first term but did not pursue a deal. NATO ally Denmark controls the territory.
“I’m not going to commit to that,” Mr. Trump said when asked whether he would rule out the use of military force. “It might be that you’ll have to do something. The Panama Canal is vital to our country. We need Greenland for national security purposes.”
If Copenhagen intervenes, he said, the U.S. will “tariff Denmark at a very high level.”
Still, Mr. Trump said he has no concrete plans to acquire Greenland, though he has repeatedly floated the idea. When announcing his choice for U.S. ambassador to Denmark last month, he said that “for purposes of national security and freedom throughout the world … the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.”
John R. Bolton, a former ambassador to the United Nations, identified key benefits to U.S. control of Greenland, such as buffering Russia’s influence and blunting China’s quest to be an Arctic power.
Mr. Bolton told The Washington Times that Mr. Trump’s tactics were self-defeating.
“Trump’s remarks, sending Donny Jr. to Greenland, is pushing locally, democratically elected government into a corner, and pushing the democratically elected Danish government into a corner,” he said. “So what Trump is doing is undercutting the various objectives he says he wants. … Trump may think he is having a good time with it. They’re not having a good time with this in Greenland and Denmark. And if he’s serious about trying to get security for the United States, he ought to button it.”
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said Tuesday that Greenland “has been very, very clear … that there is a lot of support among the people of Greenland that Greenland is not for sale and will not be in the future either.”
On another foreign policy front, Mr. Trump warned that “all hell will break out in the Middle East” if Hamas does not release its hostages by the time he returns to the White House. The terrorist group has been holding hostages in the Gaza Strip since it attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
“If those hostages aren’t back … it will not be good for Hamas, and it will not be good, frankly, for anyone,” he said.
Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s incoming Middle East envoy, briefly joined the press conference and said, “We’re making a lot of progress” to free the hostages. They are “really hopeful that by the inaugural, we’ll have some good things to announce.”
Mr. Trump made several other pronouncements at the freewheeling press conference, which lasted more than an hour. Among them:
- He announced that Dubai-based Damac Properties will spend $20 billion to build data centers across the U.S.
- He said he wants to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.
- He railed against Democrats’ “weaponization of justice” and called Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith a “deranged individual.”
- He promised to reverse parts of President Biden’s executive action banning offshore drilling in federal waters.
- He predicted Russia would escalate its war in Ukraine and called the conflict “complicated.”
Regarding the Panama Canal, Mr. Trump said Panama is price-gouging U.S. ships that pass through the strategic waterway. The U.S. built the canal in the early 1900s to connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
He said that giving the canal to Panama was a “disgrace” and that Panama didn’t uphold its end of the deal. Under President Carter, the U.S. returned the Panama Canal to the country in 1979 and ended its joint partnership in controlling the canal zone in 1999.
Mr. Carter, who died on Dec. 29 at 100, was lying in state at the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday.
“They laugh at us because they think we’re stupid,” he said. “But we’re not stupid anymore, so the Panama Canal is under discussion with them right now.”
In the case of Canada, Mr. Trump said that bringing the northern neighbor under U.S. control would create an economic powerhouse and enhance border security.
He said joining Canada and the United States “would really be something.”
“You get rid of that artificially drawn line, and you take a look at what that looks like, and it would also be much better for national security,” Mr. Trump said.
He said the U.S. spends “hundreds of billions” of dollars annually to protect and take care of Canada but doesn’t “need anything they have.”
“We don’t need cars. We don’t need their lumber,” Mr. Trump said. He didn’t mention the 140 million barrels of crude oil that the U.S. imports monthly from Canada, which dwarfs the oil from the second-biggest U.S. importer, Mexico, at about 20 million barrels monthly.
He called for hockey legend Wayne Gretzky to replace longtime Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who announced Monday that he was stepping down.
Canadian officials have said Canada will never be a part of the U.S.
Conservative commentator Jed Babbin recently suggested that the expansionist rhetoric is in line with Mr. Trump’s modus operandi of keeping “our allies off balance and our enemies feeling more secure than they should.”
“He probably figures that bullying Panama will reduce those [canal] fees. It might work,” he wrote in a recent op-ed in The Washington Times.
He said U.S. military bases in Greenland make strategic sense, though one in Iceland would be better.
“Perhaps Mr. Trump was trying to spur Denmark’s defense spending. He succeeded. Danish Defense Minister Troels Poulsen announced, soon after Mr. Trump’s comment, an increase in funding for Greenland’s defenses of about $1.5 billion,” Mr. Babbin said. “The Danes insist that Mr. Trump’s remarks had nothing to do with their decision to spend on defense.”
