‘You’ll find out’: Trump refuses to say how far he would go to seize Greenland

Donald Trump ratcheted up the uncertainty over how far he would be willing to go to acquire Greenland as he warned the Nato alliance on Tuesday that it was only as strong as the United States allowed it to be.

“You’ll find out,” Trump said in a terse reply at a White House press briefing before moving to the next question.

Trump also declined to offer any reassurances that Nato leaders were craving about his commitment to the stability of the transatlantic alliance after his threats to take over Greenland by force.

The president repeated multiple times that he had done more for Nato than anyone else, as part of suggestions that he should have free rein to shape its future and what territories the US controlled.

“I’ve made it so much better, so much stronger. It’s so good now. Nato is so much stronger,” Trump said. “When I came here we had a weak Nato … they were a nothing Nato. Whether you like it or not, it’s only as good as we are. If Nato doesn’t have us, Nato is not very strong.”

When asked whether the breakup of Nato was a price he would pay to acquire Greenland, a territory of Denmark, Trump said he thought whatever happened would be beneficial to the alliance.

“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. But we need it for security purposes. We need it for national security and even world security,” he said.

Trump’s bellicose remarks came just hours before he was scheduled to leave Washington DC to travel to the World Economic Summit in Davos in Switzerland, where he was set to meet with world leaders.

Trump said on Truth Social early on Tuesday that he had a good phone call with the Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, about Greenland, after posting a screenshot of a text from the French president, Emmanuel Macron.

During the nearly two-hour briefing, Trump also touted what the White House said were 365 achievements from the first year of his second term, as well as off-script grievances about the 2020 and 2024 elections.

Trump said explicitly he should have been awarded the Nobel peace prize, and that his failure to win the prize was a snub ultimately the fault of the Norwegian government.

“Don’t let anyone tell you that Norway doesn’t control the shots, OK? It’s in Norway. Norway controls the shots. They say, ‘We have nothing to do with it.’ It’s a joke. They’ve lost such prestige.”

At another point, Trump claimed: “I settled eight wars. No president has probably settled one war. Think of it: I did eight. The reason I do it is because it’s easy for me to do. And I didn’t do it for a Nobel prize.

“I’m trying to solve the final one – I’m trying to do Russia-Ukraine. And when Russia is ready, Ukraine is not. When Ukraine is ready, Russia is not. I’m trying to get that one done, too, but I feel that Norway has tremendous control over who gets the Nobel prize, despite what they say.”

The Nobel peace prize is awarded by an independent committee, but Trump earlier, in a letter he sent to the Norwegian prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, linked his intentions for Greenland to not being awarded the prize.

“Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel peace prize for having stopped 8 wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace,” Trump wrote in the letter.

The options for the Trump administration to acquire Greenland are widely seen to be limited to a handful of options: trying to buy the territory from Denmark, forcing a referendum on Danish governance, or military force.

Trump rattled Nato allies over the weekend after threatening to impose tariffs on a group of European members of the alliance that opposed his bid for Greenland, prompting outrage from EU leaders.

The spiraling row has plunged trade relations between the EU and the US into fresh chaos, forcing the bloc to consider retaliatory measures and new tensions inside Nato that has guaranteed western security for decades.

The US supreme court is currently considering the legality of Trump’s use of tariffs as leverage in foreign policy, which could affect his ability to use them to force Europe to support his Greenland ambitions.

Asked what he would do if the justices ruled against him, Trump said he would have to use “something else” but added: “What we’re doing now is the best, the strongest, the fastest, the easiest, the least complicated.”