“You’ll find out.”
That was the ominous reply from Donald Trump when asked how far he would go to wrest control of Greenland.
He offered the warning at the end of a long and rambling White House news conference on Tuesday, ahead of crunch talks with European leaders in Davos, Switzerland.
Trump’s news conference as it happened
The briefing, held to mark a year since he took office, comes at a time of unprecedented tension between the US and Europe, fuelled by Mr Trump’s desire to annex Greenland.
Currently, the Arctic island is part of Denmark, an ally with which the US has a defensive pact, yet the president hasn’t ruled out seizing it by force.
Trump claims ‘things are going to work out’
Asked again whether he would endanger NATO by going after an ally’s territory, Mr Trump doubled down on his belief that the US “needs” it.
“I think that we will work something out where NATO is going to be very happy, and where we’re going to be very happy,” he said.
“But we need it for security purposes, we need it for national security and even world security.”
He also said he would raise the matter at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday. “And I think things are going to work out pretty well,” he claimed.
Starmer can ‘get a little rough’, says Trump
So far, Mr Trump’s designs on Greenland have faced vocal opposition from his NATO allies.
When several European nations contributed troops to a reconnaissance mission in Greenland, he took it as a provocation.
In response, he threatened the countries with 10% tariffs from 1 February, raising to 25% from 1 June, unless the US is allowed to buy the territory.
Read more:
What Trump’s tariff threat means for Europe
Against this backdrop, British Defence Secretary John Healey will travel to Copenhagen on Wednesday to meet his Danish counterpart Troels Lund Poulsen.
While Mr Trump was positive when asked how he gets on with his British and French counterparts, he said Sir Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron – who have criticised his tariffs threat – “get a little bit rough when I’m not around”.
“But when I’m around they treat me very nicely,” he added.
It comes after Mr Trump attacked Sir Keir’s deal to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, despite having backed it just last year.
Read more:
What is the Chagos deal?
He also used the occasion to address Venezuela, whose president Nicolas Maduro was abducted by the US in a raid on Caracas this month.
Mr Trump said his administration had taken 50 million barrels of oil out of the South American country so far, and that it would bring down prices in the US.
And he once again aired his grievances about not receiving a Nobel Peace Prize, saying he’d “lost a lot of respect for Norway” over the matter.
But most of the briefing was concerned with singing his own praises, darting from subject to subject for nearly two hours.
It was an “extraordinary inconsistent ramble… even by his standards” said Sky’s US correspondent Mark Stone.
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“The right-wing US news networks stuck with it, but others moved on, skipping the monologue, dipping back only for the questions,” Stone said.
He continued: “I’d argue that his ramblings – today more than any day – are on a different level from what we saw with Biden.
“The numerous conservative policy achievements – job numbers up, immigration down, crime down – are lost behind the ramble.”
